Free The Inner City by Karen Heuler Page B

as it did. The wing opened straight out, the way a sparrow’s did, without the bend that artists like to put in it. It was paler than his skin when open—a beige colour faintly streaked with cream. The feathers were small and it was possible when looking at the wing as a whole to think it resembled a shell, changing at the edges into transparency. I was soon close enough to see the way each feather topped the one in front of it and how the skin thickened where the wing sloped into his shoulder. There it was the consistency of muscle with a thin opaque covering. When I looked at the feathers I wanted to stroke them lightly; when I looked at the wing I wanted to fly.
    Tremors fluttered the wing in waves, as if he were idly clenching and unclenching muscles, and it appeared to me that each feather was separately operated and intricately managed.
    He smiled as I looked at him, waiting for my study of his wings to end. Then he held his hand out to me, also beautifully extended, a hand without callus or scar, its fingers shaped to a roundness at the tip. I refused his hand; I had no doubt that his touch would be unnerving.
    “Will you take one step with me?” he asked, and his voice had a rich, surprising depth to it. It was a sliding voice, it slipped into your head and loosened speculations.
    The sky behind him now was a flat aluminum. It seemed so flat and I seemed so high and yet the effect of it—I could feel my heart beat through the soles of my feet, linked with the strands of the rope—the effect was to make me feel like the centre of the universe.
    Of course, that’s why I love the rope: Time is concentrated. Your life is stark, reduced to each minute, each move; every second matters as it never matters on the ground. You are aware of your pulse, the sweat on your skin. Things that have no consequence on earth matter with a vengeance in the sky. You cannot live by default, only by choice.
    So when I heard him speak in that sliding voice, I stepped backwards on my rope and said No.
    He turned his head half away from me, seeking out the flat gray sky. The wind hooked high around him, he leaned into it, and his wings opened and fluttered so fast they blurred before fitting neatly back together. “Do you think you could dance,” he asked, “this high up?”
    I felt the rope under my foot begin to wriggle, shifting in the wind in unpredictable impulses. “Hold my hand,” he said. “I can help you.”
    For one brief moment his voice gave me hints of a promise, release from the rope. But even then I noted how my foot relaxed—and how I was starting to lean clumsily forward into the curve of the rope where Gabriel stood. I had lost concentration. He was not offering me grace.
    “Are you a fallen angel?” I asked.
    He smiled. “Half-fallen,” he said.
    That was all we said, that first time, because I backed up along the rope, till I stood firm against the window. He had smiled for a while, watching me, and then stopped smiling. His head turned into the breeze and the sky. He had a quality of waiting that was impressive; I have never waited well.
    I was curious whether he would be there the next time, and as I prepared the rope a few weeks later, the thought of him standing in the sky—a sky closer by another ten stories—was always in my mind.
    I am very careful about choosing the rope days. No rain, small winds, no sun. The light has to spread out in space without disruption: that means cloudy skies.
    A dusty sky this time, brushed here and there with washed-out slate as ranges of clouds lined the distance, mountains to be climbed someday, shifting Everests.
    My hair was slicked right to my head, my body taut in tights, my arms outspread for steadiness, and I stepped out again.
    Gabriel was there, small as a statue as I took my first step. Still as a statue, a weightless one, barely bending the rope. As I walked towards him, I could feel the line’s resistance alter.
    I stopped a yard away from him.