James looked lovingly at the small smoky fire of newspapers, the splintered floorboards between which mouse droppings lay, the patchwork quilt covering the holes and stains of the scavenged sofa. This was the last time he would see the Littles’ apartment. It was squalid and cramped and drafty and he was grateful for every inch of it. He was miserable because it was his fourteenth birthday. He didn’t want to leave. He didn’t want to die.
“Lots of men come back, James,” Bonnie said, placing her hand on his shoulder and ushering him through the door. “With all kinds of interesting stories. I met a man yesterday who says he saw a tiger.”
“Evil slashing hellcats, hooray,” said James, turning away from his temporary home as his stomach lurched. “Can’t wait to see one of those.”
“I want to see a tiger!” squeaked El as she closed the door behind them. “Wish I could go instead.”
“You do not,” said James. “Girls are lucky.”
“I’d be a great soldier!” El insisted, crossing her skinny arms. She had the determined look James had come to know well-- brows lowered, lips pursed, blue eye sharp and clear, blind eye glinting frostily. Though he’d gotten used to it over the three months since Bonnie had taken him in, James still found that deformity upsetting to look at. He broke eye contact.
“Eleanore, you weigh about forty pounds.”
“I don’t know if girls are lucky,” Bonnie said as they made their way down the narrow tenement stairs. Her tone was measured. “We’re unlucky in other ways. But I’ll be sorry to see you go, James.” She smiled a close-lipped smile, but her gray eyes didn’t look mirthful. “Let’s not think about it too much. We have today.”
Bonnie hauled the building’s creaky front door open, flooding the stairwell with sunlight and the sounds of the street. Above the bustling carriages, harried pedestrians, the panhandlers, prostitutes and buskers, over the roof of the nearby distillery, James could see a comet.
“Ooooo,” El whispered, looking up as he was. “I never saw it that well before.” The previous few days had been overcast and misty, hiding the astronomical event that had dominated the papers.
“It’s beautiful,” said Bonnie, squinting at the apparition, the blue of the sky tinting her gray eyes. She was so pretty in that moment, grinning up at the sky, a light wind beginning to tousle her loose auburn hair. Without understanding why, James felt the threat of tears.
El frowned. “I think it’s creepy.”
“Why?” James asked.
“Dunno. Reminds me of an eyeball.”
They stepped out into the street, El immediately sailing ahead of the others to wrap her arms around a dog, then to chase after a wayward chicken, then to fish a coin from a nearby puddle.
“She’ll miss you, James,” Bonnie said softly. “She’s unsentimental, and she won’t admit it, but she’ll miss you a lot.”
“I found a magpie!” El shouted back at them, raising the little bronze disk to the light with newly dampened fingers.
“Yes,” said James, “she seems real broken up.”
“You aren’t the first runaway we took in,” Bonnie said. “This isn’t her first goodbye. But you are closer to her than almost any of the others. You’re good with kids, you know that?”
“Thanks. I used to have a little sister back home.”
“Typhus?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You shouldn’t be.” James inclined his head. “At least she’s away from my father.” They locked eyes. James could tell Bonnie understood him. He didn’t need to say anything further.
“You’ll write us, won’t you, James?”
“I’ll try.”
The recruitment office wasn’t far. Because a man could pay to avoid the service, most of the recruits came from this part of town. It was visible in the distance two blocks away. El stuck out a hand and pointed at it, helpfully.
“You know our address, don’t you?”
“Of course. Apartment 5, 114 Fishbone Street. I won’t forget, I promise.”
“114 Fishbone Street, Aisling. You have to include Aisling when you won’t be here anymore--” --she sidestepped a pile of manure-- “or it won’t go through.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He shuffled his feet, hoping that by walking slowly he could delay tomorrow indefinitely. They were silent for a moment. James was trying to take a mental picture of this street, this moment, today: the points and slopes of the skyline, the reflections of buildings in the remains of yesterday’s rain, the two scruffy-winged angels sitting on a nearby bench, sharing a bright red apple.
“Sure wish I had something to remember you by,” he finally said. Now that he was going to leave and nothing mattered, James was willing to admit his crush to himself. He was hoping she would give him some kind of trinket. Maybe a lock of her hair.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“I don’t really have anything to give you, James,” Bonnie said, not looking at him.
“It’s too bad. I could really do with a good luck charm.”
“You won’t need one.” Bonnie turned, looked him square in the eye. “Not if you remember what I taught you about shooting. It’s just like hunting, James. Pretend you’re hunting and you’ll be alright.”
It seemed to James there was a world of difference between hunting and war.
El, many yards ahead, had grown tired of waiting for the others to catch up and ran back toward them, her long braid swinging. “Do you want my magpie, James?” And she pressed her found coin into his hand.
“No,” said James, a lump in his throat. “You keep it.”
“There’s no line there today,” said El. “We won’t have to wait. Guess you’re the only birthday person.”
She was right. The recruitment office was nearly empty when they arrived. A mustachioed, bewhiskered man in uniform was manning the desk. “Name?” the man asked without looking up.
“James Kolman,” James replied, his voice quavering slightly.
“Sign here,” said the big-whiskered man, pushing a thick, ring-bound book across the desk. “If you can’t write your name, make an X.”
James scribbled his name and looked around the room nervously. It was a utilitarian wooden cube, devoid of decoration but for old editions of the propaganda posters one saw hung in Aisling’s streets. “TREASURE WOMEN: THEY MAKE BOYS,” read one. “THERE IS NO GREATER HONOR THAN TO GIVE LIFE FOR COUNTRY,” read another.
“Now get in the back and a doctor will look at you,” Big Whiskers said blandly, taking a pinch of snuff and waving James toward a slatted door.
While he stood in the back room in a cursory dressing gown, breathing into some apparatus that was supposed to check for tuberculosis, James found himself shivering. To distract himself from the dirty lancet his bleary-eyed doctor was preparing, James decided to stare through the room’s small window into the tiny, bare adjacent alley, and noticed something strange.
“There’s a golden carriage outside,” James said.
“Sometimes the wealthy send their sons to war like everyone else. Usually they pay the fine, but some of them do enter into the service,” the doctor replied, not looking.
“A lady’s stepping out,” said James, staring at the gilded landau and its twin white horses. “She’s alone, there’s no boys with her.”
“Hm.” The doctor seemed disinterested. “Breathe into the tube, please.”
Being drafted, it turned out, was not the lengthy or complicated affair James had imagined. The whole process seemed to him to take minutes. As James and the Littles left the building, James carrying a ready-made uniform and instructions to report to Dock 13 at midnight, he told El about the golden carriage he’d seen.
“Golden?” El asked excitedly. “Did it look like real gold?”
“Dunno. A lady was in there. She looked real rich. Maybe it was real.”
“I want to see it!” El squeaked.
Bonnie wrinkled her brow. “Could she have been lost?”
James hadn’t thought of that. “I dunno. Maybe.”
“We should go ask her if she wants directions!” El proposed excitedly. “I want to see the gold thing--” and she had vanished before either James or Bonnie could react.
“Shit,” Bonnie hissed. “She’s ten. She can’t be gawking at someone like they’re something in a zoo-- hang on, James--” but as Bonnie ran after her child, James decided to follow, feeling any small distraction from his thoughts was welcome.
As they rounded the corner to enter the alleyway, James was almost blinded by sun as it glinted off the golden landau. El, who was staring at it open-mouthed, began to turn toward the wealthy woman, who was standing some distance away, standing still and gazing placidly at nothing in particular.
James found himself more arrested by the sight of the woman than by the carriage. She wore a raspberry colored dress of what must have been silk, its long train pinned up so it wouldn’t drag on the dirty cobblestones. Her waist was cinched tighter than James had ever seen. Her skin was like china, her big doe eyes the color of the blackest coffee, and her honey-gold hair was done up in an elaborate twist. James thought he looked like one of the excessively expensive porcelain dolls he’d seen in the windows of toy shops.
“Hey, miss!” El was saying. “That’s a real nice car you got.”
“Thank you,” the woman said. Her voice was soft and musical, and reminded James of a dove cooing. She kept her expression neutral, but James noticed her gaze lingered, as everyone’s did, on El’s cloudy, sightless eye.
Just ahead of James, Bonnie held back, making gestures at El to return, which El ignored.
“Is that real gold?” El asked, and James knew Bonnie must be clenching her teeth in embarrassment at the rude question.
The wealthy woman didn’t flinch. “It is gilded,” she replied simply.
James stared at the sky in mortification as El asked some horrendously impertinent question, like “aren’t you rich enough to make it gold all the way down?” and that was when he saw the shadow.
The shadow started small. At first James thought it was a bird. As it swooped lower James could see that it was an angel. But there was something odd about the way it was flying. It was allowing its arms and legs to droop, and they alternately hung slack, then twitched with neuralgia. He wondered if it could be injured--and then as it fell closer and he saw its face, he knew something else was wrong altogether. James had time to register glazed, bulging eyes, a gangrenous smell, and a line of foam dripping from the angel’s twitching mouth before the angel crashed into the ground not two yards away.
The world was blurred. Bonnie screamed, and James heard the sound as if he were underwater. The angel convulsed, then staggered to its feet, one wing hanging behind it, twisted and broken. James saw where the bite was: a festering scar where a dog’s teeth had clamped around its ankle. Then it turned toward him. It was so close he could see the foamy saliva coating its teeth. He couldn’t understand what happened next. What he did see was the rabid angel howling, its forearm swinging limply at an impossible angle. For some reason the golden-haired woman and Bonnie were staring at El. The angel spun away from James, then tore through the alley on contorted limbs toward the golden-haired woman.
James couldn’t move. He couldn’t be heroic. He saw the golden-haired woman’s bare and vulnerable neck, a trail of silvery saliva dripping from the angel’s teeth, its dripping, incongruous tumescence.
Then he saw El. She was standing tall, escaped strands of her blue-black hair moving in the wind of the angel’s flapping wings. She bit her lower lip. Her eyes were wide. Then, dreamily, almost sleepily, she raised her tiny fragile hand.
The angel was flung backwards into the air as if it were a marionette whose string had been pulled. It emitted a hiss, its head lolling backward, then fell to the ground. James didn’t understand what he was seeing. The angel tried to rise. The foam from its mouth grew pinkish, and it began to bleed from the nose. It died before the crowd attracted by the noise could round the alley corner.
James’ ears were ringing. His heart pounded in his chest. The angel lay in a broken heap. It was El he was afraid of.
He’d been terrified of this day since childhood, ever since the kingdom lowered recruitment age. But this was the moment James turned tail and ran. Away from his surrogate mother, away from his beloved temporary home, away from Aisling. He ran and ran and ran. Off to Dock 13. Off to war.