Like an Angel

     The first sign was the small black letter that found its way to the palm of her gloved hand. It was tiny, thin, and fragile – like the minute hand of a Rolex – and seemed to peer up at her with an odd sense of innocence. The letter, a tiny black “K”, melted into the finely-knitted fabric of her glove as she stared it down. She was startled to find another letter in her vicinity, an “M”, and watched as it flitted like a snowflake from a cloudless sky and nested at the tip of her finger. She pointed her nose upward to see from where the letters were falling, and saw a large silver bird in the sky.

     The bird itself was blindingly beautiful, with a slender swan-like neck that curved into a dove-like body. The two silver wings that rose on either side beat with majestic power, but also draped and fluttered behind like massive silk flags with glittering white luster. The most noteworthy detail about this creature, though, was the fact that with every downward swoop of its wings, black letters drizzled from places between its feathers and floated downward, toward the earth, spelling out words and phrases in their decent. The display was so magnificent, so impacting, with each slow, massive flap of those wings, she and every other onlooker nearly forgot that these alphabet paper-shreds dissolved upon reaching the truth of the earth beneath it, despite the fact that it was the very ground that they stood upon.

     The girl watched in wonder as different phrases formed and fell. Yet again, as each group flitted together and announced themselves to the on-looking readers, they still met their fate in the skittering dark of the bare earth, and no one remembered what it was that those groupings had so boldly said only a few minutes before; but this wasn’t altogether unexpected, because the reason that they’d forgotten in the first place was that they were so entranced by the next flow of letters that were expelled from the bird’s flight, that the previous displays were already at the back of their minds.

     The bird turned around in a sweeping half-circle, with its wings and words streaming behind it like a liquid revelation. Like an angel, it craned its head downward with its silvery beak pointed at the girl. It was then that she noticed that in its claws (the only remotely ugly part of the creature, as despite the white diamond nails, the ash gray skin was wrinkled and calloused like the tail of a sewer rat) was a fox and a young wolf, both with cheery, doggish grins. She was not the only one to discover the two creatures, as the letters from the bird began to spell out things about the two creatures.

     “They’re being taken to a far better home than they had before.”

     “They’re coming along for the ride; and who wouldn’t on something so beautiful?”

     “They enjoy the view from such vast heights.”

     “Look! They’re even smiling!”

     The letters formed many different suggestions. At each explanation, the readers smiled and relaxed their first impressions of surprise and horror.

     The girl, however, noticed the curved beak of the bird. Knowing that as a sign of a carnivorous creature, and wondered why the others weren’t so suspicious and believed the paper-thin letters so quickly.

     She suddenly found that the “K” that had melted earlier calmly and stealthily built itself back into reality in the palm of her hand, apparently in wake of her indigestion of the bird’s sky messages. She was confused at first, but as the “M” also boldly resurfaced from the death it had suffered, her lips began to slowly curl in understanding.

     Feeling empowered by this knowledge, she grinned and began to chase after the letters before they sifted into the dirt, corralling them to a cupped hand with a readily-available pep and an optimistic smile.

     Once she’d gathered enough, she grimaced and threw the letters in the air as high as she could. The thin black runes fluttered and flickered and begged the attention of the readers, but their performance was weak from inexperience. When they finally slipped into formation they simply spelled, “Save them.” The readers, however, hardly glanced at the low-flying letters. They only cheered as the magnificent bird flew away with the two helpless canines in each diamond-studded claw.