Lucias The Fallen

He watches the amber light of the streetlamp above him as it shines down upon the old, grey pavement. Rain falls steadily, and the glow around the streetlight swells and dims before swelling again. The damp air carries the stale scent of beer and mildew. Pinkish-brown circles of old chewing gum scar the paving stones. Rivulets run down the slight incline toward the deep, dark throat of the drains. Tomorrow the pavement will gleam for an hour or two before people ruin it again.

He sits on a step in an alcove to a barbershop, huddled against the door. His dark hair is streaked with filth. It hangs across his forehead and clings to his neck, curling over the edge of his used-to-be green jumper, and he has a dirty grey blanket pulled around his shoulders. His blue eyes are dull and tired. He struggles to keep them open, and although it is summer, the relentless rain brings a chill with it. That is the joke of it—full summer, and he cannot stop shaking.

His stomach hurts from hunger because it is a struggle to get small change from most people and he has watched enough well-dressed people cross to the far pavement to know exactly what they are thinking when they look at him. Drugs, they think, or drink, or some failure of character he decided for himself. Meanwhile they will go home to a roast dinner and a warm bed and call that righteousness.

He is not here because of drugs. He is not here because of drink. He is here because he has no one, and no one, it turns out, is a much harder thing to survive than either drugs or drink.

Mostly people avoid him, but some pity him and quickly pull out a few coins, and then cautiously drop them into his grimy outstretched hand.

He does not remember a time before the orphanage. Before the long dormitory with its nineteen other boys, the bells that told you when to wake and when to eat and when to pray, Sister Anne’s soft spot for him that the other boys resented and he exploited without much guilt. He remembers the roof best. The flat tar roof with a listing wooden cross, where the sun turned his skin dark and his hair brownish blond. Sister Anne called him her little angel, with his huge blue eyes, which seemed pale and eerily unusual, especially against his dark, tanned skin, and brownish hair.

He collected feathers and kept them in an old tea tin at the back of his cupboard. When the box was full, he used to go up to the roof of the large brick building where he sat for hours with the tin of feathers in his lap, sorting them by size.

He was a shy boy who liked to keep to himself, living in his own world and always imagining he could lift off from his feet and sweep up with the wind. How he would fly high up in the sky, only a speck between the clouds, and then look down upon earth and see it all in one glance. He could spend hours in this daydream.

Painstakingly he glued every feather he had onto a long, skinny stick, which he had plucked from a tree. He fashioned the stick to fit the length of his arm, from shoulder to wrist. When the stick was covered sufficiently, he then started with the next row down, making sure they overlapped each other. He did not want to make the wings heavy with criss-cross sticks, and he liked the way it flapped in the wind when he held it up.

It took unbelievably long to make his wings. Feathers were a scarce commodity and then when suddenly the box was empty, he hid the pair of wings securely under the eaves, behind the large cross on the roof, so that the wind would not carry it away while he continued to collect more feathers.

The memory dissolves with the hiss of tyres on wet tarmac. Lucias blinks, returning to the rain-soaked street. A single white feather drifts lazily through the rain and settles on his blanket. The wind should have carried it away, yet it clung there, impossibly dry, until he brushes it absently into his palm. He turns it over between chilled fingers, and, without quite knowing why, remembers the day he finally finished his wings.

He was seven the first time he flew.

It was a sunny day and there was a slight breeze brushing against his warm skin. He concentrated, biting softly on his tongue, which was protruding slightly from between his lips, while he carefully glued the sticks to his arms, lengthwise. It proved more difficult to glue the second wing than it was to glue the first one, but eventually, sweat making droplets on his forehead, he had them both glued in place.

He stood on the roof and slowly he lifted his extended arms up and down, testing his new wings against the wind. They looked magnificent, although a multitude of shades in grey and black, and gathered from every pigeon and crow that had ever shed a feather over the orphanage grounds.

He stepped forward and stood on the edge of the three-storey institutional redbrick building and then he leapt, without thinking twice.

For a moment, he soared through the sky. He felt the wind in his hair, the breeze kissing him softly on his cheeks. He felt laughter build up in him. Flying felt familiar to him.

Then he started plummeting.

He saw the ground rushing toward him with unbelievable speed. He fell and rolled, and the shock shuddered through his body. He heard screaming that was not his own, and then Sister Anne’s face blocked out the sky above him, and she was crossing herself so fast her hand blurred.

He waited for the pain. Surely it had only been delayed. He flexed his fingers one by one, then his toes. Everything worked. Apart from the breath knocked from his lungs, nothing hurt. He frowned, puzzled. It should have hurt.

She asked him something in Spanish, and then in English, “Are you all right, Lucias?”

“I seem to be,” he told her.

She held up a trembling hand. “How many fingers?”

“Five,” he said, and watched her go pale. “Three,” he corrected, laughing now, delighted with himself. “I’m fine. Really.”

Lucias could not understand why everyone looked so frightened. Had they not seen him fly?

Mr. Reynolds, the caretaker, carried him to his bed like something precious and breakable, which made the eventual discovery of no fractures, no bruising, and not so much as a strained wrist feel like a miracle. Sister Angelina used the word miracle anyway, more than once, in a voice that suggested she did not entirely believe her own explanation. That evening she announced in study hall that the roof was forthwith strictly forbidden, and he spent the following two months scrubbing every toilet on his floor to a shine he could see his own reflection in and reciting fifty Hail Marys each night until the words stopped meaning anything at all.

It was worth it. He had learned something on that roof that no amount of scrubbing could unlearn. He did not break the way other things broke.

Six months later he overheard Sister Anne telling Sister Angelina, in the hushed and slightly frightened tone that Lucias had never once been sick. Not as an infant, not through any of the winters that put half the dormitory in the infirmary, not ever, not that she could remember, and she had lain awake more than one night since his stunt on the roof trying to recall a single running nose, a single fever, and coming up with nothing.

It is true. He has never been sick a day in his life. He used to think that made him lucky.

The white feather still rests in the cup of his hand, and without thinking, he slips it into his pocket.