I was seven when I first saw an angel. It was lying in the field, its golden wings spread wide in the tall, green grass. It was broken.

I didn’t mean to see it. I was supposed to be bobbing for apples or riding the Ferris wheel at the county fair. But I’d wandered away from my mother in a fit of wild curiosity. I had a bad habit of daydreaming. At least, that’s what my second-grade teacher called it. My childhood therapist called it ADHD.

Anyway, while my feet led me away from the neon lights of the fun house, my imagination dressed me in a ball gown and sent me spinning around and around in the arms of prince charming. I wish I could say I wasn’t a walking cliché of a child, but little girls are so predictable. You can’t deprive them of their magic.

I twirled in huge helicopter circles that I pretended were graceful strides. All ten of my stubby fingers gripped the soft fabric of my brown sundress which had transformed into a sparkly blue gown. Holding it a little away from my body, I let the wind sweep it away. Any onlooker would have seen my blue underwear with “Wednesday” stamped across the bottom in glitter coated letters. But there was no one to see. I was alone at my very own princess ball. That is, until my toe caught on something protruding out of the grass and I tumbled, landing in an utterly inelegant heap.

My lip quivered—the early onset of a tantrum. I scampered to my feet, brushing half-dried globs of mud from my little legs. I noticed, with an exaggerated wince, several shallow red lines on my knee. I had scraped it in the fall.

Now the tears streamed remorselessly from my brown eyes. I looked around for my mother, for anyone who might bestow pity on me and my pathetic injury. There was no one. No one except the body in the grass.

I gasped when I noticed the pale foot. It was half the length of my arm. Then my eyes traveled up the legs, over the stained cream-colored robe and towards the face that was pressed into the muck.

Long, blonde locks twisted in the breeze, tangling with a patch of weeds by one of the shoulders. Folded arms cradled the head in a manner that obscured any possible glimpse of the face. It looked like a child, weeping into a soft pillow after losing their favorite blankie. Crushed. Heart-broken. Inconsolable.

I knew it was an angel when I saw the wings. The afternoon sun fell at such an angle that it caught the sheen of the sleek white feathers, turning them a brilliant gold, like a marshmallow browned to the perfect gooiness. I had to shield my eyes.

Then a cloud passed over the sky and I noticed with a horror that would haunt me forever afterwards that the wings were no longer attached to the body. Blood rushed from gaping wounds in the angel’s hollowed out shoulder blades.  

My tears stalled in their tracks. I was too startled to notice anything but the sacred mess in front of me. My lips parted. Maybe I screamed, but I don’t think so.

“You’re an angel,” I said.

A dry voice rose from the disheveled body. “You have eyes.”

“W—what?”

The angel sighed. “Anyone with eyes could see what I am.”

I took this for an answer though it didn’t explain a lot. “Why are you crying?”

“Because,” the angel said in a sad, tenor lull. “Even angels cry sometimes.”

I frowned, thinking of the angels on the bathroom wallpaper at my grandmother’s house. They were cute with their broad smiles and chubby baby bodies. None of them cried. Not even when Grandpa went to read the newspaper in there.

“Are you hurt?” I asked.

“Of course I am.”

“Do you need an ambulance?”

The angel emitted a choked sound. Was it a cry or a laugh? “They can’t fix me.”

“Why not?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

My brow furrowed as I studied his ruined back. I shrugged.

The angel let out a heavy exhale. “I’m sad.”

I watched the rivers of blood carve a path between its shoulder blades, pooling at the base of its spine. “Because you’re bleeding?”

“No.”

“Then how come?”

“Because I’m broken.”

I thought about this for a moment. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I, kid. Neither do I.”

I don’t remember what happened next. Presumably, I got scared and ran off to find my mom. Or maybe she came to collect me. Either way, she didn’t see the angel and I didn’t tell her about it. I don’t know why. It just seemed so private. The angel was my little secret, my very own inner demon. The shadow of its memory coiled around my mind. I clung to it, though I couldn’t cast it off even if I wanted to.

More than twenty years later, I can’t stop seeing angels. I go to the grocery store to buy bagged lettuce, and there’s an angel stumbling aimlessly down the produce aisle, dragging its sagging wings behind. I go for a run in the late afternoon, and there’s another one decomposing by the side of the road next to the day’s roadkill. I go out to dinner and see angels slouched over plates of half-eaten chicken alfredo mixed with drops of blood that have fallen like tears from the pale, drooping faces. They’re all broken. Always, broken.

My psychiatrist thinks these constant companions are a result of unresolved feelings about my chronically failing relationships. Or maybe they’re a byproduct of my parent’s divorce. I think she’s full of shit.

I don’t really listen to her anyway. There’s a resident angel sprawled on her overstuffed blue couch. I spend my sessions conversing with it. Most of the time, we completely miss what she is saying.

“How are you doing today, Christy?”

“Fine,” I say. I’m speaking to the angel.

It doesn’t look up.

“Have you seen any angels lately?”

“I’m looking at you, aren’t I?”

“Yes, I suppose you are.”

The angel never moves while we speak, but I always watch it—I’ve decided, somewhat arbitrarily, to call it Gary.

I watch Gary from my seat opposite Dr. Warner. When I first arrive, she tries to coax me onto the couch, but I refuse. It would be rude to sit near the angel. He doesn’t look like he wants company.

Like the first angel, Gary cries a lot. He keeps his face buried in his hands. Sometimes, when I am bored, I imagine what it looks like. I think he’s handsome under all that hair. Gary’s hair is brown.

One of Gary’s wings is still attached. It leans against the back of the couch and I wonder if the ugly blue surface is the only thing keeping it upright. The other wing dangles from his shoulder by a small rope of muscle and tendon. The bone is snapped clean, its sharp fragments greenish in the fluorescent light. His feathers are coated in a rusty colored powder that clumps in places. It used to be blood.

“And how does that make you feel?”

“Sad,” I say, although I am not sure. It is not my pain.

“I understand.”

That makes one of us, I think. I don’t say this out loud. Instead, I nod and smile in a warm gesture that says “Finally! Somebody sees me!” Dr. Warner loves this.

In the evening, I go out for another blind date. This is my third one in two months. Nobody sticks around me for long, especially not after they hear about the angels.

“I like your dress.” Doug, my date, grins at the mint fabric of my baby doll dress.

“Thanks. I like your . . . belt.”

Mentally, I hit myself over the head for this one. The buckle is shaped like an eagle. It reminds me of an angel.

“Oh, this?” He reaches for the belt, readjusting the waistband of his jeans. “It was a gift. I didn’t pick it out.”

“I like it.”

He nods. “Well, should we sit?”

“Yes.” I slide into my side of the booth.

We chat over the menu, trying to ease the initial awkwardness. I say I’m thinking about the shrimp scampi. He says he prefers red meat.

It doesn’t get better from there. He catches me staring at the waiter. I tell him our server is actually an angel. He grins and asks what I’m high on.

“No, I totally get it. It’s cool.” He extends a hand under the table. “Do you have it on you? Think you could slip me some?”

I frown and blame the sighting on antidepressants.

“Oh,” He says. His face says too bad.

That’s when I spill my drink on myself which makes my poor dress nearly transparent. Then he chokes on a piece of steak. In the end, we decide it isn’t going to work out.

I spot another angel as we’re walking to his pick-up. He’s offered to drive me home, likely in the hopes of getting at least something out of this horrible night. And that’s when I see it, the ruinous figure seated on the bench at the edge of the deserted park. It is dark which makes the angel’s wings appear black.

“I’m just over here…” Doug’s voice grows fainter.

“Unhunh.” I mumble.

“Aren’t you coming?”

 I don’t answer. I’m walking away from him.

“Christy?”

“Hunh?”

“The truck is this way.”

“Actually, Doug I think I’m going to walk. It’s so nice out.”

“You’re shaking,” he says.

“Am I? I don’t feel cold.”

“So, you’re really walking?” He sounds incredulous, but I don’t look over. My eyes are glued to the lonely being.

“Yes.”

I step out into the road without checking for cars. In thirty steps, I am standing above the angel who is not an angel at all. The dark splotches I took for wings are nothing but large shadows. He’s only a boy, or maybe a man, though I don’t peg him as ordinary.

“Hello?”

It is the strange man who speaks first. The word comes out muffled. He has his head in his hands.

“Sorry, I thought you were an angel,” I say.

“How come?”

I shrug. “You look broken.”

His long fingers peel away from his face revealing dark eyes and sharp angles. Dark purple circles color the skin under his eyes.

“Are you?” I ask.

He’s incredulous. “An angel?”

“No. Broken. Are you broken?”

His pupils focus on my face, his eyebrows knitting together. Then his face relaxes, and his eyelids flutter shut. “Uh, yah. I guess you could say that.”

I nod.

His eyes snap open. “But I’m not an angel.”

“Neither am I.”

“Have you ever seen one?” He asks.

“Lots.”

He thinks about this. “And I look like them? The angels?”

My eyes bore into his face, searching for the joke. But it doesn’t exist. Not this time. “Well, sort of,” I say. “For a moment I thought—and you looked so—well, the darkness kind of looked like a wing.”

He glances over his shoulder at the shadows pooling behind the bench, just out of the golden circlet of the streetlight. “Hunh. Never had anyone mistake me for an angel before.”

“It happens more than you think. They look a lot like humans.”

“Okay,” he says. “Okay.”

I listen to the crickets. They fill the silence with a comforting chirp. It isn’t glorious or ethereal. It’s just simple, happy, joyous.

A nervous chuckle joins the chirping. The man is shaking a head of shaggy hair. Through the bangs, I study the brightness in his eyes.

“I don’t understand.” The words are shot out on an exhale as if he’s been holding them in. “Like, at all.”

I smile, remembering that very first angel.

“I’m Christy.”