Free The Faces of Angels by Lucretia Grindle

stray words—‘drunk’ and ‘shame’ and ‘speed’—that drifted up the stairs along with the blasts of cold air and the noise of cars coming in and out of the driveway.
    I told Billy that story mostly to make up for laughing about Indiana, and when I finished, she lit a cigarette and looked at me for a second. Then she said, ‘That’s sad.’ But I shook my head. That wasn’t why I told it. And besides, I explained, really, it isn’t. All it is is proof of what I found out early: that the Good Lord giveth and he taketh away. Mainly because he feels like it. All of which may or may not go some way towards explaining why I have always hated Christmas.
    Billy frowned through the smoke. Then she asked, ‘What happened next?’ So I told her how I went to live with Mamaw.
    Mamaw was my mother’s aunt, and her only living relative. Her real name was Mary Margaret Tulliver, and she ran a bookkeeping business called Tulliver Accounting out of her den. She kept the books for most of the not very many businesses in town, so we always knew exactly how bad or good it was for Dave’s Hardware, where we bought nails and duct tape, and for Real Brite Dry Cleaners, and for the Pig Stand that sold corkscrew fries and soft ice cream in the summer.
    Mamaw wore navy-blue nylon pants suits five days a week, dresses on Sundays, and lipstick every day that left bright red bands on the filters of her Lucky Strikes. She didn’t believe in walking under ladders or stepping on cracks, and she taught me how to say ‘good morning’ to single crows in case they brought bad luck, and how to throw spilled salt over my left shoulder to blind the devil’s eye, and how to be Catholic. ‘There’s no sin in being alone,’ Mamaw told me once, in a voice so hushed she sounded like she was sharing a secret. ‘But if you are, and you belong to the church, then you’ll always belong to something, and no matter what happens, even if nobody else loves you, Jesus will.’
    Mamaw’s daddy had been a miner and a rock hound, and when he died all he had to leave her was his collection of polished rocks and the house she was born in. She was still living there when I moved in. Mamaw’s house had a steep gable roof, ugly black shutters and a front porch nobody ever sat on, and it didn’t look an awful lot different from my parents’ house, which had been all of three streets away. There was the same maple tree in the yard and the rooms were even laid out the same, so I didn’t get lost. Kitchen and den at the back, dining room and living room at the front, three bedrooms and a bathroom with liver-coloured shower tiles upstairs, all of it covered in avocado-green shag carpet that smelled like cigarettes.
    There was a front walk, a lawn, and a back yard with a Webber grill and picnic table too, just like my parents’. But Mamaw’s house had theirs beat flat on one count. At Mamaw’s, I could lie in bed on winter nights and look straight out of my bedroom window through the bare branches of the maples to the flying horse on the gas station sign down the street.
    I loved that horse. As far as I was concerned, he was the most beautiful thing in our town, and over time he became more important to me than anything else, even Jesus. For a start, the horse stayed lit up all night long, so no matter when I woke up, if I had bad dreams, or heard the tinny notes of the Santa Claus song, there he’d be, flying through the winter trees with his bright hooves and his snow-white wings.
    I dreamed of those wings, as big and strong as an angel’s. And of the whooshing sound they made, and of his hooves, which were as black as patent leather and threw sparks that turned into stars as we galloped down the streets. I dreamed of my hands wound in his mane as we went, faster and faster, until finally we left the ground, and rose through the shredded night