He was ten when he shot his first angel. He remembers its stupid dark eyes staring at him from the foliage above, its two sets of wings flapping, the sound of something breaking. It was shortly after Uncle Pete’s funeral. The angels always spoke of heaven back then, but it’s been years they’ve been peppering their ramblings with words he doesn’t understand. Words like these, nonsense words: dethlem, relikori, canibury. Izora, izora, relikori. They make him feel like he’s a child again, transported back in time to when so little made sense and everything felt dangerous. And yet, he’s sure he used to understand everything they said when he was younger. Have they changed, he wonders, or have I?

The cabin is cold, but he won’t allow himself a jacket. He scoops a spoonful of honey out of the jar on the counter and puts it in his mouth. He thinks of texting Eva, picks up his phone, puts it down again. What is there to say? Besides, she won’t respond. Ten months she hasn’t. A year. No reason to change now. He connects the phone to the solar panels and leaves it to charge. Outside the cabin window, an angel whispers its riddles. Meldenia, it says. Relikori.

“What do you want from me?” Stefan shouts. “Why won’t you leave me alone?”

The cabin creaks and the angel’s wings flap against the glass of the single window.

His landlord’s voice responds instead. “Pay your rent if you want me to leave you alone. You’re three months late.” The man bangs on the door. Stefan doesn’t respond, so the landlord bangs some more. “You hear me, little shit? Pay up by tomorrow or I’ll throw you out I swear to God and all His bloody vermin.”

The honey feels false in his mouth, sweeter than he deserves. He spits out as much as he can and reaches for the phone again. Calls Eva instead of texting. Her voice on the answering machine sounds tired—more tired, he thinks, than yesterday. It’s not possible, of course. The message is the same, the voice pre-recorded, eternally the same. The machine beeps. “Hey, I’m just checking in,” he says. “You sound tired. I wanted to see how you’re doing.” A pause. The landlord bangs on the door again. “I’m thinking of you,” Stefan speaks into the device, his voice hardly more than a whisper. He hangs up.

Stefan stares at the door, willing the landlord to go away, though he knows that, eventually, he’ll come back. Angel-shooting is shitty work for shitty pay, but no one’s hiring for anything else, or at least no one’s hiring him. The likes of him. He tried, tried so hard not to end up like Uncle Pete, or like his father, out of work and so out of time, nothing but burden and trash, buried alive—but apples and trees and all that, like father like son. Stefan bribed someone to nail his Ma’s coffin tight so she died quickly. A kindness. Didn’t do the same for Pa. Went to his grave every day to shoo the angels. His own time will be up soon, and Eva won’t even know to be at his funeral, to stay by his grave and count his breaths until he dies, hope for gold trinkets that might save him. But no, Eva would never be so childish. That was only him. And way back. Not anymore.

It was Eva who gave him his name when he realized he wasn’t a girl—or wasn’t a girl anymore. Called him Stefan, thought the name was cute. Only later, after she was gone, did he find out it was the name of a crater on the dark side of the moon. He thought it fitting.

There’s no more banging. Now an envelope slides underneath his door. Probably an eviction notice or, more possibly, a threat, misspelled and in bad handwriting. He almost throws it away without looking at it before he sees the official government seal on the top left corner. An assignment, then.

He unfolds it carefully and scans the words. Clean-up at a funeral, tomorrow morning. It’s not even that far.

He folds the paper into an envelope again and tucks it into the back pocket of his jeans. Everything is quiet, now. He lets himself out, walks to the back. The angel’s gone. Something glints on the ground, so he walks up to it, scuffs the dirt with his foot. Then he bends and picks it up, feels it between his fingers. A tin ring, nothing. Useless junk, like usual. Like always. He looks up at the trees, scans the foliage for angels. They’re so quiet, and he can’t see them, but he knows they’re there. “Why do you keep bringing me these, huh?” he asks them. “Are you mocking me?” Though no, they’re too stupid to mock. He turns around and throws the ring in the trash before walking back into the cabin.

The roof leaks through the night and he can’t sleep. In the dark, he reaches for the cold metal of his rifle. Pa’s rifle. Runs his fingers against its length. Again and again, until the windows are tinted with light.

The funeral is early in the morning. Stefan takes his rifle and heads for the address stated on the assignment. He doesn’t need to look at a map; the procession is already there to show him where he needs to go. People with torches and candles and effigies without faces walk slowly behind a man in a suit, hunched. Next to him four other men are carrying his coffin. Around them, perched on lamp posts and gutters, the angels stand silently, preening their wings or staring with their large, unblinking eyes.

Feral children with kid-sized rifles stumble after the procession, their necks craned to get a clear shot at the angels. Stefan shoos them; it’s bad for business if even children can do your job. Then he shrugs off his rifle and takes down as many of the angels as he can. People ignore him. They carry on, following the hunched man to his last abode. Soon they’ll have put him in the ground, the coffin laid down and nailed shut but not all the way. Will anyone stand guard until he’s gone? How loved was that man? Is this the way to measure it?

Stefan scoops up the dead angels and piles them on a street corner. He’ll need to stack them onto a trailer later. He notices a child looking at him. Not one of the feral rifled ones; this one’s clean, clothed in a pink frock, hair tied into a fat ponytail. This child belongs to the procession, to someone’s family. “Are you a boy or a girl?” the child asks.

Stefan keeps stacking the angel bodies one on top of the other. “More a boy than a girl these days,” he says. “But I used to be a girl.” Like you, he almost says, but he doesn’t, because really, what does he know?

The child points at the angels. “What are you going to do with them?”

“Cremate them, like always.”

“What happens if you don’t? Do they come back to life?”

Now, wouldn’t that be a sight? A true apocalypse. Stefan wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. Breathes in the dusty smell of the angel wings before he continues. “No. They go bad really quickly.” He waves a hand in front of his nose. “Awful stench, don’t want that.”

The child nods sagely.

The cemetery is just across the street. The funeral priest talks about forgiveness, about eternal life, about the changing ills of the flesh.

“Better run along now,” Stefan says. “They’ll be looking for you.”

A blur in Stefan’s shadow. He missed one. A delicate thing, brown-eyed, feathers haloing its head. Meldenia, it says. Meldenia. Relikori.

“Stop,” Stefan says. He nudges it with his leg. “Go away.” But the angel comes closer instead.

Stefan bends down and picks it up roughly, though without conviction. He closes his fingers around the angel’s wings, and something slips out from between the feathers, falls to the ground. It’s the ring he picked up outside his cabin, tin and useless.

Stefan opens his hand. The angel struggles, kicks at his arms like a bird. It doesn’t speak anymore. Stefan puts the angel down and watches it flap its wings. Finally, it takes off. Flies inconsequentially into the sky.

Stefan looks around—did anybody see? The mourners are occupied. Someone’s banging nails onto the coffin, and the people stare at each other, wide-eyed, with that panic he’s seen so often. Nobody actually gets used to cruelty, no matter how common the cruel thing is. Perhaps that should be a comfort.

It’s a long walk to the furnace with the trailer in tow, but Stefan doesn’t mind. He always needs to work his muscles after a job, to spend something of himself, to feel as tired as he thinks he should. The government man counts the bodies and gives Stefan a slip he’ll need to cash at the registry tomorrow. Then Stefan loads the angel bodies onto the barrow and empties them into the mouth of the pit. Fires them up.

The furnace has a song, a low rumbling. He’s heard it a thousand times before, knows it by heart. He watches the angel wings burn, the feathers shrivel and curl, their heads hiss and turn black.

Yeah.

On the way back, he stops for a drink at the bar across the street from the cemetery. It’s small, four tables, a couple of stools, no windows to the outside, no reasons to look. Once you enter, the door shuts behind you with a final click. The light’s soft, the walls covered in wood panelling, the air laced with enough alcohol to get you at least a little drunk for free. He thinks he knows, maybe, what Pa was looking for when he came to this very bar to spend his pennies when Stefan was small.

There’s no one else here this early in the morning, so Stefan sits at the bar. He rests his rifle against the dark wood. Asks for a beer. It’s warm and slightly flat, but it will wash the ashes lingering at the back of his throat, and that will do.

A woman comes in and sits next to him at the bar, so close he can smell the cigarettes and coffee in her hair. She’s older than him. Fifty, perhaps. She stares at him and there’s something in her eyes that looks a lot like pity but could be something else entirely. She orders a beer and then nods at the rifle. “You’re very good at your job,” she says. It doesn’t sound like a compliment.

“Were you watching?”

“Mhmm.”

“Did you know the person whose funeral it was?”

She raises an eyebrow. “You really think of them as funerals?”

“What else?”

Something tightens in the woman’s jaw, a rippling up the right temple, a blade in the eye. “Executions.”

He looks away.

“But you spared one,” she says. “Why?”

She saw that, too, then. How long has she been watching him?

He shrugs. “My pennies,” he says. “My business.”

She stares at him for a while. “I have a job for you,” she says then.

“What kind of job?”

“The kind you’re good at.”

Sometimes people ask him to help them get rid of an infestation. Angels seem to like some people more than others, and then good luck with cleaning your gutters if you’re chosen. Enough feathers to fill a pillow every single day. But somehow this woman doesn’t strike him as having this problem. “I don’t even know your name,” he says.

“It’s Gala.”

“Stefan.” They don’t shake hands.

“So?” she asks. “It’ll probably take a few days, so we can put you up in one of the spare cabins.” She motions west with her arm. “We have a community a few miles outside the city, that way.”

Probably weirdos planning to murder him, then, sell his organs, feed his body to the angels.

“Nah,” he says. “I like sleeping in my own bed. Besides, I have to cash this slip tomorrow.” He waves the little piece of paper in the air, like an idiot.

She doesn’t speak for a few moments, but that look of pity is in her eyes again and he hates it. He looks away.

“Fine,” the woman says then. “Stefan. Maybe some other time, when you need the work.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Sure. Some other time.” Never happening.

He finishes his beer and heads out.

On the way back, he thinks of trying Eva again. He reaches for his phone, realizes he left it at home. He swears under his breath. An angel descends and walks alongside him on the street. He pretends he can’t hear it. Pretends it’s not there. Relikori. Relikori. Relikori. It follows him all the way home.

The smell of burning lingers in the air. Stefan picks up his pace, a dark feeling in his gut. The angel stays with him, interspersing its steps with little flutters and hops to keep up. The smell gets stronger near the cabin, until Stefan can see the dark plume rising from something burning in the front yard. He’s running now. By the time he gets there, the fire has almost died down, reduced to a smouldering pile of ashes. It’s his stuff, he realizes. His few clothes, his single coffee mug, the pot of honey. His mattress. Then he sees the blackened husk of his phone. “No no no,” he gasps, rushing over to rummage foolishly through the embers. He picks up the phone, burning his fingers. Lets it drop again. It’s dead.

He tries the door, but his key no longer fits. He throws it onto the embers and then sits on the ground. He feels light and empty, like a crater.

The angel approaches, scuffs the ashes with its clawed foot. It grabs the key and flies away with it before Stefan has a chance to shoo it.

He stays on the ground until the sun has reached its apex in the sky and then started to descend again. His mind is empty, like the rest of him. At least he still has his rifle, he thinks and laughs. The urge to call Eva returns, but he no longer has any way of contacting her—not that he really did before. So he lies back on the ground and starts talking to her in his head. Tells her about his day. Reminisces about their time together. Then his mind falls silent and there is only the feeling of her touch on his skin, so long ago now, and so briefly. “I’m sorry I scared you away,” he says out loud. “I would take it all back, if I could.”

Slowly, night falls, crisping the air around him. He realizes he’s homeless. So he does what his Pa would have done: He picks up his rifle and heads back to the bar.

It’s fuller now, the air thicker. The bartender nods at him, not at all surprised by his return—probably used to people paying multiple visits in the same day. Or staying all day, he thinks, noticing the woman from this morning is still there. She doesn’t look the type, though you can never really know. Everyone’s the type, under the right circumstances.

Stefan counts his pennies and orders another beer. A bad decision, obviously, but hey, it might be his last. Homeless people get expedited funerals.

The woman—was her name Gala?—approaches again as the bartender sets a beer in front of him. “I’ll get that for you,” she says, and pushes a few pennies towards the bartender, who scoops them up without comment.

“Thanks,” Stefan says. “Still not taking the job.”

Gala leans back and observes him for a while. “You’re a stubborn little shit, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” he says, playing it cool even though he just almost choked on his drink. “Yeah, I am.”

“You take after Peter.”

Now Stefan turns to face her. “Peter? You knew Uncle Pete?”

“Long time ago,” she says. “He stayed with us, for a time.”

Stefan scours his memory for confirmation that Uncle Pete ever lived somewhere other than their house, his brother’s house. Comes up empty.

“I’ve met you before, too,” Gala adds. “When you were very small. Peter brought you with him one day, showed you around. He was so proud.”

“How did you find me?” He means, how did you know that was me?

Gala takes a few moments to reply. “I’ve kept tabs on you ever since Peter was taken from us. He always thought you were special. And he was right.” She pauses. “No matter how hard that Pa of yours tried to mess with your head.”

“Don’t talk about my father,” he says dryly, though not threateningly. He’s too tired for threats.

Gala looks embarrassed for the first time. “Sorry,” she says. “You’re right. Family is family.”

“So you’ve been stalking me then. You think that somehow makes your offer more interesting, not less?”

“Stalking. Looking out for you. I guess it’s up to you how you wanna see it. But I do know you need a place to stay.”

That’s right. He does. “I’ll take my chances,” he says.

Gala’s eyes grow hard. “Goddammit,” she says. She puts her hand on his and squeezes it, tender but strong. “I lost Peter this way. I’m not gonna let you go so easily.” She pauses, looks him straight in the eyes. Her face is open now, calm and sure. “Please,” she says. “Peter would kill me if I let you go now.”

“Uncle Pete’s not here, though, is he?”

Gala’s gaze goes steely again. She says nothing.

“Why do you care, anyway? Why now?”

She starts saying something but then stops herself. “Just come with me. You’ll understand. I’ll explain everything after we get some food into you and a roof over your head.”

He wants to protest some more but finds there’s no more fight left in him. Besides, they might have a phone he can use. “Fine,” he says. “I’ll come with you. Fine.” And if that’s how he ends up having his organs sold, so be it.

It turns out Gala has a car parked on the other side of the cemetery. It’s an old beast, clunky and creaky, but she swears it’ll take them where they need to go.

Stefan hasn’t left the town in so long. It sprawled while he wasn’t looking, shanty towns and tent neighbourhoods sprouted where before there were parks and wooded hills loud with the chatter of angels. He cracks open his window as they pass. It’s so silent out there now. So eerily quiet, like the whole town is but a grave and they’re all just waiting for whoever’s buried in there to draw their last breath.

Gala drives in silence, her attention on the road, occasionally checking that they’re not being tailed by police cars. Though, why would they? Stefan takes the opportunity to finally really look at this woman. She has olive skin, dark curly hair that haloes her head, untameable. She has strong, wiry arms, a single silver bangle on her left wrist. She gives the impression of someone who, when she was younger, might have been a dancer. She looks nothing like Eva, and yet Stefan is reminded of her. Something in the way they carry themselves. Perhaps, if Eva lives to be Gala’s age, she might grow into someone like her, strong and confident, with a tenderness that will cut you if you’re not careful.

“You can stop staring anytime,” Gala says softly. “We’re almost there.”

“Just making sure I know what to tell the police when they ask me to describe who kidnapped me.”

Gala laughs. She takes a sharp turn onto a dirt road and manages not to make that seem ominous.

Soon, the commune comes into view. It’s larger than Stefan expected. Clusters of cabins radiate out of a large central circle with a fire pit in its middle. The whole area is flooded with the scent of pinewood and smoke. The place has obviously changed a lot, but it’s that smell that convinces him he has, in fact, been here before. He remembers now, his small hand holding onto Uncle Pete’s rough palm, his shoes dusty from the dirt paths. There are cobbled footpaths now, and many more people, going about their daily chores, tending vegetable patches or hanging laundry. And the trees above, teeming with angels. The sky is obscured by a canopy of wings, and branches groan under the weight.

Stefan takes his rifle from the car and steadies it against his shoulder. He points up as he’s done thousands of times before, almost out of reflex. Something in him feels unbalanced; the steady pressure of the rifle against his shoulder unsteadies him.

Gala puts her hand on the gun barrel and forces him to lower the gun. “No,” she says. “You don’t have to do that here.”

He knew already, somehow. “Right,” he says.

She looks down. “Perhaps, when you understand, you’ll forgive me this deception.”

A few meters away, a child is playing with an angel, trying to get it to feed from her hand.

“Come on,” she tells him. “Let me show you to my cabin.”

“Your cabin?”

“You can clean up and then join us for supper around the fire.”

He figures it’s too late to back out now. He takes a shower in a wet room attached to the back of the cabin. The water’s unexpectedly hot, for which he’s grateful. The pressure at his own place had been shit, and the boiler barely managed a lukewarm, minute-long shower, so this is as close to heaven as it gets. Back in the cabin, clean clothes have been laid out on the bed. A little too big, which is to say just the right size to hide the curves he wishes to hide.

Outside, Gala is talking to someone. It sounds heated. Stefan catches his name among the exchanged words.

When the conversation finally dies down, he dares to step outside. Gala is alone, gathering a bundle of twigs that has scattered on the ground.

He rushes to help her, so they pick twigs together in silence for a while.

“Was that argument about me?” he asks finally.

She shakes her head.

“Maybe I should go.”

She raises her eyes to look at him. “Don’t mind Greg,” she says. “He’ll come around eventually. Always does.”

“I don’t like to be where I’m not wanted.”

Gala stands still for a few moments. Then, tucking the bundle of twigs under one arm, she reaches for him with the other. She doesn’t touch him; just pinches his sleeve between forefinger and thumb and tugs. “You’re wanted,” she says. Low, quiet. “You’re wanted.”

Kindling gathered, they head for the fire pit. People have already congregated there when they arrive. Gala picks a low bench long enough for both of them and motions Stefan to sit next to her. Their shoulders touch, and he finds that he doesn’t mind. Someone hands him a bowl of thick yellow soup that smells of curry and coriander. The air has grown chilly around them so the warm bowl is pleasant in his palms, and, when the fire gets going, he welcomes its gentle touch on his skin.

They eat in silence, spoons clinking against metal bowls, fire crackling. Stefan tries to keep his gaze from drifting to the angels above, but it’s difficult—they’re so near, the people so unconcerned by their presence. The angels coo softly. A pang of loss prickles his side. He wishes Eva were here to see this. To sit here with him, feel this warmth. He bites his lip so hard he tastes blood. The pain steadies him.

After a while, the crowd starts humming. Not quite singing—it sounds as if they’re trying to remember the words to a song they’ve forgotten. The tune is familiar, but the words are blank.

Someone nearby is not singing. He’s finishing his soup but he’s looking at Stefan. Has been looking at him for some time, so Stefan stares back. Then the man—presumably Greg—calls him angel-killer. Under his breath, but loud enough for Gala to hear. “Angel-killer,” the man says again, which, fair enough, he is. “Why is this angel-killer here?”

Gala turns abruptly towards the man, her shoulders hard, her jaw tense. “Stop that,” she hisses.

Stefan puts a hand on her arm. “You don’t have to defend me,” he says. “After all, he’s not wrong.”

The man was at the ready with some barbed retort, no doubt, but Stefan’s self-incrimination stops him in his tracks.

“No,” Gala says. “He doesn’t know you.” As if she does. Then, to Greg: “Show some respect, will you? For Donnie’s memory, if nothing else. This is what he wanted.”

Greg glances in the direction of an old couple, one man, one woman. “Sorry,” he tells them. “I’m sorry.”

The woman nods at him. Then the man begins to sing, with words this time. I had a bird in my hand once, the song says. I held on to it for as long as I could, but then one day the bird flew away and there was nothing to hold onto anymore.

Stefan feels like he’s intruding on a private moment. Still, he turns to Gala. “Who are they?” he asks.

“Donnie’s husband and wife,” she whispers.

Stefan notices all the other queers then. Several couples, some with children. No one like him, from what he can tell, but of course he just might not be able to tell. The song keeps going, long and mournful.

“This place,” Stefan says. “It’s more than commune, isn’t it? A refuge.”

Gala takes a long time to respond. “Is there a difference?” she asks finally. “We had to make a space for ourselves.” She made it sound like duty, or obligation. And maybe it is. What does he know?

In the time it takes for all the bowls to be emptied and the singers to grow hoarse, the fire burns low. People drift away in twos and threes, to the cabins, to the quiet under the trees. Gala stands up and takes Stefan’s hand. “Come on,” she says. Clouds are gathering overhead.

He lets her lead him back to her cabin.

It’s warm inside. The space is not small, but it’s made to look smaller by the slanted roof. The walls are covered in panels of unpainted wood, a few photographs here and there. There’s a window that looks through the branches towards the west, away from the city. Fraying curtains. Tiny kitchenette. A Formica table that’s seen better days. A fire glows in the wood-burning stove already—who lit it?

Stefan sits at the table and looks away while Gala changes out of her smoky clothes. The crackling of the stove is the only sound in the cabin. He can’t bear it.

“So you brought me here to save me, then,” Stefan says. “To this refuge.”

Gala doesn’t miss a beat. “I brought you here for a job. Just like I told you.”

“But not to clear the place.”

“No.”

“So if you don’t want me to shoot angels, what is it you want me to do exactly?”

“Tomorrow is Donnie’s funeral. An actual funeral, not the travesties the government wants us to get used to, forcing people to be their own family’s executioners.” Gala has finished changing so she joins Stefan at the table. “I want you to protect the procession from other hunters.” She nods towards the rifle. “Put that to good use, for once.”

“Why me?”

Gala stands up and takes down one of the photographs from the wall. Hands it to him. It’s her, at least twenty years younger, flanked by two men. She points to the one on her left. “That’s Donnie,” she says. “That’s me.” Then she points at the other man. “That’s your uncle Peter.”

It’s true. Stefan recognizes him. The hunched shoulders. The kind eyes, set a little too far apart. He hasn’t seen him in so long. Has no photographs of him. His silly Pete.

He points at Donnie. “So who was he?” he asks.

Gala takes the photograph and returns it to its place on the wall. “He was our angel-talker,” she says.

He’s heard of the term before, used only by lunatics and religious fanatics to describe the people angels are drawn to and who seem to have some kind of special connection to them. Like Donnie. Like Pete. Like himself, apparently.

“Donnie was gifted,” Gala continues. “He could communicate with them. Sometimes I think he actually understood what they’re saying.” She pauses. Leans across the table to touch his hand. “I think you have the same gift.”

He pulls back. “Wait, is that why you lured me here? To be your new angel-talker?” As if I have any clue what they’re saying most of the time, he doesn’t add. He shakes his head. “This was a terrible idea.” He turns around, realizes he’s wearing borrowed clothes; his own are out drying somewhere. Doesn’t actually care. “I should go.”

Gala stands up, comes close, too close. She touches his arm. “Please,” she says. “You can choose to leave, sure. But please stay tonight, see this through tomorrow. I want you to experience a real funeral, where the person is actually dead and cared for and celebrated by a community who loved them. I want you to see for the first time what it means to live a life, to die with dignity. Just this once.” She pauses, lets go of him. He notices she smells faintly of pinecones. “Then, after the funeral, you can go,” Gala says. “If you must.”

He looks away. What does he have to lose? “Fine,” he says. “Okay.”

She nods. “You can have the bed tonight. You look like you could use a good night’s sleep.”

“I’m fine on the floor. Don’t argue. I’m staying, and I’m sleeping on the floor.”

Gala takes a step back. She smiles for the first time.

He unfurls the thin mattress she gives him, piles two blankets on top of it. Sets the rifle on the floor next to the mattress. Gala turns off the lights and the cabin is plunged into complete darkness. Stefan lies in the dark, listening to the quiet. Outside, rain falls. Something drips, probably a leak from the roof. Not that much has changed, after all, he thinks, yet so much. He looks over to the bed, where Gala’s lying. Her breathing is steady. He imagines she’s Eva, but not quite, Eva but someone else, someone who could love him back.

He closes his eyes, drives all thoughts from his mind. His fingers search for his rifle. Pa’s rifle. A danger that soothes, an unsafety that feels safe—has that ever truly been a paradox for him, people like him? Stefan wants his body to be still, for his thoughts to go blurry. He thinks of Eva instead, again, wonders where she is, what she’s doing, if she ever thinks of him. He wants his body to be flat and hollow, to hold nothing: to be a thing without memory.

In the morning, he wakes up to someone poking him in the side. A little girl-shaped thing. She’s got curly hair, frizzy and brown. “Gala needs you,” she whispers. “Down at the pavilion.”

“Okay,” he says, rubbing sleep from his eyes. “Thank you, little girl whose name I don’t know.” The child laughs as she skips out of the cabin.

Stefan puts his boots on, shrugs on his borrowed parka. He looks for his rifle, but it’s gone. He frowns. Feels naked without it.

Outside, people in dark clothing are heading in one direction, so he follows them, certain they’ll lead him where he needs to go.

The pavilion is on the far side of the commune, a circular structure, open on all sides, a catafalque in the middle. The man and woman from yesterday flank Donnie’s casket. People file through, embrace them, then say a few words to Donnie, plant a last kiss on his forehead or pat his entwined fingers with the tenderness of old friends, conspiratorial and with a chuckle, as if saying, now look what you did. Old friend, look what you went and did.

Stefan realizes he’s never seen a dead person before. He looks at the cold, stiff body and wonders at how peaceful it looks. Then he observes Donnie’s partners. They’re devastated, yes, but, for all their grief, he can see they’re at peace, too.

Overhead, the angels perch silent, looking on solemnly, as if holding a vigil.

He finds Gala on the other side of the pavilion, her back resting against a wooden beam. His rifle is hanging from her shoulder. She notices him looking, hands it to him.

“Thought I wouldn’t leave without it?” he asks.

“Just keeping it safe for you,” she says. She glances at the line of people waiting to pay their respects. “We should be starting soon.”

Donnie must have been loved by many, because the procession is long. The sky is clear now, and the angels hover above them, escorting the mourners to the burial site. It’s little more than a fenced field, lined with graves, some freshly dug. The odd cypress tree. The recently buried sigh heavily from beneath the ground, a haunted, haunting sound. There are trinkets on some of the graves, gleaming in the weak sun.

Donnie’s grave is already open, waiting for him. His friends gather around the hole in the ground. Greg among them, his eyes red. Donnie’s husband and wife say some words. There’s no priest. Some people are crying. Stefan tries not to listen to them. He can’t remember how long it’s been since he last cried, since the last time he allowed himself to weep.

He stays behind, keeping an eye out for cleaners, but none show up. After Donnie is lowered into the ground, his people put stones on the dirt, one each, with a message scribbled on it. The angels descend on the grave and pace the dirt, peering curiously at the stones, their faces closed and inscrutable. They say nothing, but Stefan can hear it, their muted grief.

Slowly, people start on the way back. Nobody stays behind on the dirt, listening to their loved one’s laboured breaths, wondering which one will be his last.

Gala was right. This is different. Stefan sees her walking, her back curved. She’s holding her head in her hands as she walks, as if it’s too heavy to stand on its own between her shoulders. He picks up the pace so he walks next to her for a while. Tears are streaming from her eyes now; she doesn’t even register he’s there. He has the urge to wrap his arms around her and say…what? Something. Nothing. Just hold her.

He doesn’t.

The procession makes its way back to the commune, and everyone gathers in the central circle, as if pulled there by some invisible force. They light a fire. Stefan finds himself joining in, seeking Gala without realizing, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world to do. He thinks, you put someone in the earth and then you know where they are forever, or until someone else puts you in the ground too. Perhaps that’s for the best—perhaps that’s the only way to hold onto someone for good. He sits next to Gala on one of the benches, lets his rifle slide from his shoulder, touch the ground. Hardly notices.

The atmosphere around the fire is different this time. People bring out platters of root vegetables that they roast on the fire, wrapped in tin foil. A boy goes around pouring drinks for those gathered. Some tell jokes or share memories from their life with Donnie. They laugh. There’s grief, yes, but also relief. Stefan watches it all, a foreigner, an intruder, looking in. Undeserving.

At one point when Gala is gone to help wrangle the children, Greg approaches him. Stefan holds up his palms, “Look, man, I’m not here to take anyone’s place, I’ll be gone tomorrow,” he says, but Greg stops him. He hands him a glass of faintly yellow liquid, which Stefan eyes suspiciously. “It’s homemade,” the man says. “Donnie’s favorite.”

Stefan takes the glass carefully and sips. It warms him, leaves behind a hint of honey. “Thank you,” he says, then takes another sip. “To Donnie.”

The man repeats the gesture. “Donnie,” he says. “I don’t like you, just so you know. I still think you should go. Just not tonight.”

“Noted.”

“Name’s Greg, by the way.”

“Stefan.”

“Yeah.”

Gala comes up behind Greg and wraps her arms around his shoulders. “Are you two playing nice?” she asks.

Greg turns around to face her, a cheekiness in his eyes that Stefan wouldn’t have thought possible for the man. “Never,” he says. He hands Gala a drink, and the three of them toast Donnie again, like old friends.

Then people settle down, and they eat in silence for a while. When the clatter of crockery fades and plates are placed empty on the ground, they start sharing stories again. The time when Donnie brought home a wounded angel and nursed it in his cabin for days. How the others congregated outside his door, how he opened it to find more and more of them every morning until there were so many of them they covered the entire area around his cabin and it was impossible to walk. How after the angel healed and Donnie released it, it brought back a shiny bottle cap, flattened to a golden disc, probably by a car, and pierced through the middle. Donnie pulled a thread through the hole and wore it around his neck. Didn’t take it off once since that day. They buried him with it.

Another says, “I hear they talk to some people. That there are actual angel-talkers, where the talking’s not just a metaphor, like Donnie was an angel-talker.” The man looks around, takes a drink, continues. “They say if the angels favour you, they might give you the words that will unlock heaven when you die.”

Stefan thinks of the angel words. Only allows himself a moment to wonder if that’s what they are. To turn the idea in his head before he rejects it: The angels hold no keys. The angels fell to the ground and are condemned to crawl around in the muck, like the rest of us.

He turns to Gala, finds her studying him. “Do you remember when the angels fell?” he asks. It’s not what he meant to ask, but it will do. “What it was like?”

Gala looks into the fire. Her face is painted orange, extraordinarily beautiful in the flames. “Yes, I do,” she says. She searches for the words. Finds them. Lets them pour out of her: She talks of a crack in the sky, of bodies falling in their hundreds. Angels face-down in the dirt. And then, the smell of decay that followed them for days. God is dead, people cried, God is dead. She pauses. “But nobody knew for sure, of course,” Gala says. “Nobody knows.” And she’s right. People have been coming up with all sorts of explanations, both personal and cosmic, will keep coming up with them. Can’t be helped. But nobody truly knows.

Everyone is silent around the fire for a while. “You must have some stories, too,” Gala says then.

Stefan thinks of the strange words. Relikori. Dethlem. Does he have stories? Maybe, one or two. None worth sharing.

And yet, he finds himself talking about Uncle Pete’s funeral, the spared angel in his past, the trinkets piled high on top of his grave. “I waited there on the dirt every day, listening to him breathe, praying to the angels to bring something valuable, something I could sell to buy him more time.” One of the children is looking at Stefan, rapt, hanging on every word.

“Did they bring a treasure?” the child asks.

Pete. Silly Pete and his last breaths. Stefan’s knees on the dirt, his ear to the cold stone. “Of course they did,” he says. “A gold ring with a ruby as fat as a strawberry. They brought it and dropped it on the pile of trash. I was dozing at the time, almost missed it. But when I woke the glint caught my eye.” Gala is looking at him, too. She knows. His deception. Does it matter that he’s doing it to be kind? It must. Except, how kind can it be to give a child hope? “I took it to the government man and he said I was just in time. He gave Uncle Pete an extension and me and my Pa dug him out of his grave. He was barely breathing by then, but he was very glad to be alive. Told that story for years: the only man to be able to recount the tale of his own funeral.” He pauses. Is that disbelief in the child’s eyes? “He died of cancer two winters later, of course. We buried him again. It was so cold the soil was frozen solid. We had to break it apart with pickaxes.”

The child looks relieved. This is a story they can believe, hold onto. Doesn’t matter that folks die anyway; it only matters that there be more to the world than cruelty.

“I hope the angels never go back to the sky,” the child says, and Stefan knows why. He imagines it: how lonely everything would feel, how abandoned.

Back in Gala’s cabin, they don’t speak. She avoids his eyes, and Stefan steps lightly, as if the merest contact between them would embarrass them both. His hands keep patting his pockets for his phone. The need to call Eva is so strong it hurts. He imagines himself going to the doctor. “What’s wrong?” the doctor would ask. “Where does it hurt?” He would show them his empty hands, his broken soft bits. “Ah,” the doctor would say. “It’s just arthritis of the heart. Everyone gets it, eventually. Nothing can be done.”

“What are you looking for?” Gala asks. Of course she noticed. Gala, wise, keen-eyed Gala, she notices everything.

“Is there a phone I can use?”

She points him to the landline. Doesn’t retreat.

Stefan picks up the receiver. It’s dark green and ancient. He holds it to his ear and presses the big black buttons. Eva’s phone rings, once, twice, three times, voicemail. Eva’s tired voice saying her name, and then Please leave your message after the tone. He does. “I’m all right,” he says, “in case you’re wondering. I’m thinking of you always.” Pause. “You’d like it here.” He glances at Gala, who’s looking at him, discretion a foreign concept at this point. He hangs up.

Gala sits at the kitchen table, sets two glasses of pale liquor on it. He joins her. He tells her about Eva, unprompted, the long of it too long to fit in this moment, this chest, this life, the short of it so simple and sharp you can cut yourself on it. A great friendship, a great love. Doing everything together, holding each other through the worst of everything, no questions asked. And then, a wall so tall it could fence the sky. It was all over. She was gone. Has been gone. Disappeared.

Gala has been listening in silence. She studies her drink now, as if she can divine something in the pale bottom of the glass. “Was it because you transitioned?” she asks. Her eyes, when she looks at him, are shiny in the dim light of the room.

“No. She actually helped me through that. It was after.” He pauses, thinks about it. Was this the reason, only delayed? No, that would have been a lesser pain. “It’s my fault,” he says. His voice sounds dry, like gravel, all gentleness beaten out of it. “I was in love with her and she just wanted to be friends.” Only gave herself to him one time. He remembers her softness, her smell, still, her open mouth. Her desire making him feel more like a man than all the testosterone in the world. How hetero of him, and yet, there it was. And he remembers, too, how she laughed, afterwards. It was an experiment for her. It was not an experiment for him.

“There’s no fault in loving,” Gala says. “And I can think of fates much worse than being loved.” Her voice sounds hard. As dry as his own.

He doesn’t know what to say, and so he doesn’t say anything.

The air in the cabin grows stale. He wants to open a window, let in the night and its humid cold. Outside, the angels murmur, hidden in the canopy above. Stefan stays seated.

“I know the angels didn’t bring no ring for Peter,” Gala says, her face twisted for just a second, then back to its usual hardness.

“No,” he says. “They didn’t.”

“But you said so anyway,” Gala says. “For that kid who’s nothing to you.” She’s looking at him now. What is she getting at? Doesn’t he have enough to feel guilty for already?

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have lied.” He remembers that kid’s face now, lit up, relieved. “Hope is a terrible thing.”

“Yes,” Gala says. “Yes, it is.” She stands up, walks to the kitchen counter. She opens a cabinet lined with jars: pickled cucumbers and beets, molasses, strawberry preserve, golden honey with a piece of beeswax in it like something prehistoric preserved in amber. “We make these every year,” she says, her tone wistful, as if recounting something sweet and gone. “Every cabin has a cupboard like this. Our little treasures that we share between us.” She pulls down the jar of honey and brings it to Stefan with a spoon. The smell fills his nostrils as soon as she unscrews the lid. She hands him the spoon. “Go ahead,” she says. “Try it. If angels could feed, this is what they would eat.”

Stefan takes the spoon from her, looks at the honey. He’s always loved honey, since he was a child, though it was so expensive they could rarely have it in the house. Perhaps he loved it so much because they so rarely had it in the house. He dips the spoon in. He’s about to put it in his mouth but stops himself. His body rejects it. He’s sure that, even if he put it in his mouth, he wouldn’t be able to taste it. “I don’t deserve it,” he says.

Gala laughs. “Nobody does,” she says. “Have it anyway.” She runs her fingers through his hair, then caresses his cheek. She guides his hand gently, until the spoon is in his mouth, the golden thing dissolving on his tongue, sweeter than anything. His throat tightens around it, and he almost gags. A swift pang of shame heats up his gut, but there’s no time to linger on it, because Gala’s fingers are around his, prying the spoon away, and then her mouth is on his mouth, her lips on his lips.

He stands up to meet her. Her hand is on his wrist, pulling.

Her body is strong, her tongue so surprisingly dry. There’s a moment when the world collapses around them as she kisses him, and everything falls away except her breath, her body, and the way she reaches for the buttons on his shirt. He doesn’t think of Eva then, doesn’t, doesn’t.

She guides him to the bed. They lie side by side, their hands connected. Her face is obscured, and still he kisses her. “Are you sure?” he asks.

“Boy,” she says. But then she realizes he’s still waiting for an answer, so she reaches for his lips and crotch, gasping, “Yes, I’m sure, yes.”

She twists her body to get the light on the bedside table, but he stops her. “I want to see you,” he says. Keep his mind from getting confused, from superimposing someone else’s face on hers. It wouldn’t be fair to any of them.

Gala shakes her head. “There’s no mercy in light,” she tells him. She switches off the lamp.

As they get to know each other in the dark, she talks about anger. “I’m so angry, all the time,” she says. “It’s a fire that eats its way through me, and it will keep eating until there’s nothing left, no lungs, no heart, no stomach, just an empty husk that used to be a person that people used to love.”

He knows what she’s talking about. He kisses her hands, her mouth, kisses away her words until she falls quiet at his side.

When they’re done and Gala’s breathing grows steady beside him, he slips out of bed and returns to his mattress on the floor. He lies in the dark, looks at it until it births shapes and textures. He had forgotten, just for a moment, how much friendlier the darkness is, how much more known. Gala was right: There’s no mercy in the light. He lets his body sink into the mattress, straight, facing up, until the mattress is his coffin. He’s not dead, not alive. If he died now, he wonders, would the angels bring him trinkets for his grave? He’s killed so many of them, and yet they follow him, and yet they speak to him, the undeserving fool.

In the morning, Gala’s already gone, her bed unmade. He looks at it, knows she’ll only break his heart, and he will break hers. But then, that’s what people do, isn’t it? That’s life. He pulls the blanket over his shoulders and stays there a while. Watches the slanted ceiling, everything around him quiet, no clock, no dripping faucet, not even an angel to break the quiet with nonsense.

It’s the quiet that finally chases Stefan out of bed. A note waits for him on the kitchen table. Gala’s neat cursive asking him to leave, no doubt, to forget any of this ever happened.

But no. She wants him to meet her at the construction site by the pavilion. The note is written in block letters, pressed on the paper too hard, an anxious hand that cares too much. She even left him breakfast on the counter.

So he puts on his clothes and he eats the breakfast and he heads out to meet her. Outside, the ground is littered with down so thick it’s as if someone took to plucking angels overnight. He looks up, despite himself: The angels are no longer in the foliage above. Children are playing, someone’s chopping wood. A quiet world, no angel chatter. A normal world.

Soon, he can see the construction site. People are gathered by the pavilion, standing in a circle. They welcome him. They know his name, pat his shoulder good morning, as if he’s already one of them. He doesn’t know any of their names, he realizes. Except Greg’s, of course.

Gala joins him a few moments later. She’s already sweaty in her hoody. She smiles at him, but her stance doesn’t betray any intimacy between them—as if what passed last night was only in his head, a thing of darkness, to remain under wraps. Maybe it’s for the best.

“What are we building?” he asks.

“New cabin,” Gala says.

“Are more people coming?”

“People are always finding us. Always growing tired and rageful, more and more.” Gala pauses, looks around, at her people.

Could they be Stefan’s people, too?

He chases that thought away. It scalds his skin on contact.

“One day,” Gala says, her voice quieter now, underneath it something that cuts like glass, “one day no one will have to die covered in soil, their family witnessing above.”

Gala presses her hand against his. Her fingers are warm. He thinks he hears the angels calling his name, but no, no, there’s no one.

“Let’s start,” Gala says. She puts a hammer in his hand.

He looks at it a while. He’s never really used a hammer before. Never even hung a picture on a wall. No pictures, his family only a blur of memory, a memory of a memory. Soft down in a gutter, unwashed dishes in the sink, a fridge that always melted and leaked. His mother’s smell. The smell of dead angels bunched together by their taloned feet, so similar, so familiar.

Stefan hefts the hammer. He’s never really built anything. Only torn things down. And yet, here’s this woman, asking him to make something with his hands. Trusting him to.

Days pass building this cabin, and slowly he finds himself understanding how it works, how much rests on each thing you do. Gala makes him stop every time he makes an error, sometimes gently sighing, others snapping, but she always makes him try again. They take breaks at midday, when the sun is the hottest and the sky loud with angels again. He was uneasy while they were gone, as if the world were suddenly lacking, or wrong, the way it would feel if there were suddenly no stars at night, or the sun was gone.

He wipes the sweat from his forehead, and his body aches sweetly. People whose names he still doesn’t know bring him water bottles and sandwiches, and then, eventually, he knows their names, who is whose, how they got here. He doesn’t want them, all these stories, the girl who escaped here, chased by her father; the failed musician who was told he would be buried when he turned twenty-two; the man thrown into the freezing sea, rescued, he says, by angels. All this context, he doesn’t want it, but it pours into him anyway.

Days pass, and the moon rises pale and inadequate in the sky.

And then, without realizing how or when or why, he does want it, the context, the names, the stories, all of it, despite himself, against himself, and he finds himself staying late around the fire, talking to people—even Greg—into the small hours. It fills him with dread.

At the cabin, in Gala’s bed, he tells her so.

She kisses him. “This is what it’s like,” she says.

“What is?” he asks, thinking of the kiss.

“To be with people. To not bear the weight of the world alone.”

He grows still. Is this for him? Him, who wants to be a crater, something empty and flat, holding nothing and no one at all?

He tells her of his crater thoughts, and she cradles his head but doesn’t speak. She sighs, something pained in there, he knows. He can tell. He doesn’t want to, but he can.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

She switches on the light and pulls a piece of paper out of the drawer. She hands it to him.

He pushes himself up on his elbows and leans towards the light to read it. It’s an official notice of expiration. Someone’s time’s up, whatever this means. Stefan has lived all his years in this world, with its rules, and still he doesn’t know how to count a life, how this world measures a person’s worth, the fine thing that turns a life into a burden. You just work, and work, and work, and hope it’s enough.

Stefan scans the document for a name, finds it. He doesn’t know it. “Who is it?” he asks.

Gala takes the piece of paper gently and returns it to the drawer. “Does it matter?” she asks. “Is anyone more expendable than anyone else?”

He breathes in, then out, in, out. Something hard and painful in the middle of his stomach. If he stays here, this is what will become of him. If he gets attached, this is what he’ll be, not an empty place, but somewhere overfull, his organs pushed aside thoughtlessly, making space for things he doesn’t want.

He leaves the bed, runs outside. The angels are there, everywhere, on the ground and overhead. Stefan imagines them whispering darkly about their wings, the way they used to when he was small and he still understood them. Where are your words that will unlock heaven now? he wants to ask them. Where are your trinkets now? But no, that time is past, gone for good, when a child could hope for mercy from above, for the things he loved the most to be spared. The angels were never going to save anybody. He runs his hands through his hair, bunches his fists, pulls slightly. The pain feels good. Above, the angels keep chattering. They sound like bells.

When he goes back inside, Gala’s sitting on the bed. Her hair is loose, grey-white, down to her shoulders. He loves it, he realizes with a start.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Shouldn’t have left like that.”

Gala shakes her head. “You came back,” she says. “Good enough for me.”

He sits next to her, wiggles under the covers, where her warmth is. “What happens now?” he asks.

“They’ll collect him, maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after, maybe in a week. They know we won’t comply, so they’ll come armed, ready to fight. It’s happened before. Many times.”

He doesn’t ask her to recount the times before, to narrate their defeats—for what else could they be but defeats? He can imagine it just fine on his own: the loved ones snatched away, the lives cut short, a community burned to the ground. Then, the ashes gathered again, arranged into the shape of something familiar, worth fighting for.

He turns to face her. “So we’ll fight?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says, planting a kiss on his lips. “Of course we’ll fight.”

That night, he dreams of angels fastening their heads to their necks, folding their wings and tucking them away in the safety of their own bodies. They close their eyes and wait for the return of the sun. But they never sleep, or at least Stefan doesn’t think so. It would be too cruel, to be able to sleep and dream of your own fall, what you had, what you lost. Do angels dream of falling? Stefan does. He dreams of falling all the time. Of being left behind. Of gates closed and others opened, gaping and inaccessible.

The next days are spent in preparation. They gather rocks, leave piles of them around the camp. They fill glass bottles with gasoline, stick rags into the bottle necks, seal them with duct tape. Guns are cleaned and bullets counted.

On the last night before they come, around the fire, Gala stands next to Stefan. “I’m scared Eva is dead,” he says. “That she had her funeral somewhere and nobody told me because nobody knows me, I have no friends, no family, no ties. I belong nowhere, and that’s the way I like it.”

Gala doesn’t wave her arm in an expansive motion towards all the people around the fire, all the people he knows, that know him. She doesn’t need to.

“I’m not like you,” he says. “I’m not one of you.”

She reaches into the hidden pocket of his jacket, fishes out the payment slip from his last job.

“You never cashed this,” she says.

No, he didn’t. He’d forgotten it was there. So? Doesn’t prove anything.

Stefan looks around at the piles of rocks, the Molotov cocktails, the faces ready. He knows it’s no use. Their enemies will keep coming and coming until there’s nothing left. They have all the power, and Stefan’s people—yes, fine, Stefan’s people—have only their hearts, their love for one another, these cabins they built with their hands.

But then, what else is there to do?

He throws the check into the fire.

When they come, it’s not the army they’re expecting, but just one person, a single cop with a gun and a megaphone, calling for the expired person to come out. Gala is at the gate, Stefan and everyone else in a line behind her, the person they’re protecting spirited away, kept in one of the cabins equipped with a trapdoor, a hidden basement.

Gala informs the man they will not be giving anyone up. He’ll have to go through the entire community first.

Stefan expected his heart to beat fast, but now, faced with this man, he finds it calm, his blood running cool through his veins, not pumping in his ears. The angels chatter overhead, flap their wings, their too-human mouths rounded into big Os.

The man tries to push his way in, past Gala, but she puts her hand on his shoulder, holding him back. The people heft their rocks. Stefan hefts his rock. Someone throws a bottle; somewhere ahead, fire flares. The cop discards the megaphone and rests his hand on his gun, unholstered now, ready now, pointed now at Gala’s chest. Stefan screams to let her be, to stand back, to go away. People throw rocks, but if they throw them at the cop they’ll hit Gala, too, so they throw them at a wide angle, away from them. They join Stefan in shouting, but they stay back.

Stefan can’t see Gala’s face in this moment, but he can imagine it: indignant, her eyebrows knitted together, her lip quirking, mocking. Are you going to shoot, then? he imagines her asking. You’d rather I bury myself for you, wouldn’t you, do your dirty work on my own. And Stefan looks at all these people, ready to riot to protect one of their own, ready to use their voices and ready to draw blood, and he thinks, why didn’t anybody fight for Uncle Pete? We were his family, weren’t we? We were his people. How could we just go along with this, for so long, how could we let it happen? Why were we all so complacent?

Stefan sees the tension in the cop’s hand before the man has even made the decision to shoot. But he’s going to, there, the muscle, there, the tendon, there, the finger’s imperceptible change. Stefan wants to shout the angels’ words at Gala, open the gates of heaven for her before it’s too late. He doesn’t think it’ll mean anything in the end; he wants to do it anyway.

But then, something happens, incomprehensible. A swarm of wings descends, blocking the scene from view. People draw back, cry out. Above and around, angels’ wings, full, white and grey and brown, blinding. They smell of pine needles, of baby powder and dust. Stefan’s mouth fills with the taste of pennies, metallic, like blood. The angels are attacking. Whom are they attacking? He can’t see. He can’t see.

He springs forth, throwing himself into the tornado of feathers. He finds Gala’s arm by touch, grabs it, pulls it. He can see then: angel talons shredding the man’s skin, mouths biting his face, beakless but going for the eyes. Stefan pulls again, “Come on,” he shouts, “let him be, they’ll take care of him,” but Gala shrugs him off, free of his grip. He doesn’t understand what happens then, but something passes between Gala and the angels, and the swarm disperses as suddenly as it descended. The angels retreat to the trees, and the man is on the ground, writhing, a bloody mess. He’s no longer a threat.

But that same tension that was in the cop before is in Gala now. Stefan can see it: in the shoulders, the back, the side of her neck. Slowly, she kneels next to the cop on the ground, her fist bunched, ready.

“Gala, no!” Stefan shouts, but it’s too late. And he doesn’t stop it. He doesn’t run away. Neither does anybody else.

Gala brings her fist down into the cop’s bloody face, again and again, then kicks him in the ribs, the gut, the head, until the man stops writhing, stops moaning, and his body jerks like a rag doll with every kick.

Stefan’s arm aches for his rifle. His side feels empty without it, he craves it in his grip. To do what with? Hunt angels? Go back in time and kill the cop himself? He’s never killed a person before, he thinks. Are angels people?

Gala crumbles to the ground, on her knees, her bloodied fist in the dirt. Slowly, a woman approaches and puts her hand on Gala’s shoulder, coaxing her off the ground, on her feet, the woman’s arm around Gala’s shoulders now, taking her away. The others make a circle around the dead man. No tears shed. They lift his body. Stefan steps forward. Is this his time? He’s never wanted anything except for things to stop hurting, and then came Gala with her want, her hope, infecting him. Is that better, then? This terrifying hope?

“I know what to do with the body,” he tells them, and the people look at him and see him, they know him. Someone comes close and touches his face, mouths a thank you, passes a hand over his hair.

Stefan drives the body to the crematorium alone. He signs himself in, shows the cart to the clerk, says, “Big haul today,” and nobody lifts the tarp to check, because who wants to look at dead angels?

He lifts the body into the furnace, closes the hatch and waits until a man he didn’t know is reduced to ashes and fragments of bone. He doesn’t think of guilt, or fault, or loyalty, of who bears the responsibility for a crime condoned by the state. His mind is empty.

When he goes back, Gala is not in her cabin. The woman from earlier finds him and motions him to come quick. Gala is in hiding. When that police officer doesn’t turn up, they’ll come looking for him here. They’ll put two and two together soon enough. Stefan’s name is on the sign-in sheet at the crematorium. They will be looking for him, too.

The basement is dusty and cold, illuminated only by the yellow light of a storm lantern. Gala is on the floor. She’s dirty, her knuckles still caked with blood. He wants to touch her, but he doesn’t know if she wants to be touched.

She looks at him, then runs her palms over her face, her bare arms.

“Come,” she says. “It’s okay.”

He sits next to her on the cold ground. They don’t touch.

It seems impossible, now, that this is their life: people with expiration dates, meant to be put away, buried alive when someone deems their existence unsustainable. How is it possible that a system like that exists? Why aren’t they on the streets yet, he, Gala, everyone, yelling, burning it all down?

He asks so, out loud.

Gala smiles. When she speaks, her voice is full of cracks. “People are too ground down. Too busy surviving the cruelty to fight it.” She reaches out to touch his hand but doesn’t quite touch it. “We’re exhausted, that’s all.”

He takes her hand. It’s cold, as if she’s already buried, already dead. Perhaps they both are.

“Why did you do it?” he asks, looking into her eyes for the answer. “You didn’t have to.”

Gala holds his gaze. “No,” she admits. “I didn’t.”

“The angels were going to finish him off.”

“That’s right,” she says, with a finality that makes something in him go off, and he understands.

“You spared them,” he says. “You spared the angels.”

She takes a while before replying. “You think I’m a better person than I really am,” she says then.

He cannot see her well in the jaundiced light of the lamp, but he thinks her expression changes, settling into something hard that makes the room feel even colder than it is.

“Perhaps I did what you say,” she says. “Or perhaps it’s simply that I cannot forgive. Cannot let go of this anger. It’s all I have. It gnaws on my bones, puts its mouth around me.”

He inches closer to her, puts his own mouth on her eyes. “It’s not all you have,” he says.

“Yeah?” she asks, without malice, without moving away. “And what do you know, little boy? You’re so angry at yourself you can’t even swallow a mouthful of honey without feeling guilty.”

He kisses her eyes again. “I know this,” he says. He pulls her closer, onto his lap, and she wraps her legs around him. She presses her body against his, his chest, his belly, heat against heat, the hair at the base of his neck sticking up the way it does when danger is nearby.

Still, they kiss, despite everything.

He knows what will happen. They’ll come back and this time it won’t be just a sole man with a megaphone and a gun, it’ll be a whole army bearing arms and they will raze the commune to the ground and they will take whomever they want, they will walk through it and pick it apart until there’s nothing left—

Gala’s fingers are inside him, her mouth on his neck, her other hand on his forehead.

His racing mind quiets. No thoughts. No memories.

“You make me feel like a crater,” he tells her when they’re lying side by side in the dark, after. “With you, I’m free of everything.”

She pushes herself up on her elbow and faces him. She traces his cheekbones, his jawbone, all the contours of his face. What does she see? he wonders. Do I look like a man with no past?

“You have it all wrong, you know,” she says.

“All what?”

“Craters. A crater is nothing but memory. It only exists after the fact: a symptom of something that happened. It’s a reminder.” She pauses, lies on her back again. “Not a gap, but a scar.”

He doesn’t reply. Eva comes into his head uninvited, and with her entrance he realizes he hasn’t thought of her in days. He thinks she’s gone, he really does. The thought comes with a dull ache, deep in the bones. There are no phones anymore, not here, not for him, and so he talks to her in his head: Sometimes I miss you so much I feel my chest collapsing, he tells her. I remember what you felt like, what kind of person I felt like when I was with you. I miss you and him both.

I let go. Of you and him both.

Next to him, Gala is almost asleep.

He’ll lose her, too, he knows. She’ll give herself up to keep everyone safe, just like she gave herself up to spare the angels a deed they couldn’t come back from. Because, after you’ve fallen, who knows how much farther you can fall?

He feels like destroying something. This cabin, this camp, this body. What’s the point of fighting to live if you’re going to be ground down anyway, in the end? Left for dead in a shallow grave and a coffin nailed half-shut?

Then again, what’s the point of not? You’re going to be crushed in the end either way. Survival is always temporary. So why not live?

“Relikori,” he whispers into the dark.

“What?” Gala asks, half-asleep.

“Relikori,” he repeats, and she wraps her arms around him. “Dethlem. Canibury.” His voice grows faint, the world too.

He doesn’t know how long he’s been asleep when Gala shakes him gently awake.

“It’s time,” she says. “You need to hide somewhere else.” She pauses. “And I need not to know, in case I tell them.”

Outside, perhaps, the sun is rising. A new morning’s coming.

He grasps her arm, holds on. “No, please. Wait. We’ll fight. I’ll fight.”

“We can’t win,” she says.

He knows that’s true. They won’t listen and they won’t stop until they get what they want. Still, he grasps. He holds. “Then hide with me. Run away with me.”

“They’ll just punish someone else. Keep punishing our people until they find me.” She shrugs out of his grasp. “But perhaps, this time, something will change. I have hope.”

“That terrible thing?” Stefan asks.

“Yeah,” Gala says, caressing his hair. “That terrible thing worth having.”

Stefan slaps away her hand. “Your sacrifice will achieve nothing.” He shouts, even though he knows he shouldn’t.

“Probably,” she replies, her voice calm. “And yet,” she says, “does this mean it has no value? That it’s a cheap thing, a trinket capable of saving no one at all?”

Stefan thinks of angels. Of trinkets piled on top of Uncle Pete’s grave, of nonsense words that will never open the gates of heaven. Not magic, not precious. Disposable. Is that right? Yes, he thinks, and no. Perhaps, in the end, their value is in the giving.

Gala is already on the way out of the basement. He hurries after her, grabs her, closes his arms around her, and she lets herself be held. For a moment. For however long they have.

Then, a sound. A rumbling, a turning, and nothing they’ve ever heard before.

“Is it the police?” Stefan asks. He imagines an army at the gates, something out of the wrong timeline, thousands of soldiers with pointy helmets and round, wooden shields, cradling a battering ram. Beside them, maybe, a catapult. “Are they here already?”

“No,” Gala says. “Something else.”

They run outside. The taste of honey is still in Stefan’s mouth. He wonders at it. It’s been days since those stolen spoonfuls, hasn’t it?

The world is covered in a veil of light, no longer night but neither quite morning. There are no shadows, only brightness and the distant echo of a voice they never heard. The earth is wet. Did it rain? When? Stefan finds he cannot look at the sky.

He stares at his arm instead. It’s holding his rifle—did he have it in the basement? He doesn’t remember. It looks wrong—his arm, too, looks wrong holding it. He lets it fall to the ground.

Gala is crying next to him. There are others around them, in a haze. “Now, how will we live?” someone asks, voice cracking.

And then, he sees it, the up up movement, impossible to describe. Everywhere, the angels are ascending. Stefan’s on the ground now, too, and a hand on his forehead—his own hand? A wetness on his cheeks that he recognizes as his own salty tears.

It’s been so long. But it’s okay, he thinks. It’s okay to weep over this.

Something shifts in the air, in the world, the sky, like a clock righting itself. Far away, a hint of trumpets. And a new sound, bell-ringing, mouth-gaping, like a door opening and closing, like something breaking and breaking and breaking.

Still on the ground, Stefan holds out his hand.

Gala takes it and, together, they watch the angels fall into the sky.

 

(Editors’ Note: Natalia Theodoridou is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)

© 2025 Natalia Theodoridou