Backof 36

All the Delaware Angels

By Mei Backof

Content warning: Horror

There was no electricity after the angels came. There was something about how they sang.

They were chickadees when I was born, and for many years after. Thin, gracile figures that stood on tiptoes—blunted, winged arms, and avian heads. They used to sing atop our houses in the mornings, waking every family with their candy-sweet titters. Grandpa told me that was why the church, and even those who didn’t go, called them angels.

One landed at our door one day; a child-sized, naked being, all slate-feathered and a wooly, rounded face. As Grandpa held his toddler-me in his arms, I reached out and tickled its feathers with pudgy-pudding fingers. It had peered at me, curious, black eyes glimmering in bushy grey cheeks. Then, perching on its tiptoes, it stood on one foot and began to sing a honeyed warble.

Until Grandpa told me that story, I could’ve sworn I’d never seen a chickadee angel. Just the ones that came after.

When I was seven, Grandpa found me out in the barbed wire skeleton of the penitentiary. He found me staring where Dagny Fredrickson lay splayed across the fencetop. I don’t remember her but she had been my babysitter, a nice girl in her second year of high school. Never had a bad thing to say, never did a wrong thing, all the things they say about girls who die young. And she was so thin that we could see the barbs sticking through her bare stomach, where the angel had pushed her down upon it.

The angel was different. Gone were the soft white cheeks and rounded faces—this angel was bigger, slate-headed, eyes masked with a black stripe and feathers puffed out like a dog’s fur. Its beak curved cruelly downward, coughing out bits of pink Dagny. It burrowed its head into her and pulled, carrying with it the uncoiled spool of her intestines.

Grandpa thought the girl was dead, until her eye moved in her head and she peered into him, forlorn, like she was asking him one final question. And then she gave a big sigh as the angel gathered something spongy, pink, and pulsing into its beak, and pulled. The angel draped her lungs around her neck, a final decoration—then it stood on one foot and began to sing.

I had been missing for a few hours. The coroner thought Dagny had been on the wire for three.

After we buried her, half of the town stopped calling them angels. Most of the churchgoers started calling them demons, because the chickadees were so gentle and an angel would never do something like what they did to Dagny.

The people who didn’t go to church still called them angels. The word didn’t have the same meaning to them.

A week before I turned fifteen, Grandpa told me, “You rarely see shrikes in Delaware.”

I’d never left the state, but Grandpa told me that in Michigan, the angels were cardinals. Angels always took the form of songbirds.

He told me about shrikes, too. He called them “butcher birds” because they didn’t have strong talons the way eagles and hawks did. Instead, they skewered their prey on sharp things for leverage and simply stripped it away until it was gone. They were some of the only predatory songbirds on Earth—and so we couldn’t say the shrikes weren’t angels.

I remember when the angels took Dagny Frederickson, they had no human hands with which to pull bits of her into their mouths—their feet sported no claws, only blunt human toes. The angels only had their beaks, their necks, and the telephone poles—those vestigial spines of an old world that knew electricity. It seemed so perfect that we no longer had use for them. But the angels, and their appetite, did.

Except they never ate what they killed; that day, when they took Dagny and peeled her guts from inside her, they simply spit them onto the barbed wire in ropey wreathes of red, pink, and grey. It was like they didn’t know what to do with them.

I always wondered what Dagny had done, why she was their first, and no one knew. I asked Grandpa one day, because he was the birdwatcher and I was sure he knew.

“There’s no reason,” he said.

That couldn’t be right, I told him. “You can spend your life asking,” he said, “but you’ll realize that sometimes, things just change for the worse.”

I always thought he could have figured it out, but he died a little after my fifteenth birthday. He’d grown up with them being chickadees. He didn’t know how to live now that they were gone, and after he died, no one knew how to live with me, either. The town looked to the Fredericksons, but they didn’t want to take care of the little girl who had not screamed or run for help while their daughter was disemboweled.

I stayed in Pastor John’s house for a week after Grandpa died. He was the chubby, ginger town pastor with a wife who was much taller than him. I didn’t remember staying with them, but I remember one night being handed a cup of tea and it being really quite good but I didn’t know what flavor it was.

And I didn’t remember what his wife looked like. I always forgot the faces of people the angels took, and they took her a few years after Pastor John tried to drop me on the Fredericksons’ doorstep.

“I’m sorry the angels took Dagny,” I remember saying.

Mr. Frederickson didn’t say anything. Mrs. Frederickson slapped me across the face.

“Don’t call them angels, you fucking brat,” she screamed at me, and Pastor John had hurried me away, cowering like a fat cricket.

“Forgive her,” he’d pleaded, “her grandfather was not a Christian.”

When I didn’t cry, not even when she hit me, I understood I wasn’t quite right anymore. Grandpa was gone, and I remained. No one else would take his place. No one wanted me.

I was the birdwatcher now. I started to watch the angels take people. I started to watch on purpose.

Then there was Miss Ivy, the satin and eclectic lesbian down the street, who made her living by raising chickens. She was probably the prettiest lady in town, though she tried to make herself uglier—wearing the pinkest lipstick she could make, or chopping her hair in uneven sheets. She always wore dressing robes and sandals, even outside. She was one of the few people who still wore old-world factory clothes—no electricity meant there were no factories to make them—and most people didn’t have the patience, or time, to care for such artifacts.

I wasn’t sure if people were right, that Dagny really never had a bad thing to say, but I was sure Ivy didn’t. She always had the nicest praises for everyone who came to her door, even Mrs. Frederickson. She always picked dying animals from the dirt to nurse back to health, always donated any old clothes she had. She was only in her thirties, but she took me under her wing regardless, not minding how frail she was.

When I asked her why the angels took people, I told her I’d been watching for a while, but I wasn’t smart enough to figure it out. She didn’t try to give me an answer—she was spread on her moth-eaten couch, sweating a migraine away, a curl of a smile weakly laced into her pale face.

“Oh, Campbell,” she’d cooed, “you aren’t right.”

She told me she could guess what the angels wanted, but that it was a conversation for when I was older.

The town only gathered at night. Shrikes were diurnal, and in turn, we were not.

Miss Ivy tried keeping me in night school, but she eventually realized I’d never do well there; she pulled me so I could tend to her hens and do chores around the house. She would hold me in her arms when the daytime screaming started, trying to keep me from watching, but I’d always peek. Peek when families cried out for the angels to drop their children, when Werner and his crowds of spurned churchgoers would spear one angel and saw off its wings. When he was alive, Grandpa told me Werner Churchill’d always been rotten, like his one front tooth, black from the smack of an angel wing.

Miss Ivy wasn’t always there to stop me. One day, some of the men bundled an angel into a burlap sack, plucked its feathers, and dressed it in ladies’ clothes—a long-sleeved gown concealing its naked, nubbed arms. They let it wander into the street and told the town to stay inside. Three other angels swooped upon it and wrestled it through a telephone pole, gutting it as it shrieked. Even after they’d torn through the sack, revealing the bloody, gasping head, that same curved, cruel beak they all possessed, the angels kept pulling.

The angels never spoke or cried out or shouted; their necks were birds’ throats and they still squawked like shrikes, but deep and baritone. Yet as the lady-angel was torn apart the shrieking started to sound human after a while, like the sobbing of a strange, genderless person.

Pastor John had been the one to tell people to stop calling them angels, but even he was furious with Werner. “We ought not act in the Devil’s image,” he’d scolded. But if Werner hadn’t listened to him back when the church meant anything, he wouldn’t be listening now.

Ever since Pastor John and his wife let me stay in their house and had given me that delicious tea, I always thought he was decent. It was an opinion Miss Ivy didn’t share—he’d refused to officiate her marriage to a woman from New York many years prior. She’d never told me why. He was the only person I’d ever heard her speak ill of.

Sometimes all of it was too much for Miss Ivy. She would collapse into my arms in one of her migraine fits, panting for breath, wax-white, and tremble for an hour at a time. She would make me hold her hand, sobbing, “It’s horrible, it’s not right, this world, the people…”

It would take a while, but she would calm down when I made her food and tea, but the tea was never as delicious as Pastor John’s. I think, like Grandpa, Miss Ivy wasn’t used to the shrikes. She’d grown up with the chickadees, too.

When I was seventeen, I vowed I’d marry Agnes Guillaume. I swore she was the most pure, unfucked and unfuckable being in Delaware, and I loved unfuckable people who wouldn't fuck me. I liked her Haitian croon, her uneven eyes, the pink between her lips and the inside of her mouth. We were the only two girls in town who looked like boys, but more than that, she was fat. I liked that. It meant that if the angels stuck her on a pole, she wouldn’t bleed out so quickly and maybe I could save her.

A month before I asked Agnes on a date, I told Miss Ivy. It’d crossed my mind to try Ivy herself, but only in passing; she was a nice lady, and she had really wonderful breasts, and she hadn’t had a lover in years. But I felt it would’ve been odd.

She was excited for me when I told her how I liked Agnes’s face. Her laugh. How nice to me she was––until I’d mentioned the part about the poles.

“That’s an awful thing to say,” she said to me. “Hardly even love.”

I didn’t see what she was talking about. “I’m just saying. Skinny people die too fast on the poles, like Dagny did.”

She told me to think a little harder about what I’d said, and to ask if I’m ready to love anyone at all—but especially a girl—if that’s how I speak. I told her the angels could pick me up any day now and, unlike Agnes, I didn’t have as much flesh on me. So I’d better go and ask her.

I asked Agnes if she would go with me to visit the penitentiary. I knew it was where Dagny Frederickson had died, but I always wanted to visit—I was too afraid to go alone. I don’t think Agnes knew that, though. She said yes, and we kissed that same night. I still remember what she’d been wearing—she liked researching old-world subculture. A patchy spiked collar, a studded belt, a black, upcycled jacket, and her belly had felt good when she guided my hands under her shirt.

She told me she liked my nose.

“You’re perfect,” Miss Ivy said, the first time she met Agnes. I didn’t disagree. “I’ve heard so much about the Caribbean. Wonderful place. The angels there are catbirds, aren’t they?”

Agnes had smiled, sheepish. She hated correcting people. I liked her snaggletooth canine. “That’s more Jamaica, but yes. Where my mother’s from in Haiti, the angels are orioles.”

Miss Ivy nodded very, very slowly. Then she tipped her head at me. “Does she know about Dagny?”

“Everyone knows about Dagny,” I said. We were eating one of the roosters.

“Yes, but surely you told her the whole story,” said Miss Ivy. “Everything, even the little parts. I always told my girlfriends my secrets. Girls trust when they know.”

I told her no, because I never liked talking about Dagny Frederickson. That’s why it was always so odd to me whenever Miss Ivy talked about how her mother and father once left her in a cornfield to die after beating her face bloody, and how she had run ten miles home afterward.

“Excuse me,” Agnes murmured quickly, an uncomfortable grin plastered to her face.

As she hurried towards the bathroom below the stairs, I accidentally flicked a piece of white meat onto the tablecloth. Miss Ivy smiled after her, lipstick smeared across her teeth.

“She’s perfect, isn’t she?” she said. “Still so upset by these things. She’s not like you.”

“I’m just used to this story,” I said, realizing immediately that wasn’t what Miss Ivy wanted to hear.

“That’s what I mean, Bell. You should never, ever be used to it. That’s why I don’t want you watching the angels.” She peered at me, “You haven’t been, right?”

I’d never stop watching until I figured out what they wanted, so I said nothing. Miss Ivy continued,

“I’m happy to see people like Agnes, who still feel for others. They’re few and far between nowadays.”

I flattened my head to the table. “Sorry, Miss Ivy.”

An odd look always crossed her face when I apologized. A shine in her eye.

“I worry about you, Campbell.” Miss Ivy raised her napkin to her cheek, but nothing was there. “You don’t watch what you say. Sometimes I wonder what kind of person you are.”

“Isn’t it better I say what I mean than lie?”

Miss Ivy pushed her lip out. “A good person doesn’t have to lie, Bell. All the good things come out of their mouth real easy.”

I hated these talks.

“You should be lucky such a nice girl has taken you in,” she said, “you’ll hurt her. The way you hurt me sometimes.”

“I don’t mean to,” I said, “it’s like you said, Miss Ivy, I’m not right.”

“I know, Bell. And so you must be better.” She kept smiling, “You’re lucky. If you had been as you are, grown up the way I had, you wouldn’t get so many chances. People like my mother and father, they were a lot more commonplace. People who would have beaten you for loving women, for being different.”

“I guess,” I grumbled, “but you also grew up with the chickadees, and I didn’t.”

“Exactly. I grew up with the chickadees.” She raised her glass to her mouth, but didn’t drink. “Oh, Bell. It must be nice to be so fortunate.”

I’d never heard someone disparage the chickadees before. “But the chickadees didn’t kill people. You didn’t have to hide during the day with them.”

Miss Ivy tutted.

“I thought I’d save this talk for later, but it’s clear you need to hear it now.” She adjusted her bathrobe and it fell to expose the top of her breast. “I know why the shrike angels kill, and why the chickadees didn’t.”

I bolted up. Finally. My answer.

“...Why?”

“Because the people they kill deserve it,” she said, “and those who need protecting—people like me, people who other people never loved, who they hurt—we’re safer for it, when all the rest are gone.”

I was disappointed. “But what about Dagny?”

“Bell, you should know better than anyone,” she said, “no one ever gets anything right the first time. But at least they try. No one else does. The chickadees didn’t.” Miss Ivy reclined in her creaking chair, “Christians like Pastor John, they no longer call the angels what they are. That’s because they’re no longer comfortable, now that the vessels of their faith dispense the justice they're afraid of.”

She pointed a polished nail at herself. “The chickadees didn’t stop my family from beating me. But you know what did?”

Miss Ivy had never told me what happened to her family—I just knew they were dead—but she smiled when she said that. Miss Ivy always had this one smile when she knew she was right about something. A mink-like, tiny curve in her lips.

Agnes reemerged from the bathroom. She asked through a rushing mouth if we could retire upstairs. Miss Ivy watched us as we went, smiling, content to leave her question unanswered.

Before I took Agnes’s hand, she had whispered to me, “Oh, the angels would never take her.”

“Do you think the angels like pulling people’s guts out?” I asked Agnes.

I felt Agnes shake her head atop mine. “Campbell, I told you I don’t like talking about guts anymore.”

Agnes’s father had been taken three months before. But he’d never liked our relationship—perhaps that was why, like Miss Ivy had said. The angels, protecting Agnes from him. Even I knew, though, that this wasn’t the time to bring that up.

“Right. Sorry.” Agnes always forgave me, so I continued. “Well, not about guts, then, but do angels like what they do, you think?”

“I…don’t think so. I think it’s just how they are. They’re like animals.”

“But they don’t…” I checked Agnes’s face, and she sighed and nodded to let me know I could keep talking, “…they don’t eat the people they…take.” I was trying not to say gutted.

“I don’t know, Campbell. It is probably not so complicated.”

“Pastor John says they’re demons.”

“Pastor John says many things. He’s a priest, it is probably much easier for him to think that. But everyone knows that the shrikes have nothing to do with God. Even the church men know that, that is why they kill them now. Yes?”

I tried again. “Before Grandpa died he said, sometimes things just change for the worse.”

“I think he is probably right.”

“Really? Are you sure?”

“He was the ornithologist, not me. I don’t know.”

“You’re smarter than me,” I said. “I’m always wrong about everything.”

She sighed. “That is not true. But I think…I think they are just shrikes. They are animals. There is probably no meaning to it, it is just how things are.” She shrugged, “It is the same reason the chickadees didn’t do what the shrikes do now. It’s just not what they do. They are not angels, necessarily, they just…are.”

“I want to know why they took Dagny,” I murmured. “I think about it a lot.”

“I know.” Agnes laid her warm palm against my cheek. I loved when she did that. “But there never needs to be a reason. Sometimes, terrible things happen to good people.”

Agnes’s hair had become a drape over her eyes. I moved it.

“You’re not a bad person, Campbell,” she said.

“Why do you say that?”

“I feel Ivy talks to you like you are,” she said.

“She gives me lots of chances, like you do.”

Agnes straddled me, but not in a fuck-me way. She knew I liked feeling her weight on me. Like nothing could pick me up and drop me.

“It was a little odd,” she said, “when you told me you liked that I was fat.”

My face burned. “Agh, Aggy, I already said sorry!”

She snickered, “No, I mean, of course it’s odd. But I know you just want me to be safe. Odd way of saying it, for sure, but I knew what you meant. You care in your own way. I think that’s okay, even if it is not like other people.”

“You’re too good to me, Ag. I’m not all that nice. I’m fucked up.”

“But you’re trying,” said Agnes. “I don’t think you’re fucked up.”

A thick warmth spread through my head. “Miss Ivy said the angels try their best, too.”

Agnes smiled when I said that, but it was a little crooked. More crooked than normal.

I always led when we took chickens to the nightmarket. Miss Ivy hated going more than a hundred feet outside her house—like she was afraid of being taken by the angels. But she always told me she had no reason to fear them, that she loved the angels dearly.

“Did you hear last night?” I asked. “The Churchill guys caught another one.”

“I’m sure they did.” Miss Ivy was close to my back, trying to keep behind me. “Pastor John’s of no help in stopping them.”

One of the only reasons Miss Ivy told me she hated Pastor John was because he didn’t like that she fucked girls. He’d only ever been kind to me and Agnes, though. “He doesn’t really like when they do that, I don’t think.”

“It would make sense if he did. He probably does. Ever since his wife.”

“Well, he seems like he doesn’t.”

“He should stop them if he cares so much,” said Miss Ivy. “All I see is a weak, blathering shepherd with no control of—ah, Mr. Churchill.”

I wrinkled my nose. Of course he’d be first to barter with us for chickens.

He was a thick mountain, Werner Churchill. He stood two heads taller than either of us, hands permanently clenched in fists. His one black tooth grinned at us.

“Hey Werner,” I greeted, “heard you caught one last night.”

Miss Ivy started to say something, but her voice was so quiet and Werner’s wasn’t. “Got the fucker hanging in the street.”

He pointed, and I followed his sausagey finger to the crescent shape held up by a stake. Another shrike, wings splayed in an open-armed embrace. The top half of the stake was brown. The bottom half was red. “Find it scares ‘em off for a bit. Not long, but a bit. John gives us a real hard time about it, but I don’t see him doing shit.”

I took a step closer, but Miss Ivy’s grip on my arm was ironclad. I was curious why this angel seemed more human than the rest, in the shape of its head—until I realized they’d ripped its curved beak straight out of its face.

“Werner,” I said before I could stop myself, “do the angels only take bad people?”

“Campbell!” Miss Ivy squawked.

“Don’t you go calling them that.” Werner poked that same fat finger into my collarbone. “Angels don’t take little girls and drop them onto telephone poles. You oughtta know that.”

“I don’t know,” I said, “that’s why I’m asking. I know you don’t lie about stuff.”

Miss Ivy’s nails dug into my arm. They loosened when Werner looked her way, and he gave her a popcorn-looking grin.

“Got some balls on him, doesn’t he?” Werner only ever called me “he” after he saw me kiss Agnes in public. I didn’t care enough to correct him. His eyes returned to mine. One of them had always been a little off-center.

“John, the Fredericksons, them lot, they like to talk about how these shrikes are demons. But to be honest, I don’t care what they are. I kill them because they’re fucked up. I kill them ‘cause there ain’t no reason for them to be around. I kill them because they fuck with us.”

He leaned closer. “To be honest, boy, I kill them ‘cause it’s the only thing to do around here.”

“Did you ever kill a chickadee?” I asked.

“Never,” said Werner. “Maybe I should’ve. Maybe there’d be less of them if I had.

“Was a real shame about Dagny, you know…the shrikes just rip up girls and leave them like that, don’t even eat ‘em. And if they ain’t eating them, they oughtta fuck them, right, not let it go to waste. But they don’t.”

His black tooth was like a hole in his face as he handed Miss Ivy the money for two chickens. I watched him walk away, carrying them by their ankles. As one hen continued to shriek in protest, Werner smacked it hard into the side of a fencepost, squashing the noise in a squelchy wallop. As he pulled it up to his lazy eye, I saw blood drip from its beak.

I wondered why he was still walking around, if the angels took all the bad people. I looked to Miss Ivy, but she was counting the bills he’d given her.

The sun oozed over the hills. The dawn shine lit the chicken blood on our hands.

“Do you think it was appropriate to call me a liar to Mr. Churchill?” asked Miss Ivy.

“I didn’t call you a liar,” I grumbled.

“You told him he told the truth. You implied that I don’t.”

“Miss Ivy, I didn’t say that. But you’re wrong about the angels,” I said. “They’d have taken Werner a while ago if you weren’t.”

Miss Ivy didn’t speak. I smacked a horsefly off my thigh,

“What, are you angry with me now?”

“I know what I’m talking about,” Miss Ivy said, “let’s remember. And you don’t. Please don’t tell me that I’m wrong.”

“Grandpa knew what he was talking about. Agnes knows what she’s talking about, too. I asked her. She said the angels take anyone, doesn’t matter how bad they are.”

“Agnes is young and very— ”

“I hope the angels take Werner today,” I said. “I wish they’d taken him yesterday. I wish that angel on the pole had ripped his dick off. I hope he gets chicken bones stuck in his throat. You said the angels are supposed to protect us from bad people, why haven’t they taken him?”

Miss Ivy drew into herself, and she looked so much smaller than me. “Mr. Churchill has only ever paid well for the chickens, and— ”

“Are you scared he’ll beat you or something?”

“What? That’s horrible, I just don’t…I don’t like saying bad things about the townsfolk. We’re all friends.”

“Except Pastor John,” I said.

Miss Ivy bit her lip. She bit it so hard that blood began to slither down her chin. She touched her chicken-gored finger to her lip and smeared it leftward. “Campbell, do you understand how lucky you are? You just can’t help yourself, can you? Fortunate little Bell.”

Miss Ivy paled, brow pulsing above her eye. Her knees buckled and my arms moved and she collapsed into them.

“Mr. Churchill, Pastor John.” Her chin stabbed into my chest, her eyes looking up at me and it was so hard to look back. “They like you and you don’t even try to earn it.”

“I don’t want Werner to like me,” I protested weakly, “or Pastor John, I’m just…I’m not…not right. You said so yourself.”

“If the angels took Mr. Churchill,” said Miss Ivy, “they ought to take you, too.”

“What?”

“Oh, Campbell. You’re like him.” Her eyes were so wide I thought they’d slip clean free of their lids. “They call you a boy for a reason, you hurt people.”

“I never asked them to call me a boy— ”

“You hurt me. You watch the angels take people, and you like it.”

“I watch because I want to know why they do it,” I exploded, still trying to look anywhere but at her, “I want to know why Dagny Frederickson died, you’re not telling me the right answer.”

“No, no. That’s not true. I’ve told you why they kill, and you still watch. You like it, like Mr. Churchill does. Like you always say, you’re just not right.”

Her bloody hand slid up my collar and she placed it on my cheek and it felt cold, sludgy, wet, not like the way Agnes held me. “You liked it, lovie. You did. That’s why Mrs. Frederickson hit you way back then, remember? If I wanted Mr. Churchill to die, I’d be asking for you to die with him, and I don’t want that. I believe in second chances. Especially for you. Because I love you.”

I kept my mouth shut.

“It’s awful to hurt someone who is already so hurt. I feel like glass some days.” She found half her footing but she didn’t move away from me. “It must be nice. You’re like a rock. You’re tough. You don’t realize how easily you break people. What do you say?”

I didn’t want to say sorry. When I didn’t answer, she smashed one palm between us, against her robe, over her breast. Chicken blood seeped into the aged fabric. “Bell, tell me. You’re hurting me.”

“…I’m sorry, Miss Ivy,” I finally uttered. “I’m not right.”

At my words she let out a deep, long sigh, like it had been priming to burst from her bosom. As she, finally, pushed both feet beneath herself and stood upright, there it was—that shine in her eye.

“It’s good to apologize when you’re wrong,” she said. “Humility is good.”

What about Werner? I wanted to ask.

“Your sorries, Campbell, are what make you better than people like Pastor John.”

It was too late—that minky smile had crossed her face again, and she was correct once more.

We were halfway home with our empty chicken cage when we first heard the screams, felt the shadow.

“Why? Why?” Miss Ivy ducked behind me, shaking, “An angel?”

A scream trailed as the human-ish shape soared overhead, framed by those round songbird wings. And then a watery, tinfoil scream, sailing from lungs that should not have made the noise. An infant’s scream.

“It’s got a baby,” I said, and my feet moved.

I had seen the angels take people before, but something about this, about the concept of a baby, a baby being pushed onto a telephone pole, at least Dagny was older than me. Every person I’d seen taken was older than me, or at least, old enough to be a fuck-up, like Miss Ivy had said. Well, not the children, not the children, but I never really, really saw those. But babies haven’t done anything. It was a baby, a baby, a baby, and I forgot to check if Miss Ivy was following me.

I didn’t make noise. The shrike didn’t make noise. I could see in the glimpses of the pink sky, the shrike with its wings wide, dipping and diving in the breeze, its pink human body rigid and I could see the even pinker thing dangling by its diaper from its beak, wailing.

It’s a baby, I thought, it’s a baby, a baby.

I chased the angel for so long, thought maybe I should pick up a stick and throw it, but I couldn’t stop in time, I was afraid of losing them. The fluffy grey shrike flaked and flapped and flapped, and suddenly it was flying upward as we emerged into the market square, approaching a telephone pole.

It could not be my fault again.

I threw myself to the pole. My shoulders screamed as I yanked myself upward and for the first time, I was thankful I was so thin, because I was making it to the top and I would have done anything. I’d throw myself atop the pole because I’d rather the baby land on me and splay me wide upon it like Dagny than have it be my fault again, because Miss Ivy was right. I wasn’t right. I wasn’t right. I watched last time. I was not going to watch this time.

But the angel was fast. It flew up, and up, and up, and the little pink thing dropped.

I watched it fall, watched the little body hit the spike with a squelch, and as blood sprayed beneath my chin and onto my neck I locked eyes with the angel. Little black beads deep in its masked face. Its head turned to the side, watching me as I fell, curious. Not malicious. Not hateful. Not angry. It was like looking in a mirror.

That was when I understood, covered in the infant’s blood—the angels had no reasons.

The back of my head crunched into concrete.

“Campbell? Campbell, can you hear me?”

My eyes were open but they didn’t see. There was so much screaming, the voice was hard to make out and at first, I thought Miss Ivy was there—she was always the one to wake me up—but it was Agnes’s voice.

“Hi Aggy,” I said dully. Blood crept down the back of my neck. It was probably the baby’s. And mine too. Something soft was being pushed into the crown of my skull and it should've hurt but I didn’t feel a thing.

“Sh-sh-sh.” She was crying but she had one of those cries that sounded like laughing. “You’re bleeding a lot, just, just sit still.”

I was trying to talk but the words wouldn’t make it out of my brain. I couldn’t concentrate. There was so much screaming and there was this metal sound, needles and steel clanging between my ears.

Agnes cradled me in her big arms, so gentle that for the first time in a long time, I thought about crying, too. “The Fredericksons found you,” she said. “They called me over to…to help, and they…they told me to tell you they were sorry.”

“The. The baby.”

“No no, stop looking.” She was crying. “Stop looking, don’t look at it.”

A warm palm covered my eyes even though I couldn’t see. Her warm palm. My fingers found the back of her hand, and I held it.

“I fucked…fucked up,” I said.

“You did not, Campbell,” Agnes wept, “you did not.”

“Where…where’s…Fredericksons.”

I heard Agnes’s voice catch in her throat. “…They’re…t-trying to…” it was hard for her to speak, I could tell she was looking at the telephone pole, “…they’re trying to…ch-chase it away.”

Her fingers weren’t fully covering my eyes. My vision was starting to return and it was hard to see—there were so many dark and multicolored blobs of people—I could see two silhouettes at the foot of the pole, wielding two long things, maybe pitchforks. They swiped and swiped and I realized the metal sound was not metal, but the angel screeching in anger. It flapped its wings and kicked with its tiptoe human feet, balancing precariously on the mushed remains. As it did a piece came loose and fell and one of the figures flinched, and began to flail wildly at itself, shrieking.

“Kill it!”

I heard Werner’s voice, louder than all the other screams. “Kill it! Kill it!”

It should have been you, I thought. But instead, I asked, “Whose baby.”

Agnes took a second to answer. She tried to speak but nothing came out. Then she tried again.

“Pastor…Pastor John’s,” she said, “his son.”

When people scream they all reach a certain pitch. I tried to search for Pastor John’s voice but I could only see the Fredericksons batting at the angel, and the sludge of people screaming and crowding and I could not hear anything a father might say, like My son or My baby and there were so many people crying out No, no, no, there was no way to tell which one was Pastor John, which one had lost everything.

As my vision crawled back in hazy clouds, I spotted a familiar pink robe amongst the throng. A petite pair of factory-made sandals. Miss Ivy’s sandals. Positioned away from the crowd, watching. Staring at Pastor John’s mutilated baby.

She didn’t scream. Didn’t cry. Didn’t faint like she always did, had no migraine. And in the daylight, she wasn’t the least bit pale.

Instead, she turned to look at me, and my vision returned in time to see her eyes glint. The way they did when I apologized to her. Her scarlet lips sewed into a tiny smile.

That same, minky smile.

“...Ag.”

Agnes sniffled, “Yes?”

“...I think…” I murmured. But I couldn’t finish. And that was okay. Agnes already knew, because she had always known. And she was right.

As I watched Miss Ivy in all her triumphant minkishness, someone—a man, a woman, I couldn’t tell—moved its legs and it was up close to her and they had a hand out, and it looked like it was gonna hit her or go for her throat and I couldn’t tell and I didn’t want to look and Miss Ivy was still smiling.

Nothing stopped. The angel stood one foot on Pastor John’s baby and began to sing.

Mei Backof is an Isabel Sparks President's Award winner, grant-funded horror freak, and lit mag enthusiast. She has been published or is forthcoming in F(r)iction, Kitchen Table Quarterly, and Blood+Honey, among others. She currently guest-edits for and has been featured in Fish Girl Collective. Find her on Substack (@meibackof)!