Fiction

They’ve been coming out of the hills for weeks now. Strange, colorless entities, though the exact hue has been a topic of much debate. When they arrive, our town elders walk through the streets to speak with them at the gate. The conversation is, as far as we can tell, nothing more than a series of gestures, as though the elders are pantomiming leaving to very small children. They don’t seem to have a language, or at least nothing audible.

Genevieve thinks that they are the fallen angels, wandering the world in search of a lost God. She is given to such sophistries, my youngest, and we do indulge her so. Our town elders do not know what to do with them. They are appearing more often of late, at least once a day. They do not, I’ve observed, appear to have any young. Their eyes and faces are unique, in that the eyes appear very old, wrinkled and wizened, but it is as if their cheeks are carved from marble.

Many of us suspect that they are in search of food, which has been quite scarce this year. The elders took to the streets, beating drums with bones while beseeching the heavens for rain. I have no faith in the elders, a fact which I hide well from my wife and children. In fact, I do not think they collect the bones of our dead and put them inside the drums because is the will of God. Rather, I suspect they do it because they do not know the will of God. They do not know why so many of our children die.

In the evening, the shapes return. This time, our elders refuse to speak with them and they walk around the city, peering in our windows and running their fingers along our doors. At first we are fearful, but then we take to the streets in force, asking the creatures to leave us. They leave quickly, looking pained and quiet.

I take the children inside and tell them a story about a land that was once promised to use that was filled with milk and honey. The story is familiar to them. They ask what honey tastes like on toast. They are good children, smart children, these beings of mine. I kiss them on the eyelids, noses and cheeks as they sleep. This is what I imagine it must be like, to love.

After putting them to bed, I return to the living room, where it is warm. I am alone with the moonlight that pulses on the floor. In here, I listen to the sound of the fallen angels circling our city, their wings brushing past our windows like a swiftly falling rain, reminding us, what we had dared to forget that we live in the city of the damned.