Iterations and other stories (collection)

I have a confession, he said. I lied when I said Carlo had turned me down; I lie a lot. He did take the deal, but he, too, tried to break it.

“And so you let him fall?” The words were forced out; her lungs were raw.

He didn’t fall, said the voice. He jumped. He thought if he jumped, then the deal would be broken. Oh, yes, he would die, but his soul would go up, not down. A pause. The irony was too much for me to resist: for one who had come so close to touching the heavens to now not even be able to stand—a perfect living hell.

“No,” said Angela, the words a hoarse whisper. “No, please—not that. Don’t make me fall.”

Of course not, splashed the voice. Of course not.

Angela breathed a sigh of relief.

For you, something different.

She was hit by an explosion of hot air, like the exhalation of a blast furnace, air so hot that sweat evaporated from her skin as soon as it beaded up. The wind slapped her like an open-palmed hand, pushing her down, down, down. Its impact had slammed her wings against her body, had flattened her little pink skirt against her thighs, had, she was sure, plastered her bat-ears flat against her skull once more. She tried to unfurl the wings, spreading her arms, splaying her protracted fingers, fingers as long as her legs. But the wind continued to blow, hot as hell, and she found herself tumbling, head over heels. Instinct took over, and instead of trying to extend her arms, she drew them in now to protect her face, her torso. Soon she was only a few meters above the ground, a ball of tightly wound limbs being pushed laterally through the air.

No, no. She had to fight her instincts. It was like being on the high wire. Do what your eyes tell you to do, and you’ll fall for sure; the human mind wasn’t made for such heights, such perspectives. She forced her arms to unfurl, forced the wings to try once more to catch the air, and—

Such pain, pain so sharp it made her wish her spinal cord was severed.

The wings were burning now, sheets of flame attached to her elongated, bony fingers. She could feel the membranes crisping, reducing to ash. Her long digits raked the air, but there was nothing much spread between them now to catch it—just a few singed and tattered pieces of skin. Incredibly, her clothes remained intact—or, perhaps not so incredibly, for all circus clothing had to be flame retardant…

She curled her sticklike fingers, as if clawing for purchase— but there was nothing but air, blisteringly hot, a wind from Hades propelling her along past the freak show, haunted faces looking up, past the arcade, children agape, past the fortune teller’s tent, the line of suckers somehow parting just in time to permit her passage barely above their heads, farther and farther still, toward—

—toward the Ferris wheel, it rotating in one plane, she tumbling head over heels in a perpendicular plane.

She’d thought for sure that she would slam into the spokes of the Ferris wheel, knocking herself unconscious, but that didn’t happen. Instead, she found herself reaching out instinctively with her feet, and hanging like the bat she’d become from one of the spokes, and—

No.

No, he could not be that cruel, that wicked…

But, if he could not, who could be?

It was as though her ankles were pierced through, like Christ’s, and yet not like Christ’s, for hers were joined now by a small axle, a spindle upon which she hung, rotating along with the great wheel, always facing down, pointing head-first toward the ground.

She thought briefly of a butterfly, pinned on a collector’s sheet. He was a collector, too, of course…

The wheel rotated on, and she hung from it, a macabre bauble, with skeletal fingers that once had supported flight membranes now hanging limp, like the boughs of a dead wallow.

He had won, of course. Angela imagined he always won— and, she supposed, always would win. And, as she hung upside down, a pendant, she thought of her Poppa, and her fear of falling, and of failing him. No, things hadn’t turned out as she’d hoped, but, still, this wasn’t so bad; the old fears were indeed dead.

The wheel continued to turn. She felt sure it would always turn; no fireman could cut her free, no ladder would ever reach her. She rather suspected that the devil did not leave fingerprints, that she—indeed, the whole damned wheel, and its other occupants, whom she caught only horrid glimpses of—could only be seen when the lighting was just so, when it was not quite dawn, or just past dusk, when you weren’t really looking.