Free ANGELA by Adam M. Booth

element down on her, tiny ragged birds falling onto her, gored and bloody.
     
    Beauty is a matter of perspective. From the right point in time and space anything can be beautiful and from the hill behind the house the birds formed a shape, circles and lines splitting themselves into twos and fours and sixes with their own perfect symmetry. A target? Perhaps. A symbol? Certainly. But beneath it, up close, where Angela stood, it was a scythe, slashing, spinning, shredding itself, beaks and claws tearing beak from claw. The shape hung in the air, over the town, over what was left of her life.
     
    She ran from the starling storm, taking shelter from it in the house she had called her home and stood at its kitchen sink as the kettle rattled in its cradle, barely containing the rage boiling within. Three heaped spoonfuls of glinting white rubble fell from a spoon held with shaking hands into the bottom of a tea-stained mug, her favourite. Princess Diana’s faded face smiled meekly from within a blue crest. Tea, water, milk and sugar did their alchemy and gave her what weak reassurance they could. She sipped it. It was too hot. It burned her lips.
     
    A laundry basket overflowed in the corner of the kitchen. She tipped out its contents. It was Natalie. Wig and all. Dirty and stained, and beneath her was Janet, resplendent in denim and wool. She hugged them to her chest.
     
    Girls. Girls together.
     
    She pulled Natalie’s red hair over her own black mop and looked in the dusty mirror on the kitchen wall. She was her own monster. A black face, a sharp beak, a head of flames. Her eyes murdered her through the grime. Fear and solitude, all of it. All the world had to offer. She took Veronica's femur from the worktop and swung it at the menace in the mirror. It cracked a star that reflected her back in triangular elements, one part fire, one part dirt, one part bone.
     
    She took off her clothes and dithered into Janet’s wool and denim then looked out of the window, over the yellowing bones on the worktop, and out into the wild of the garden where the birds still circled their black sign over her deep dark ditch. She could see its maw - gaping, inviting.
     
    Behind the circle of birds that blackened the sky the clouds rolled purple and blue over the sun’s burst eye. A tear swelled at the corner of her own and coursed a rosacea path through the dirt that covered her face, while the eye in the sky threatened to do the same.
     
    The time was now.
     
    It always had been.
     
    Veronica's bones made morbid music as Angela dropped them into the laundry basket and she clutched it tight and went outside.
     
    She knelt in the soil piled up on the high side of the hole, piled around the lips of the dirty mouth that wanted to kiss her, wind and rain whipping their lash. She wiped Natalie’s red hair from her wet eyes and tucked it behind her little ears without looking at the birds and clouds that blackened the sky. She laid Veronica down in neat lines. Parallel. Organised. It’s what she would have wanted. The skull she held up to the sky, pulling the fuzzy grey feathers and straw out of its crevices, and looked through its eyes into the place where her love had lived. It was too small in there to hold all that love. Too tight inside that cracked cranium to hold all their experience. A strange purple light came in through the hole the hammer had made, Angela's entrance, and Veronica's exit.
     
    Veronica's old jaw hung low at one side in a long slur. She held it closed.
     
    “Don’t speak,” she whispered into the wind, and they kissed, finally.
     
    A tear dropped out of the sky and ran down her cheek. Then another. And another. The twilight eye cried on her, its tears becoming indistinguishable from the storm in her eyes.
     
    “Let’s go to bed,” she said to her dead friend’s head, and it smiled back at her. She climbed down and they lay together in the dirty black bed she had dug for them in the earth, and she