Mercy, A Gargoyle Story

by Misty Provencher

  He let out a big sigh, with a smile.

  "Oh, yeah. Me too," he said. He rolled his eyes up over the invisible hurdle we'd cleared together. "But that's not what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about us."

  He said it so sweetly, I scooted closer the edge of my seat, leaning forward to hear every word. I opened my eyes wider, smiled wider, let my heart expand a little, as if I could let it flood across the table and surround him. He was so nervous. He stood up beside the table and slid one hand into his pocket. My breath caught in my throat. I knew what he was about to do. The proposal would be the reward for doing what he wanted me to do. To show me he loved me, despite what he asked me to do.

  "I know you love me, Madeline," he said.

  "I do." I inhaled until I couldn't expand anymore. I wanted to remember this moment forever. The grin twitched off his face. His knuckles bucked against the fabric of his pocket. I laid my hand flat on the cold tabletop, ready.

  "That's why I have to tell you, Maddy...God, this is so hard. I'm just going to say it, okay?” He exhaled a deep breath. “I'm not in love with you."

  My smile froze. I couldn’t process what he was saying. I tried to puzzle out why he wasn't taking my hand and slipping on a ring. I wasn't embarrassed. I didn't even realize I should be, until he frowned. My brain clicked and his words finally gushed in. They splashed inside me, against the back of my eyes. I tipped my head to one side, hoping that what he said would just drain out. Instead, he stood there at the edge of the table and I could feel it. He was already leaving me, like a melting sand castle never meant to stay on my shore. I squinted, trying to see over the tidal waves crashing inside me.

  "What?" I blinked. He shrugged. We were, finally, both embarrassed.

  "I'm sorry. I wanted to. You're hotter than anybody I thought I could ever get, and you're a good person, but I'm just not in love with you. I keep trying to feel it, but I don't. And now that all that stuff has happened, I just can't keep leading you on, because it's never going to go anywhere. It’s not fair to you."

  Blank inside. There was only a hole at the base of me that I drained through. Just as I found the air, his words hit me. He was right: it wasn't fair. The only fair thing I could see at that moment would be for him to stay with me, forever. I’d given up so much; he could give me a little. But there wasn't enough left inside me to say it. He began to talk again, each word quivering, like he was standing on the end of a diving board.

  "It's my fault, okay?" he said. He was desperate, maybe frustrated, or even angry, I couldn't tell. Didn't care. "I like you, but I don't love you, and I'm really sorry it happened like this. It's all my fault."

  He had an almost-grin, as if calling our relationship 'his fault' erased the last six months. Like his fault would leave me any less ruined. He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out the key to my house. I'd given it to him the week before, and had gone to bed every night since, fantasizing that he'd use it, and I’d wake up with him beside me. But he'd never once used my key.

  Not until that moment.

  He slid it to me, with just one finger, over the tabletop. He finally used it to ruin my life.

  "Okay, well, I gotta go," he said with another shrug. He put both hands in his pockets and slunk out the door.

  Leaning off the lip of the building now, watching his window, I squint at his apartment window. The ash-rain falls on my shriveled heart. Maybe I should've fought harder for him. Maybe I should’ve fought harder against him.

  Ayla's knock is at the door and he goes to it, glancing through the peephole. He immediately pulls open the door and Ayla's face is stoic as she steps inside.

  My heart rolls in my stomach, like an extinguished flame floating in gasoline. I don't want to see her there. Not being the same fool I was. I spread my wings up around my head, catching their conversation in the bowl.

  "Are you all unpacked?" she asks. He nods. They stand in his apartment as easily as if they are a roof and a basement, like two ends of bread or a thumb and baby finger. I was always the glue between them, and now, they are standing uncomfortably close to one another, as if they don't even remember how to be acquaintances anymore.

  Ayla rests her hand on the back of his couch.

  "You want a drink?" he asks.

  "Sure," she says. The Boy goes and pulls a bottle from his fridge and splashes cola into red plastic cups.

  "Hey, um, you still have to show me around," he says, handing her a cup. He grazes her fingers, but my wings stiffen as he tilts his head and gives her an awkward grin.

  Ayla shuffles her feet. She takes a drink, blocking his gaze.

  "You want to sit down?" he asks. She moves in a way I’ve never seen her move, like a marionette that's been glued together at the joints. She makes it to the edge of his couch cushion. He sits all the way at the other end, arms in his lap, gripping the plastic cup. He looks up and gives her an awkward grin, but the grin isn’t the same one that always made me feel like I was full of ping-pong balls. He's not doing that...yet.

  Mighty Ayla, my best friend that gave me advice about how to handle The Boy, this exact one, is frozen. Mighty Ayla, her opinion always wrapped in of-course-you-will, is floundering at the other end of the couch, plucking at her shirt.

  "He's rushing it," she'd once snapped at me in the coffee shop. That was when The Boy had told me that he wanted to do it with me and Ayla groaned when I had confided in her. "Just don't forget, Maddy...we call the shots, not them! We own the magic! If you do it right, you can work him like a Muppet! And if he's crazy about you, he'll do whatever it takes to stay with you. And that means waiting, too."

  Ayla didn't take garbage from any of the boys she dated. I never met any of them, but I knew she wasn't lying, just by the way she treated the boys at the coffee shop. They were always trying to pull up chairs and talk to us. Ayla, with her fleshy hips and flat chest, was the Pied Piper of coffee shop boys. But if we were talking about something serious, she'd just as soon tell them to git.

  Now, peering into The Boy's apartment window, I wonder how Ayla could handle every boy in the coffee shop, but seem so squirmy with this boy, who she already knows. She takes another drink and glances across the couch at him. He's staring in his cup.

  "So, you're all set to jump into grocery store management?" she asks with an uncomfortable laugh.

  "Sure" He shrugs. "It's just stocking shelves at night. It's not really managing. More like keeping track."

  "Mmm." She nods, sips.

  "What about you? Did you figure out where you're going yet? Is what's-her-name kicking you out right on your birthday?"

  Ayla frowns. She rolls her cup between her palms. "Selene. Her name's Selene. I don't know what she’s planning. It doesn't matter. I've still got time."

  "Not much," he says. "A couple weeks? Your step mom..."

  "Foster mom."

  "She’s pretty cold, if you ask me. But I was thinking about it all today too, and I have an idea for you."

  "Oh yeah? You've got an opening for a stock girl?"

  "No, but if you need a place to crash...” He jostles his cup in a little wave over head, indicating his apartment. Some of the liquid splashes over the edge and runs down the side, leaving a wet ring on his jeans. Ayla doesn't notice. She's too busy gaping.

  "Here?" she asks. "With you? That'd be kind of weird."

  "What'd be so weird about it?" he asks, shifting on the end cushion. I can tell he feels weird now too. He moves his legs even tighter together and holds his cup with both hands, over his crotch. Frowns. "We'd just be roommates."

  "You only have one bedroom, Adam."

  "You could always crash on the couch," he says. Ayla narrows her eyes a little. He gives her another shrug. "Or I could."

  "Why are you even offering?"

  He groans so quietly, I'm not sure she heard it, even though I do. I lean a little further toward the window, trying to scoop up every word.

  "I think it's the same answer to why are we both here?" he s
ays.

  Ayla's face screws up into a tight knot and she jumps off his couch. This is finally the Mighty Ayla, taking a stand. The only best friend that I ever had. She seems to grow a steel shell right there, in the middle of his living room. I've seen her do it before. She's going to let him have it.

  "I only came over here because you asked me. Why did you even move here?"

  He rolls his hand over his hair, suddenly flustered.

  "I don't know," he says. "But you knew her and I knew her and I think we both feel…I don’t know…bad. But when you’re around, I don’t feel it so much. Being able to lie beside you helps take it away."

  "That’s what I’ve been to you? A mercy fuck? Somebody to get you over Madeline?"

  My wings shudder as her words slam into them. I stagger backward and struggle to keep my wings aloft. My only friend and The Boy. They were each separate things that belonged to me, but now they are one thing, and belong to each other.

  I want to hate them. The emotion would've been so easy to conjure when I was in my flesh, but now, bringing up the feeling is like trying to lift the Earth. The hatred snuffs itself out when it reaches the pitch of anguish, and then it sinks, like a ship with a hole ripped in the side, down into the deep pit of me. It rests at my base, it’s anchor dragging on my sorrow.

  What good is it? They are paired now, an exotic species of life, something that I’ve left behind. The thought stings inside me, the same way the water stung my eyes when I first jumped.

  I press my wings in a higher scoop. I still want to hear how it happened. Why.

  "Don't be stupid," he frowns.

  "You tell me then. What am I to you?"

  "I didn't want it to happen like that...we were so...I don't know. Everything just was just so fucked up. I liked it and everything, but we should have waited."

  I see Mighty Ayla crumble then, staring into the bottom of her cup. "I didn't want to wait."

  "Me neither, I mean, obviously, but it shouldn't have happened like that. It was bad enough that she never knew about us before. She was my girlfriend...” His voice pleads with her.

  "Then why didn't you act like it?" she says. Her voice is soft, but her words sink into him. His tongue trembles with an excuse so empty it stays behind his teeth. I can’t breathe.

  "It can't ever happen like that again," he says.

  "It won't," she moves closer, reaches out, but only brushes his arm as he stands up with a frown. He rattles his empty red plastic glass and goes to the fridge for more.

  "I just wasn’t sure," he mumbles. “I’d have to be sure.”

  ***

  Sure.

  I want his word to mean something specific, but it has a hundred different petals that I pluck away, one at a time, in my mind. Sure that he's in love with her? Sure that he can stop her from killing herself? Sure that another Bean won't happen? Sure that one will?

  Sure would have been as beautiful as breath is to me now.

  Ayla says she has to go, it's getting late, but she looks like she doesn't want to leave.

  He says okay, that he'll catch up with her tomorrow, but he frowns when she slips out the door.

  She eventually washes out onto the street and drifts back to the entrance below. I dig my talons into the curled ledge and watch her walk home, her shoulders slouched, her feet shuffling and scattering pebbles as she crosses the street. The Mighty Ayla has disappeared. I angle from my ledge, watching until she disappears inside. It's like she's trailing sadness, a miserable jelly of a mist, behind her.

  I turn my head back to The Boy's window. He leaves a similar but different mist, a vapor of misery with a speckling of frustration. I watch him spread it through his apartment as he does meaningless things, with the frown still on his face. He washes the cups they used, paces, rubs his head as if he'd rather it just explode, slumps down in front of the TV, and changes channel after channel after channel without really seeing anything on the screen.

  They are both so miserable and there are few things in life that can produce that kind of misery. I remember. Death can. And love can.

  I come off the ledge. My wings sink back against my spine. The two that once belonged to me, belong to each other now. I glance back to The Boy's window, darkened with only the glow of the TV shining on his face. The unfinished painting of a ghost.

  I pace over the roof and kick the jumbled tarp. I don't even care if the sun kills me today. I return to the ledge and lean from it, but The Boy’s apartment is dark now. Curling my wings up once more, I can hear him breathing, trying to fall off to sleep.

  Brick crumbles away beneath my claws. The tiny sound of him is cut short by the squeak of the door, behind me.

  Selene stands only feet away; her widening eyes fix on me, as I turn on the ledge to face her. Her jaw drops at the same time my wings do.

  I am on the ledge, moving. She’s only seen me as a statue before, a suspicion. But she’s come prepared for the fear that rolls off her in waves.

  Her knuckles whiten around a pipe. The chips in Trickle's back flash across my mind, as I dig my claws into the brick and hear the grit rain down.

  My options pour through my mind: I could drop off the side of the building. I could cling to the side and scramble down the brick until I'm far enough away or flat enough to be camouflaged. I could jump at her and maybe scare her away. I could do any of those things, but instead, my claws dig in deeper. All I do is hang on.

  Selene charges straight at me, heaving the gray metal into the air with her deflated arms. Her feet clap against the tarred roof.

  My claws drill holes in the brick. Her thin hair flutters out behind her like ragged feathers; her face is suddenly stretched tight. She screams as I lean in from the ledge, toward her pipe, ready to take her beating. But at the last second, just as the pipe connects with my skin, with everything I have in me, I roar.

  ***

  The roar bursts from me with broken wings. It is its own mad bird, pounding dark and violent wings against the air to be free. It breaks from me with such force that it blasts Selene’s hair back from her face. Her hair blows straight back in long, molting strings. Whole locks of it come free from her skull, blowing away across the rooftop.

  The roar empties from my gut.

  I close my mouth.

  Selene stands only feet from me, the pipe trailing from her hand now, her scalp a patchy field. Her skin is a sour white. It is the color a dying body wears. As we stare at one another, I realize the cancer she's been hiding, and her eyes draw wide with horror as she watches her secret leak away. The pipe falls from her grip with a pitifully hollow *pank*.

  "Have you come for me?" she whispers. Her eyes waver a glance in Trickle's direction. "Or have you come to assist the other beast?"

  We are both statues for a moment. When she continues, her voice is deadly quiet.

  "If you are coming for me, know that I have already defeated that demon,” she warns, motioning toward Trickle’s back. “My faith turned him to stone. If I've done it to one, I assure you, I can do it to you too. But if you've come for one of my children, don't you dare be deceived by this weakened body. The faith in my heart has never been stronger. I will protect every soul in my care and I will prevail. So tell me which fight you’ve come for, demon."

  I stare at her, too shocked to answer.

  "Tell me!" Her shout clatters in the silence, but it doesn't jar one word from my mouth. Maybe she is the one Trickle says he ‘slipped away from’. Maybe he tried to save her, but she beat him instead. She speaks of faith, but doesn’t recognize that an ugly messenger can deliver it.

  The sallow skin on her sunken cheeks grows even paler, until it nearly glows in the moonlight. I watch the fear climb up in her eyes. I watch her try to wash it away with hopeless shadows.

  "Not a child," her voice quivers, although she tries to anchor it between tight lips. "I will fight you...do you understand me? With everything...everything I have. Do you hear me, demon? I will fight. You will not have the
m...not even the smallest one of them."

  She raises her hands to the sky and prays aloud for God to smite me. To vanquish me as her enemy. Her prayers snare me in the grief of being misunderstood. It weighs me down and slows my heartbeat. The ash in my belly tumbles over my heart. She continues with her prayers, and when she is finished, I am stooped beneath the weight of her immense fright. She's not made me concrete, but I am still so exhausted that I hold myself as still as a statue, so that the Selene will stop smothering me with her fear.

  "You were warned, demon," she says. And she reaches for the pipe again.

  ***

  She doesn't charge at me like she did before. Like I am expecting her to. Instead, she swings the pipe like a fan blade, circling it around her head. She lets it go three-quarters of the way around and the pipe makes a low whistle in the air, too heavy to spin, but heavy enough. It rushes past me and falls into the pit between the buildings, plummeting to the ground.

  Selene’s eyes grow wide. I don't know if she's realizing that she's unarmed or if she's terrified about what or who that pipe might hit. A quick blink to the side, and I can see that the pipe will only gash the street, leaving another pothole.

  The scuttle of feet racing up the stairs echoes out onto the roof. It is a child, I can tell by the gait. Selene hears it too and hobbles toward the door. Her face is full of grim lines, stretched in agony and determination as she positions herself to block and protect the child from me.

  From me.

  I leap away from the rooftop, throwing myself toward the other building, hoping I will manage to conjure flight from a random miracle, but the ground comes up fast. I see it like a tunnel and the pavement is a dead end that I hit at full speed.

  My body sends a crack snaking across the pavement on impact, and I am curled on my side, momentarily paralyzed. One wing is wrenched beneath me. I can feel my body, but not see my own appendages, flattened against the concrete. A trailer truck turns the corner and I peel my wing from beneath me. The front wheels, enormous and black, rumble toward me, followed by sixteen more that promise to grind me to dust. The headlights bounce toward me, like a dog's nose, searching the ground for my scent. I fold my wings over me, enclosing me in an ugly gray pod. I close my eyes and wait, the ground shaking beneath me. The truck turns one street short.