Free Elemental by Steven Savile Page A

standing. Not moving but standing, its head turned in the direction of the sun, its wings neither folded nor spread but lifted, half-open, the way a bird’s will do sometimes when it is roosting to remind itself that it is a creature of flight.
    Early morning sunlight filtering greenly through the leaves of the cottonwood trees cast a honeycombed pattern of shadow through the chicken wire onto the angel’s skin. Garrett Ainsworth stopped and stood and unconsciously ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, feeling for a loose tooth, a loose connection, some tripped circuit breaker that he could reset and go back to yesterday when the angel that had fallen in his backyard was still faceless and like to stay that way. When this didn’t work he asked Quinn Parnell, “When?”
    Quinn shrugged his crocheted-blanketed shoulders, his bestubbled face haggard in the morning light. Across town someone’s dog was barking in a steady, measured cadence, a distant, yelping metronome. “Well,” said Garrett Ainsworth and sucked his teeth meditatively one last time, “I’ll fetch us a couple cups of coffee.”

    Pretty soon the regulars started to show, and everyone who came helped himself or herself to a cup of coffee and put a quarter in the kitty. Used to be Garrett would ring up coffee like a regular sale, but not lately. Anyway, people mostly stayed honest about their coffee donations, what with the angel and all.
    Somehow it made a big difference that the angel was standing, at least for a while. The kids who had been tossing a Frisbee around yesterday didn’t today, although Bobby MacReary still played backgammon with anyone who would stand him a game. Old Man Stoat even got so he would step around to the back of the coop to spit.
    Of course the main thing was that everyone wanted to look at the angel’s face, which was no problem really since all you had to do was walk right up and look at it. Mrs. Patsy Tucker fell over in a dead faint when she looked at it, but after they laid her out on one of the picnic tables—all 240 pounds of her squeezed into a flowery summer dress—and Doc Hayward examined her, he told Claire Williams privately that Patsy Tucker was a hypochondriac, which everyone knew anyway, and that he doubted it was any accident that she fainted right when Hank Baldwin was right there to catch her. In any case, she came to pretty quick after they put a cold compress on her forehead and chafed her wrists.
    What did the angel do? Nothing. Even when Betty and Jack DeKalb’s boy Rick, who was already a terror at seven, tossed a clod of dirt at it. Even when Rick howled while his mother hauled him off by the arm, swatting his behind at every other step: Nothing. It just stood there like a half-answered prayer by a homoerotic Pygmalion, tracking the sun degree after slow degree.
    Since no one knew what to expect, this behavior did not seem unduly strange and perhaps in fact was not so for angels fallen in either the literal or metaphorical sense. The angel’s eyes were suited for gazing at the sun, at once fierce and fiery and distant the way a hawk’s are, but altogether different. Its face was very beautiful in a way that seemed very simple and almost indifferent to itself, and so could almost be taken for granted; the brow was fair and broad, a graceful expanse over which the
tawny locks tumbled in classic disarray, the nose straight in the manner one sees in profiles on ancient coins.
    In other words, it looked pretty much like an angel ought to.
    Hilary Putney-Smoot, who was the oldest woman in Utopia and a delightfully eccentric soul even in the early stages of senility, brought her art class of children ages 8–12 to paint the fallen angel that afternoon. A few parents secretly hoped that this would prompt a budding Raphael to emerge among their offspring, but this did not occur and the parents of Hilary Putney-Smoot’s pupils sighed