That day began with a scream

by Cecilia Resio

photo by Cecilia Resio

photo by Cecilia Resio

That day began with a scream.

A cry in reverse order. Somebody was dying, going back to where he had come from. I looked out of the window. The shutters of the opposite building were all closed, wooden eyelids to protect the residents’ sleep. All closed, but one. My eyes went through that far-away darkness and I could glimpse a body. A dead body, with closed eyes, exactly like the shutters of the building. The hair that touched the shoulders was blonde, the pupils under the closed flesh were azure, like the sky vault, which considered this gazing of mine as a theft. Of the dead we knew the smell, the absolute obscenity of the arteries and the magnificent exhibition of the wings’ remains. The ossicles, the dance of coagulated blood around the wrists and the blades of light, stained with red.

Dawn had killed an angel.

So I closed the window and sat down, with my back to the sky. I wondered where the child guarded by the angel had vanished, which war had grabbed him from Earth, which sorrow had passed through those eyes inundated with rain. When an angel dies, the mouth becomes dark, the breath sounds like the fire that burns the houses and the smoke prevents us from looking on. That day, the opposite building became a spaceship and took away all its dwellers, guilty of apathy and habits. Culprit of not doing justice to themselves. The crystal child, instead, came out of the angel and stayed close to the body. He picked up the feathers, one by one, and reassembled the wings.

That day ended with a flight.

A flight in reverse order. The angel and his crystal child pierced the ground and made it fertile and new. Intelligence and beauty closed the eyes of hate and power and since then nobody remembered what a war was.