Na’dayah Pugh ’27
Her wing was broken.
The breeze was the only thing that soothed her, gentle against both the broken wing and the tears pooling on her hot cheeks. She’d landed hard enough to send a gust that flattened the grass around her into a wide circle. Now, she sat in the open space, cradling her wing, trying not to cry.
It was the right one that was injured, snapped the wrong way, jutting out at an angle. The bones were fragile: they’d shattered when she’d fallen from the sky and crashed into the hard earth. There was a stream of red spilling from the wound, seeping into dirty white feathers, hot and sticky to the touch.
She tested the other wing, the left one, the good one. It moved, but the bones were connected, and she could feel the nerves in her shoulder blades scream with the movement, shooting a searing pain into her right wing. She grit her teeth and fought the urge to yell, jaw tight.
She pulled herself to her feet. This field wasn’t safe—nowhere on Earth really was. She had to find a way back up. She’d convince them—they’d cast her out by accident, of course. She was a good angel. She’d prove it.
She hobbled towards the edge of the circle. Holding her wing with her right arm, she pushed her way through the grasses with her left. The grasses were taller than her, and they were dense. They flattened some as she stepped through, but popped back up after she’d passed, the only thing marking her path being the thick trail of blood pouring from her wing.
She pushed through. There had to be an end, somewhere. Surely, this field couldn’t go on forever—
Then she was crashing to the ground again, her ankle caught on something.
She landed hard on her bad wing. Sharp, iron-hot pain seared through her, starting at the wing and coursing through her like electricity.
She bit her lip. Tears pooled in her eyes as she felt a strange coldness at her ankle.
Then, finally, the pain dissipated and she opened her eyes. She calmed as her vision cleared. The coolness at her ankle came from the hand wrapped around it, belonging to a child who couldn’t have been more than five years old.
Her breathing steadied. Children were good. Innocent.
She started to say something—what, she wasn’t even sure—but before she could get a word out the child suddenly growled, a snarl pulling back its lips to reveal canine-like fangs. They barely fit in its mouth.
She snatched her leg away, scrambling to her feet. She ran.
Hot pain bloomed from her wound again, but she didn’t care. She crashed through the grasses, all the while hearing the child behind her—
She almost tripped again, bringing herself to another sudden stop. A few feet ahead of her, crawling out of the dirt, was another growling child. It caught sight of her and hissed, clawing its way out of the dirt. It broke free quickly, and she was almost too slow: she leaped out of the way as it reached for her ankles, narrowly dodging the dirty fingernails.
She ran, again, the image of the children burning in her mind. The second one had vines growing from its arm, and she feared, running through the field, that the grasses brushing against her were made of the same.
More appeared as she kept running. Crawling out of the ground, coarse dirt spilling from eye sockets and vines all over their limbs, sprouts coming from arms and heads instead of hair.
She kept running, trying to ignore the burning pain in her wing, the hisses and growls of the plant children, just running and running, and she could almost see through the grass, so surely there was a clearing up ahead—
Then she was crashing back to the ground, her head slamming into a thick wall of dirt and her broken wing getting trapped under her. She groaned, cradling it and looking up. Then, she froze.
Dozens—no, hundreds of plant child eyes were staring at her, gazing down into the hole in which she’d fallen.
She pulled her legs into her chest, curling up into herself as they continued to stare. The dirt walls were too tall, and with her broken wing, she had no hope of escape.
One of them grunted, a gesture echoed by the others. She stared up in fear as they nodded at each other, and her heart filled with horror as they all picked up a handful of dirt.
“No!” she screamed. “No!” But they didn’t care.
She was buried alive within the minute.
Silence came from the now-filled hole. The plant children looked at the fresh dirt. They looked at each other.
Then, a hand shot out from the fresh dirt. A fresh green leaf bloomed from the wrist. The plant children smiled at each other.
They’d grown another.
And they’d continue to grow more.
