“Yeah, it really is smelly.” Alena wrinkled her nose.
“Aside from that, I think we’ve been excellently successful. We got away, after all.”
“They didn’t send us home, though, like we wanted.”
Laura gazed philosophically at a fly-splat on the windscreen. “Maybe this is the next best thing.”
“I suppose we might have more freedom. Listen, we’re not going to prank Nana.”
“Of course not. I was thinking we might go easy on the teachers at first, too—until we know if we want to get away.”
Alena nodded. “Sounds reasonable. I read up a bit about Rotorua when they gave me my phone back…”
“Oh yeah? What did you find out?”
“Super touristy. We can totally have a hot night on the town.”
“Is that all? Really?” Laura rolled her eyes.
“It’s a weird place. There’s like, geysers and stuff, and sometimes they go off in weird places. Like under houses.”
“Huh. Who needs to play pranks when the earth itself is pranking you?” Laura paused for a moment as they swept by a last view of the harbour, guarded by the peaks of Rangitoto. “I thought the oddest thing was how she called us toxic.”
Alena jabbed her in the ribs. “Don’t let it get to you. If toxic is what it takes to get out of there…I’m good with that. We did what we had to do.”
“I still think the chicken was the perfect finish,” said Laura, and both burst into peals of laughter.
The End
About the Author
Grace Bridges is a geyser hunter, backyard chicken keeper, editor and translator, and Kiwi. The current president of writers' organisation SpecFicNZ, she is often found poking around geothermal sites or under a pile of rescued kittens. She is a multiple nominee and three-time winner of the Sir Julius Vogel Award from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Association of New Zealand, an editor and mentor for Young NZ Writers, and has edited dozens of published books. Her own novels include Earthcore, Irish cyberpunk, and Classics in Space. Both her works in this collection are part of the Earthcore urban fantasy series based in New Zealand. More information and free stories at www.gracebridges.kiwi.
Things with Wings
Jane Lebak
Things with Wings
Jane Lebak
Sekkiel, the angel, prayed while watching the chickens.
Raviniel made it beautiful here. Sekkiel’s friend had picked a cliffside grotto for his “heavenly mansion,” and it had become a bird sanctuary. Water tumbled from the cliff and through Sekkiel, who let the water and the prayers flow through him. Please bless his work while he’s still a guardian angel, and thank you for this chance to help him.
For the past thirty-five years, Sekkiel had spent three mornings a week with Raviniel’s swans, a heron standing long-legged at the shore, and his sparrows. Peacocks, so many peacocks. The trees bore a raiment of birds more colorful than any bouquet, and they’d parceled off the environment into “pocket zones” so each bird felt comfortable. Love and feathers abounded.
The chickens, though: those required tending, and the one thing a guardian angel didn’t have was time to tend them. Not a problem. Only an hour after Raviniel received his assignment, still dazzled by the nascent soul of his human charge (a baby!, a brand new baby, her soul brilliant and clean), Sekkiel had approached with a calendar and a list of volunteers. The bird sanctuary would thrive. The chickens would be fed.
“The day your human charge enters Heaven,” Sekkiel promised, “you’ll present her before the Father, and then she can visit your home.”
Eyes round, heart overfull, dreaming about two creations he loved meeting and adoring one another, Raviniel had gushed, “She’ll love that! Thank you.”
For thirty-five years, angels had tended Raviniel’s grotto, or sometimes tended Raviniel’s human charge so the exhausted guardian could pray and recharge here instead. Raviniel loved his charge, but she didn’t even love birds. His feathers dulled whenever he talked about that, because he’d wanted to go birding with her. Nowadays, his charge didn’t even listen to the birds chattering to the rising sun. She woke, joyless, and trudged off to her job, still joyless. Raviniel’s assignment wasn’t joyless, but it was a lot of drudgery.
Sekkiel’s vocation, by contrast, had intense periods of fighting followed by stretches of down-time. He worked in the angelic ministerial corps, otherwise known as “the assignment pool.” When a deployed angel needed help, Sekkiel was one of thousands who might answer. With his shift due to start, he detangled himself from his prayers, stepped out of the waterfall, and escorted Raviniel’s chickens back to their coop.
They didn’t need to be cooped. They had no predators, and they couldn’t wander out of Heaven. Still, it turned out that after thousands of years of domestication, chickens preferred things a certain way, so Raviniel had provided them a coop and a run.
A hen was broody and irritated, and Sekkiel discovered she’d laid one solitary egg. He picked it up, then gave her the oval stone they used as a stand-in. They always presented eggs before God.
Settling the broody hen took the full five minutes, and then Sekkiel felt a sharp call in his heart: danger and need. He was getting paged. He still had the egg.
An angel needed help right now, though, so he opened a pocket dimension. Into that little reality, a very tiny universe, he tucked the egg. Then he flashed across the divide to Earth to answer the call.
Sekkiel landed in the middle of a demonic firefight—spiritual fire, that is, over a human soul in the teeth of a struggle. He armored his heart with God’s strength and drew his sword from a different pocket dimension. With his blade incandescent and his heart burning, Sekkiel clashed with the demons trying to fill a human soul with discontentment. He fought them off, but he didn’t even have a chance to put his sword back into storage before another desperate call came to his heart: a human soul about to lose hope.
After answering nine different calls, tired but thrilled to be serving God by protecting his creatures, Sekkiel got a respite. He could take this chance to present the egg at God’s throne.
He reached into his pocket dimension, but the egg was gone.
Ruthann forced a bright smile for her kindergarteners. “Everyone, this is an exciting day! Do you know what arrived?”
The students wiggled in place, three kids shooting up their hands while two others blurted out, “The chicks!”
Ruthann fought a sigh. “No calling out during circle time. Anya, do you have an answer?”
“The eggs.” Anya sat tall with her hands folded in her lap. “The chicks will be inside the eggs.”
“That’s exactly right.” Ruthann made eye contact with all the students every day, her smile broad, her voice pitched up. It exhausted her to spend eight hours in high gear keeping a group of five-year-olds engaged. She was only thirty-five and lately starting to feel dread about teaching until retirement. The chick hatching experiment was usually a highlight, but this year, even the chicks felt uninspiring.
Growing up, Ruthann had always had a soft spot for “things with wings.” Flight seemed to be like freedom, and feathers were the magic that got you into the sky. A feathered dragon, a Pegasus, even an angel—but she’d given up on all the fantasies. If angels existed, they probably didn’t even have feathers, and why would they care about her?
She faked excitement because the kids deserved better than a lackluster teacher. “This morning, we’re going to double-check the incubator to make sure it’s working, and we’re going to set the eggs inside.”
The kids loved this part. Ruthann and her assistant teacher plus two parent helpers worked with the kids (with very, very careful supervision) to arrange the incubator and open the box with their eggs.
She’d ordered six eggs, and in the box were six perfect eggs—plus one broken egg.
“Eew!” one of the boys shouted. “That’s gross! Can I hold it?”
A girl sniffled. “That’s so sad. If you b
reak an egg, you killed a chick!”
“That’s true. But we still have six eggs.” Ruthann fought fury that the seller hadn’t removed the broken egg. Sure, they’d made it right by adding a replacement, but you don’t just…send the broken egg too. Talk about unfair to the little kids.
Six healthy eggs went into the incubator. They were all different breeds of chicken egg, blue, or speckled, or gold, or brown, and one larger than the others. Tomorrow the students would talk about what made chickens lay different color eggs. She couldn’t tell what kind of egg the broken one was. What jerks, traumatizing little kids.
Ruthann kept composing a nasty letter in her head, especially when one of the kids looked at the incubating eggs with a trembling lip. “There could have been seven.”
She’d only ordered six. Ruthann said, “We talked about how eggs are delicate. The shell is so thin.”
Not the object lesson you’d hope for, but still.
The student wrung his hands. “Didn’t the farmers know they had to be careful?”
Ruthann sighed. “Sometimes you’re very careful, but things still break.” Like your hopes and dreams. Although that wasn’t fair—she had dreamed of teaching kindergarten and owning a rural home with a little property. She had it all. Sometimes she wanted more, but how ungrateful was that?
The student said, “Why would God make eggs so fragile?”
Ruthann said, “Maybe they’re fragile so we always know to be careful about other things that can break, like other people’s feelings.”
As soon as she spoke, she realized she couldn’t write that nasty letter. She’d feel just as discontented afterward, and the egg would be just as broken.
At the end of the school day, Ruthann checked again on the incubator. “Good night, sweet chicks. Even if you’re still only eggs, you’re cute as you are.”
Sekkiel spent twelve continuous hours retracing his steps across the Earth and praying, both at the same time. Father God, please reveal what is hidden. At every place, though, he found no evidence of the egg.
Zynna, friend and fellow volunteer, followed Sekkiel through every spot, praying and giving him her calm whenever the frustration built. For reasons known only to Himself, God wasn’t telling Sekkiel where to find the egg. Nor even why it had vanished from the pocket dimension.
You know perfectly well where it went, so why won’t you tell me? Sekkiel prayed.
Although Zynna couldn’t hear his prayer, she let her calm seep into his heart. “We’ve been through every location twice. Let’s regroup and come up with another plan.”
He tightened his wings. “I have a plan. Find the egg.”
Zynna touched her wingtips to his and lowered her voice. “If we do this a third time, demons will realize we’re looking for something. They’re going to search.”
Sekkiel clenched his jaw. What would a demon put in the egg? What could they do to a developing chick? “We can’t let that happen. It’s probably not exactly an earthly creature anymore. Not if it germinated in Heaven.”
That’s why they brought the eggs before God. Let God handle them.
Zynna took his hand to transport him to a place of solitude. They reappeared on a pumice raft, ocean dominating their vision all around.
Zynna tucked up her legs. “You never touched the egg’s pocket dimension after putting the egg into it. You’re sure you put the egg fully inside before sealing it. Therefore I want to try an experiment. Can you create a pocket and put me into it?”
Sekkiel shrugged. “Of course, but do you think I lost it through bad technique? I’ve never lost anything before.”
Zynna shook her head. “It’s worth trying, if only to change my perspective.”
Sekkiel re-opened the same miniature universe. He didn’t push Zynna in the way he had the egg, but after she flowed inside, he sealed the opening. Her sensation vanished. After a minute, he reached into the pocket dimension, and she popped out. “It was very quiet.” She flexed her wings. “I may start making those for myself, just for a private retreat space.”
Sekkiel chuckled. “That’s what your home in Heaven is for.”
“I felt focused inside it. Regardless, the dimension itself is solid, so your setup was fine.” She tightened her bronze-toned wings to her back as she thought. “Do it again, but this time, in between sealing me in and letting me out, open another dimension and take something out of it, like you did with your sword.”
Sekkiel was used to maintaining several pocket dimensions at once, but he opened it up, and in she went. His sword’s pocket was two thousand years old, and the sword was the first thing he pulled out and put back. Next he opened the pocket for whichever book he was reading, and finally repeated the process with his musical instrument.
Before he was done, Zynna’s energy reappeared in the world, and he turned to find a very wide-eyed angel. “You never stored a living thing in a pocket, did you?” When he shook his head, she said, “Reaching in and out of the other pockets made mine less stable. I felt you accessing them. The third time, the barrier was so thin that I burst out.”
Sekkiel’s hand clenched on his clarinet. “Are you saying the egg—?”
“—popped out somewhere in space and time. I ended up back where I wanted to be.” Zynna raised her wings and looked at the ground. “I can’t imagine where an egg would want to be.”
Ruthann’s students dutifully turned the eggs and candled them every day for two weeks. They observed how the chicks developed, and they made plans for the brooder box. On weekends, Ruthann came to the classroom herself to take care of them, but on school days, the students helped change the water and monitor the temperature. They even suggested names for her to write on the shells in blue crayon: Dixie, Shelly, Chris P., Avery, Nugget, and Bill.
One Wednesday, Ruthann turned on the classroom lights to find the first egg cracking. By lunchtime, no instruction whatsoever was taking place because all fifteen students wanted to watch the chicks hatch, and whenever an egg moved, the students all shouted. I hope chicks are hard of hearing, Ruthann prayed. She didn’t pray often, but she wasn’t sure who else to talk to about hatching chicks.
She surprised herself by enjoying hatching day. The chicks emerged wet and ugly, gangly, wobbly. They staggered around, stepping on their own shells without understanding why the ground wasn’t steady. None of the kids wanted to go home because Bill still hadn’t hatched. Ruthann promised she would stay and take video.
Bill hatched at three thirty, clear-eyed and bigger than the others. The chick strutted, then stared right into Ruthann’s eyes.
“Hello, sweetie.” She rested her chin on her hands. “It’s a big world, and now you’re here.”
Bill inspected the other chicks, then nudged one with its head.
“You’re taking charge.” She chuckled. “I hope you enjoy it here. Once you’re dry, you’ll all go in the brooder box. Tomorrow, you’ll get to meet your fan club.”
Sekkiel hadn’t moved from before God’s throne for two hours. Kneeling, hands crossed over his chest, wings tight to his back, he prayed with his eyes closed and his heart broken. He should have an egg in his hands. Instead, his hands were empty.
The Holy Spirit washed through him, but Sekkiel couldn’t relax. Relax, and he’d break down.
Just this morning, Raviniel had visited the sanctuary, feathers dull. “I got a friend to stand in for me,” he’d murmured, not noticing Sekkiel’s startled fear. “It’s been difficult lately. Her life feels so empty to her.”
Sekkiel had managed to say, “Is she resisting grace?”
Raviniel only shook his head. “Just resisting joy.”
Sekkiel couldn’t tell him what he ought to. Couldn’t tell his already-downtrodden friend that one of the eggs was loose in the world, lost, unpresented to God. Couldn’t say it was his own fault. Not when Raviniel already had so many worries about his joyless human charge.
It’s only an egg, Sekkiel insisted to the Holy Spirit, as if the Holy Spirit n
eeded to know. There are eggs all over the world.
It’s just that he’d wanted to do a good job. Losing something like that—it wasn’t merely unprofessional. It was careless in a way God’s creatures didn’t deserve.
Sekkiel had done everything he could to track where the egg went. He’d put plants into the dimensional pocket to see where they’d go. He’d tried with insects. When the pocket buckled, they always returned where they belonged. But the egg belonged in Heaven to be presented to God, and the egg hadn’t come back.
Why won’t you tell me? Sekkiel finally asked.
The Holy Spirit swirled through Sekkiel again, moving against the tight parts in his soul, the anxiety about one lonely egg jostled from the nest, rolling through the spiritual corridors of the world.
You could have warned me, Sekkiel prayed. I’d never have tucked it in there.
The Holy Spirit poured reassurance into his heart, but Sekkiel recoiled.
The Holy Spirit pushed forth a question: why was he so insistent on feeling terrible? Was he not sure of his own innocence? Did he believe God would allow evil to come from his well-intentioned mistake?
Raviniel counted on me. Sekkiel closed his eyes. I failed.
The Holy Spirit replied, But I didn’t.
Ruthann turned on the classroom lights to find all six week-old chicks out of their brooder and staring directly at her from the carpet.
At the head of the fluffy flock, Bill regarded her with an intent focus. It wasn’t exactly creepy, but in sixteen years, she’d never encountered a chick who paid attention to the humans in the room. Usually the chicks pecked around and put up with being handled.
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