Momma hit an angel on the highway today. It was like thunder snarling from the dashboard; the brakes scraped my eardrums, and the apples in the backseat rolled like heads fearing the white guillotine of their Walmart bag.
I didn’t see it. I guess Momma didn’t, either. We were alone—then there were feathers in the Ford’s grille: silver spat red. It made the apples seem bleached.
Momma tells me not to look, but I peek—I have to see what I’m grabbing. The angel’s milk flesh brushes against the truck as we heave it into the bed, eyes open and staring at the sky. Its knees are backward. I can see them from between my eyelashes, real fuzzy. I’m not sure if they’re supposed to bend like that. Like a bird. Maybe we just hit a person-sized bird. A skinny, pale bird with big, baby-blue eyes and a nose like mine. It could be my cousin.
“No one will know,” Momma says. She takes my plaid blanket—the one I use to make forts—from the backseat and covers the angel the best she can.
She drives fast, then slow, sniffling, scanning the roadside like she wants to pull over, then taps the gas again, pushing down slow, until the world smears to a flurry of pines and gray sky. Her tears turn pinkish as she wipes them, hands speckled red. I think mine are clean—I only touched the feet, which were black from the road. How long had the angel been walking? Why was the angel walking? Why did the angel cross the road?
We get to the garage and unload. Momma guides the blanket, coos as she adjusts it to keep the angel wrapped. She talks gently like she’s hushing me after a bad dream, but I hear her strain as she lifts, “Help me, dear God, please.” I don’t know if she’s talking to me or God, but I take one end of the blanket.
“Dad’s workbench,” Momma commands, “put it there.” I listen and the workbench groans. Momma tells me to go inside, wash up, take a nap, “But bring me some trash bags, first.”
I see the angel when I sleep. We walk with it on our backs, Momma in front with its heart to her spine. I carry the feet, bony ankles on my shoulders. It has ten toes and two wings. I manage to glance up, once, to ask how much farther, and it turns its head to blink two black eyes—all wrong. We take it inside, sit it in a giant stewpot while it mouths things to me; it has no lips, but it has large, squared teeth—white like the rest of it. I worry it will bite Momma while she sings and sharpens a knife: serrate the spine, flay the flanks, break the bones, and thank His Grace. When I wake up, the kitchen smells like thyme and rosemary. I approach the stewpot to find thin-sliced meat curling in broth with lentils and carrot.
Momma says sit. I scooch out my chair and sit tall, stiff under the bulb that yellows our dinner table. She serves two bowls—dad at work, Father at the table as she presses her hands together. “Dear Lord—we heard You today. We thank You and Your blessings. We thank You and Your trust. Like Abraham and Isaac, we know Your tests are not for the faint-hearted.” I peek at the mention of my namesake. Momma is crying. Momma is smiling. There’s a light around her throat, a ring, like the black chokers I’ve seen the older, “bad” girls wear. “Oh Lord, bless this meal we have received from Your bounty. Through Jesus, we pray, Amen.” Momma raises a spoon, and she nods to me, inclining I follow. I collect some broth, catch a carrot, then lift it to my mouth. I blow to cool it and watch as Momma swallows, the ring around her throat bursting with light.
Gabriela V. Everett is a queer, mixed-race writer from Las Vegas. She possesses a BA in creative writing from Columbia College Chicago and an affinity for coffee at midnight. Her work has appeared in Allium, Mulberry Literary, Dream Noir, and Glyph; her piece “Love Poems for Death” received Glyph’s award for Best New Voice in 2016.
Main Squeeze Literary Journal 