Free Elemental by Steven Savile

stethoscope and listened gingerly to the angel’s heartbeat, said it sounded fine, and wouldn’t do anything else. Bobby MacReary, who liked running errands, went to fetch Doc Farnsworth, who was the county veterinarian, but Doc Farnsworth was drunk and wouldn’t believe him, which everybody said was just as well.
    At around 11:00 a.m. the Reverend D.J. Breedlove and most of his congregation showed up. The two Reverends got into a shouting match, which always happened anyway. The choir from Mount Zion Baptist Church, which was accustomed to doing without its spiritual leader whenever he and Reverend Plunkett encountered one another, sang a couple gospel hymns that really got the backyard rollicking but didn’t
stir the angel, so they broke it off and went to have some lemonade. Someone had the idea to send Bobby MacReary to fetch Solly Morgan, who had a dry-cleaning business and was Jewish, but it turned out that the angel didn’t respond to Hebrew any more than it had to hymns. Solly Morgan shrugged and patted Quinn sympathetically on the shoulder and went over to play backgammon with Bobby MacReary.
    All in all, nothing really happened the first day except that most everyone had a good time and Garrett Ainsworth sold all his luncheon meats and most of his frozen lemonade to the League of Women Voters. When it started to get dark and no one could talk Quinn Parnell into going home, they decided to leave him to keep watch over the angel. Miss Jessamine Brown, who led Reverend Breedlove’s choir and ran the boarding house over on Elm Street, brought Quinn a blanket and a thermos of soup even though it was eighty degrees with the sun down, because her grandma always said that soup nourished a body.
    Nothing really happened on the second day or the third day either, except that the sun rose in the east and set in the west and the shadow of the coop that Bobby MacReary built moved across the angel. At least this is what most people, who got in the habit of coming in shifts instead of staying all day, thought. Quinn Parnell, who stayed, saw what happened. He saw how the angel’s body slowly acquired gravity and he witnessed the adamant made flesh. As the hours wore into one another and the sun completed two measured circuits, the alabaster skin took on a subtle flush of humanity. The bronze corona of the angel’s hair, seen from the back of its head like a shield-in-the-sun, dimmed to a tawny brown. Its wings; well, if you have ever seen a swan close up that looked as pristine and white as a bridal bouquet from far away, you will know how its feathers looked, disheveled and a little discoloured.
    These are the things that Quinn saw happen, and usually when change happens gradually, it is easiest to see it by leaving for a while and coming back, but this does not necessarily apply in the matter of fallen angels.
    After a while Quinn got to talking and being able to carry on conversations
about ordinary things, like the weather and what the weather was like this time last year and how Bob Angler finally had his license pulled for drunk driving and the Jacksons’ youngest boy Will was going off to MIT in a few weeks and wasn’t that amazing, and he could talk about these things sitting in the dirt in Garrett Ainsworth’s backyard, but the only thing he could say when they asked him when he was going home was, “When it does.”
    And that was pretty much all that happened on the second day and the third day, but on the fourth day things changed again just when everyone was getting used to the way they were, because when the sun rose and threw the shadow of the cottonwood trees cool and verdant and westward along the banks of Foxglove Creek, the angel was standing.
    This is what Garrett Ainsworth saw when he walked out his back door that morning: Quinn Parnell sitting Indian-style in the dirt, wrapped in Miss Jessamine’s crocheted blanket, staring at the coop. And the angel,