Free Elemental by Steven Savile Page B

inwardly, smiled and exclaimed, and hung the paintings on refrigerators with magnets or in dimly lit hallways if the paintings were matted as was the case with the older children. Many years later they would realize that these paintings, long since consigned to attics and scrapbooks, grown brittle, faded and dusty with age, were the only visual documentation of the angel and they would wonder why no one took photographs or videos and whether it was possible that such a thing had occurred after all.
    The angel took no more notice of the young artists than it had of the hurled clod of dirt, though of course everyone noticed how it took no notice. The two Reverends got into another shouting match about it, as by this time they had become firmly entrenched in opposing opinions, with Reverend Plunkett maintaining that the angel was a damned soul newly cast out of Heaven contemplating its future as a foul fiend eternally tormented in the bowels of Hell and Reverend Breedlove just as adamantly insisting that the angel had merely lost its way and was being visited on Utopia to remind everyone that we are all lambs of God lost on the way and should like the angel spend our time in humble contemplation of the Almighty and the mysterious sublimity of His design to bring grace and redemption to the human heart.
    Since neither explanation seemed particularly satisfying, nobody bothered to take sides and the fourth day wound down with the Reverends declaring a truce due to heat prostration and Hilary Putney-Smoot packing art supplies away in an old tacklebox with arthritic hands and a twinkle in her eye because even though she didn’t know that
she’d had her dress on inside-out all day, she had noticed something about her young pupils that no one else had. “My dear,” she whispered in Quinn Parnell’s ear, “they all painted the angel, but not a one of them painted the coop!”
    That night, which was the fourth night or possibly the fifth, depending of course on the indeterminable factor of exactly when the angel had arrived, it rained. It didn’t rain hard, but it was enough to make Quinn pull Miss Jessamine’s crocheted blanket over his head like a hood. Through the murky darkness he could see that the angel had not moved. The rain damped down the dust, which gave off an acrid tang. Quinn sighed, huddled, and dozed.
    The sun rose on the fifth day to burn off the residue of the night’s rain and nothing was changed except that Quinn smelled like wet wool for a few hours. That morning Claire Williams declared that she was sick and tired of Quinn’s mangy dog act and that if he couldn’t behave like a man at least he could look like one, and she upped and went into the General and purchased a men’s battery-powered shaver and borrowed a hand mirror from Garrett Ainsworth and came back out and stuck the mirror in Quinn’s left hand and the shaver in his shirt pocket. And of course everyone wondered about that, because everyone knew that pretty, acerbic Claire Williams had been married to a hotshot prosecutor in Boston for seven years before moving back to Utopia alone where she took over the weekly newspaper and never spoke about the divorce. Now this, and Quinn a lawyer too.
    The nature of a small town being what it is, no one asked Claire Williams directly about her sudden concern over Quinn Parnell’s personal appearance. They didn’t ask her why no coverage of the fallen angel had appeared in yesterday’s issue of The Utopian Weekly either, but that was another matter. There was news and then there was news, and this was not the sort of news one printed in the paper, because if that happened the next thing you know the town would be crawling with FBI agents and men in mirrored sunglasses from a division of the United States Air Force that doesn’t exist on any official records and therefore
cannot possibly have a hangar full of UFOs somewhere in the deserts of Nevada