The change came four days ago in the midst of the homily. I realized that the church, the holy doctrines, the religious ramblings I’d once tried so hard to follow were all just parts of a lie created by humans so blind and so flawed they’d mistake a divine being for one of their wretched own.
My neighbors are content to sing useless hymns about rivers, fountains, and rocks, but their devotions are empty.
None of them know anything about devotion! I pushed through the parishioners and made my way to the front of the church. From the wooden pulpit, I told them as much, pounding my fist in anger. Behind closed eyes, they prayed for promotions and the newest kitchen gadget. What could they give with their flawed, human love? I had known what she was from the very beginning. An Angel — one of God’s true messengers — lived at the end of my road. I had touched her feathers with my outstretched fingers, had caught a fever from the mere touch of her rosebud tongue.
I know what they saw: my wrinkled clothes; the dark circles under my eyes, weak and red from so many sleepless nights; hair matted with unwash. Pastor Graves approached me. He covered my hand with his own. I could read the fear in his eyes, saw how the irises bled black into the brown.
“Of whom do you speak?” he asked quietly.
I began to laugh.
I pulled my hand out from under Pastor Graves’s light grip. How sorry I felt for the reverend, his life wasted on such a monstrous bunch of tricks! I left the church then, knowing, even before receiving the letter, that I would never return.
FOR FOURTEEN YEARS, I could only watch from my window each time Pinnacle Lane was transformed for the solstice celebration. From a distance, I watched the neighborhood men set up booths where chocolate truffles, plates of krumkake, and husks of yellow corn would be sold for a nickel; I watched gaggles of girls from the high school’s Key Club arrive with their mothers in tow, toting pies to sell for the benefit of the Veterans Hospital downtown; I watched the musicians gather, bringing mandolins, accordions, creaky violins, xylophones, clarinets, and sitars; I watched the giant bonfire in the school parking lot blaze against the night sky; and I cursed every living thing with feathers.
But that year was going to be different.
Cardigan had been secretly preparing for solstice for weeks. She didn’t even let Rowe or me in on her plan until the day before, when she told Rowe to meet us not at the bottom of the hill as usual, but at the festival itself.
“You’ll see why soon enough!” Cardigan told him, laughing.
I stood in front of my bedroom window, watching the sunset paint glorious shades of orange and purple across the sky while Cardigan brushed my hair. The festivities were already well under way, but I’d insisted on waiting until the sun had set to make my escape. It would already be far earlier than I’d ever been out before — it was risky.
But what a risk to take, I thought, smiling to myself.
It took Cardigan a few hours of persistent nagging to convince me to cut and dye my hair.
“Just think,” Cardigan said, “no one will recognize you.”
“I think the wings will probably give me away,” I said dryly.
“That’s what those are for.” Cardigan pointed to a set of wings in the corner, the very ones Gabe had made when he had hoped to teach me to fly. Seeing those wings made my chest ache. I looked away. I didn’t want to be sad. Not that day.
Cardigan and I suspected Gabe had a new sweetheart. He’d rarely been home in weeks. When I did see him, it seemed he was always on his way out, his hands scrubbed clean, the collar on his shirt freshly pressed, his woodsy smell replaced with the sharp tang of cologne that my mother always pretended to be offended by. He left his dilapidated pickup truck in the driveway. Perhaps his sweetheart was too delicate for those tattered, threadbare seats. Whoever she was.
I wrinkled my nose. “How are those supposed to help?”
“If I wear them, there will be two angels, not one,” Cardigan said defensively. “It’ll throw people off your scent.” She held up the mangled mess with her fingers. “I glued a bunch of feathers to ’em. So, see? No one will think your wings are real. They’ll just assume we’re both wearing costumes. Plus, a lot of people still think the Angel never leaves the house. And that she only wears white. And that she has talons —”
“I don’t have . . . what?”
“Talons,” Cardigan made her finger into a hook. “You know, like an eagle.”
I folded my arms across my chest. “I do not have . . . those.”
Cardigan shrugged. “I know, but there’ve been speculations. Which,” she quickly added, “only further supports what I’ve been saying: no one will know it’s you because you won’t be what they’re expecting.”
I watched nervously as dark strands of my hair fell and gathered at my feet.
“It keeps sticking to your feathers,” Cardigan said, checking to be sure she’d cut each side evenly.
The bleach took the longest, and for a moment we both feared I would end up with orange hair. But when the smell of bleach finally stopped burning my eyes, Cardigan took a step back and whistled. “Jeez, Ava. You are one hot blonde!”
In ancient Gaul the midsummer celebration was called the Feast of Epona, named after the goddess of abundance, sovereignty, and the harvest. She was portrayed as a woman riding a mare. The pagans celebrated solstice with bonfires believed to possess a form of earthly magic, granting maidens insight on their future husbands and banishing spirits and demons. The men of the Hopi tribe dressed in traditional masks to honor the kachinas, the dancing spirits of rain and fertility who were believed to leave the villages at midsummer to visit the dead underground and hold ceremonies on their behalf. In Russia young girls floated their flower garlands down rivers, reading one another’s fortunes by the movement of the flowers on the water. In Sweden neighbors gathered to raise and dance around a huge maypole draped in greenery and flowers. They call it Litha or Vestalia in Rome, Gathering Day in Wales, All Couples’ Day in Greece. It’s Sonnwend, Feill-Sheathain, Thing-Tide, the feast day of John the Baptist.
For the people of Pinnacle Lane, the solstice celebration was a chance to shed their cloaks of modesty and decorum, and replace them with wildflowers woven in their hair. Only during the summer solstice did the old Moss sisters remove their crosses from between their low-hanging breasts and drink themselves silly on great pints of malt liquor. Only during solstice could Pastor Graves forgive himself for his favorite sweet, the Nipples of Venus, feasting on white chocolate from the truffle’s teat. And only during solstice could Rowe Cooper arrive at the festival to find two identical winged girls waiting for him.
“How d-did you . . . ?” Rowe flicked his fingers at the feathers sprouting from his sister’s shoulder blades.
Cardigan hit his hand away. “Don’t. They’re not dry yet. Pretty neato, huh?”
Rowe turned toward me. “I like your hair.”
I smiled.
Rowe glanced from girl to girl. “So, why do you look the same?”
Cardigan put an arm around me. “We’re blending in.”
As we wandered through the festivities, I saw something new or strange at every turn: an ambush of tiny tigers and panda bears, their face paint smeared, their fingers clasping giant sticks of cotton candy; men and women in medieval garb; a small girl in a wheelchair, her legs encased by a shiny fabric mermaid tail. There were Norwegian mormors dressed in their woolen bunads, and Shakespeare’s mule-headed Bottom stumbling from tents of sheer turquoise and white. The crowds of solstice revelers were so strange that, for perhaps the first time ever, I fit in. I grabbed Cardigan and swung her around right there in front of a booth selling wind chimes. Then I laughed out loud because no one even glanced at the angels dancing to the chimes ringing in the growing breeze. Cardigan was right. We blended in beautifully.