ANGELA Read Online Free PDF Page A

gripped her finger tight. She looked down into those black diamonds in his head and saw herself in so many ways. Angela opened her jacket and fed him into the warm place between the light beige lining and her big, low breast. He didn’t flinch; he just gripped the fabric with his little black claws and held still. On the way home he pecked at her soft skin till she bled out onto his oily black feathers and she gripped the sleeve of her jacket and let Him.
     
    On their first night together an unseasonable wind picked up and shook the house. The tiles rattled on the roof and in the garden the fence panels fought their cases to fly away. Inside the second bedroom the light flickered and the birds flapped and panicked, their beady eyes spinning and wide and their beaks drawn open, showing off strange little tongues that poked at the air. Every one but the rook. The rook just sat under the sloping eaves of the rattling house on a stack of old books with the same stillness He had in the rattling cage. He let His eyes reflect his new home with ambivalence. Was it ambivalence? Angela regarded Him from behind the mesh door and lace curtain that hung over it, making the scene a mosaic. She felt the change. She wanted to go in and feel the soft wind from their little wings as they flew around her and landed on her shoulders and nestled in her hair. She wanted to smile as she fed them from her hands.
     
    But not this night.
     
    Not anymore.
     
    The room was His now, and when she closed her eyes to sleep it was as though she was at sea. She could feel the spray on her cheeks and the salt on her lips, she felt herself corroding, but a light pulsed to the right of her vision like a lighthouse.
     
    She was almost there.
     
     

OFFICE HOURS
     
    She wakes to find herself naked on the beige bed linen. Warm yellow light cuts under the blue curtain and to her bleary eyes it’s a shore. She’s washed up. She’s home.
     
    She looks through the crust in her eyes at the tall pile of neat washing. Work outfits cleaned and pressed dutifully call to her like a beacon. She wears them enthusiastically and leaves the dankness of her home for the fluorescence of work with a spring in her stomp, the hint of a smile at the corner of her lips, and a cold sore. She boards the train and finds her seat and overhead the cuckoos flying south scrawl a “V” in the sky.
     
    At work Veronica asks how she’s been and she’s too happy to see her face and hear her voice to answer the question honestly. She’s been great, she says, great. Got a lot done. Veronica asks if she enjoyed the Isle of Man with the ghost of a smile on her lips.
     
    “Yes, thank you,” Angela says, thinking of the imaginary isle that has swallowed her kitchen, “I saw a lot of wonderful things.” Then she is swept away by a calming tidal wave of paper work that cleanses her soul of that dirty black bird who filthies her mind and heart and second bedroom.
     
    Beyond the dusty office window a charm of finches spiral through blue sky. She feels the salvation and it tastes like honey on her lips, like a salve on her soul. But then it’s the late afternoon and the phone won’t stop ringing and Veronica won’t look her way. Then the sore on her lips begins to sting and she feels His damp decay creep back in, tickling up her veins, fluttering and flaking, nerves stuttering on and off like a dying light. She holds the arms of the chair with hands that buzz with a static that seems to interfere with the picture on her screen, which smears in front of her, an electric mess of blue and black. She feels Him swarm through her brain, turning parts of her off, turning parts of her on, and she wants to touch herself and she wants to scream, but she doesn’t. Her lips tremble but she doesn’t scream, but the people look over at her anyway, their faces full of holes, and she is lost again at the bottom of the deep black sea.
     
    The week draws on, Tuesday becoming Wednesday becoming