It was the kind of church she had seen many times: a signpost to the sacred for a rural community that had dwindled, since the industrial revolution called its inhabitants to far away places of smoke, dirt and metal with the promise of possibilities. She was saddened by the emptiness of these past migrations, feeling sure that any hope for a better life had been slowly bled from those crammed into rows upon rows of tightly knitted houses as they fed and drank inside a growing swell of smog and disease. But then, she had grown up in a large city, and she had hated the noise, and the stench, and the claustrophobia inflamed by having to travel in prisms of strangers. Her urban friends had mocked her, deemed her difficult, and she'd spiralled in a cocoon of isolation until escape appeared in the form a handsome, countryside dwelling young man encountered at a late summer garden party.
To the left of the church, separated by a narrow path between an untidy garden and the edge of the graveyard, was an abandoned cottage that might once have been considered pretty. Time had dulled its whitewashed walls, which now peeked subserviently between the thick coils of ivy that seemed long since post health. The windows were all greasy, with slivers of white amid the gloom like clumsy snail trails. An aura of neglect pervaded here, and she felt a flicker of regret for this forgotten home that had been abandoned to emptiness and the greed of second rate foliage.
There were clusters of gravestones that had been eroded by an equal dismissal. The memorials - these last stamps of name and lifespan - were all but lost, the dead beneath them slumbering as their identities gradually faded into illegible indentations. Most indeed were unreadable now, and she hoped a parish book of some sort remained, some more permanent token of these lives now long over. The fear of forgetfulness had been with her for many years, prompted perhaps by the absences pasted across her own family tree. Her parents, both only children, had shared a dislike of their own parentage, and hadn't minded that they knew little of whence they'd come. As she had grown, disjointed in their shadow, she had craved some kind of familial foothold, something memorial with which to position her surname as a connection to those whose genes were her ontological legacy. Perhaps, she thought bitterly, she'd hoped to find someone she could regard as family who she might actually like. But there was nothing, just the barely recalled names of her grandparents, and the suggestion that many of her maternal ancestors had been killed in the first and second world wars.
Only the flora seemed alive and present in this patch of the contemporary world, only they seemed to belong to the here and now as more than a memory. And then, on a patch of grass a metre or so from a church wall, there, something that made her pause, that caught her attention as though a passing breeze that stirred an otherwise balmy day. A pair of wings. A pair of neatly severed pigeon wings, parted, torso-less, fresh.
The wings were of a carcass not long dead, and free from infestation. As she leaned closer she could smell hyacinth, surprisingly strong though no such flower grew nearby. There was a clot of wine coloured blood near the tops of the wings, neat, accurate, as though painted there by a professional whose pallet was almost dry. A sudden burst of music pinched the air: organ, decadent, baroque. It drew her to the church, and to notice that the oak door with its rusty iron hinges was slightly ajar: a reluctant invitation. She accepted, stepping carefully inside, and as she did so the music stopped.
The church smelt as other churches did: like old books in antiquarian libraries when you press you nose up close to the yellowing pages. It was not particularly large, and not overly ornamental save for the odd memorial plaque in marble or grey stone pinned to the walls, and a smattering of Christ images and crosses. At the front of the church was an altar, on top of which lay a red blanket and simple bronze cross. She stood before it, tempted to reach out and touch it, to make contact, but conscious of some imprinted aversion from trespassing with fingers when it came to sacred things.
Standing near the altar, her eyes were drawn to a near hidden group of statures positioned near the back of the church. They were of angels, their faces raised toward the sky as though in agony or ecstasy or a moment of complete surprise. In the middle stood a figure that appeared human at first glance, kneeling with its head in its hands. She moved closer, curious, and saw that the figure was not intended to be human: on its back were two rough stubs, one each positioned high on either side of the back: in places where one would expect the wings of angels to begin. This time she could not restrain her desire for touch, and reached out tentatively to stroke the edges of those peculiar abrasions. They were not part of the original design, she could tell, for their spines bore the sandpaper grooves that suggest a break. She could smell hyacinth again, hyacinth arising from the places she had touched.
The mobile phone's sudden beep broke her reverie, and she skimmed the message that called her back. Turning on her heels she alighted smoothly, suddenly eager for the secular comfort of her boyfriend's flat. The wings on the grass made her pause, and then the cooing of pigeons drew her eyes to the neglected cottage, upon which waited a legion of such birds. They eyed her seriously, she thought, and without understanding why she bowed her head in solemn greeting.
As she neared the village where her boyfriend lived, she drew out the map to survey her journey's landscape. There was no mention of a church, or a cottage, and she was sure she had not walked the full three miles it suggested the corpse road ran. Disconcerted, she by chance stopped a man she recognised from the local pub as her feet touched the dirt track that led into the village.
"What's the name of the church, about a mile or so north of here?"
"Excuse me?"
"A church, you can see it when you go over the hill."
He paused, his face scrunched up by the wear of remembering something mentioned a long time ago. In a moment, it came to him.
"Oh, sorry, but its such a bare ruin I forget that it was once a church. There was some violence there, a couple of centuries back, and the local priest was killed in the ruckus so it was abandoned. I'm surprised you could tell it was a church actually, although I'm not so into my history as most I suppose. There was a village around it, well, more a hamlet really. But that all came down after the priest's death, and those that didn't go to the city went north."
She dreamt that night, of a flock of pigeons migrating, chased away by some terrible thing that had destroyed and violated the sanctity of their home. Their flight was haphazard, as if these creatures knew how to fly but were unaccustomed to the limits of their bodies. She could smell fox, and dog, and things raising hungry faces, growling to be feared as their wet snouts caught the scent of flesh. In the midst of it all she felt a sudden stab of grief, a falling, a wrenching of skin, and muscle, and bone. Falling feathers, and with them, falling grace. A wingless white shadow drifted beneath the anxious kit. It whispered, softly: "these birds, these fragile mortal things, what strange avatars for the divine they are."
Unknown artist
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Inspired by the chance discovery of a pair of pigeon wings the lay in the graveyard of a church in Newcastle.
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