Born in the Mouth of an Angel Part I

be getting properly clean.

  His hair still had dried clots of blood in it. He patiently washed it out until he couldn’t feel any strands sticking together anymore. With the soap rinsed off, he turned his face up to the water, scrubbing at it, the rough stubble itching less without the dried sweat and blood.

  Eventually he turned the water off. The towels waited for him, soft and fluffy. He dried his hair and body quickly, running the cloth over himself without much care. He stepped out of the shower, the dim light over the mirror lighting the pile of clothes she left him.

  Colors were indistinguishable and he pulled on the worn clothes, studiously avoiding the mirror. He hung up his towels and tried to put the room to rights. He didn’t want to be an ungracious and messy houseguest. Underneath the sweater she folded for him, he found the slippers she’d spoken of. His new slippers were plush and blue. He found he liked blue.

  He didn’t know what to do with the ripped and stained clothes he’d worn all night. They didn’t belong in the clean bathroom or even near him any longer. Yet throwing them out seemed like a waste. He didn’t think he was a wasteful person.

  Scooping his dirty clothes up, he held them far from his nice clean clothes, and opened the door. He didn’t call for her but followed the path towards the living room. She wasn’t there.

  She also wasn’t in the kitchen. But while he looked, he found a plastic bag and threw his dirty clothes inside. For lack of anywhere else to put them, he left them on the floor next to the garbage bin. He had a feeling she would know what to do with them.

  He continued his search for her. There were stairs by the kitchen but he didn’t climb them, having no desire to see what was upstairs. On the ground floor, aside from the living room and the kitchen, he found a bedroom tucked behind a dark wooden door. The door was cracked so he didn’t feel too bad about pushing it open the rest of the way.

  It had to be her room. He flicked the light switch on. There were lace curtains, dulled from the original white, and an antique, dark wooden vanity. Her bed was the same make and a similar lace pattern covered pale pink sheets. Her room looked lost in time and he backed out, suddenly feeling like he was intruding.

  His hostess was still nowhere to be seen. For such a large house, it seemed as if she lived only in three or four small rooms. His mug of tea which had been empty, sitting on the living room table, was gone. But in the kitchen, waiting on the table in there was the same mug, delicate and pale blue, steaming. Still no sign of his hostess.

  He sat anyway, despite his missing hostess and despite the worry that the seat wouldn’t hold him, the rungs looked far too fragile. He seemed a little too large for the house and its furnishings. Hooking a finger though the handle, he brought the tea to his lips and blew, the steam curling away from him.

  Tiredness descended on him as he sipped. When he was done, he stood, pushing the chair back clumsily. There was another room he hadn’t seen, sitting off the living room. As he stood in the doorway, somehow he knew this was his room.

  The furniture was heavier, thicker and there were varying shades of blue throughout the room. He sat down at the desk, a lighter shade of wood than was in her room. Immediately he was confronted with a mirror.

  Once his gaze caught, he was stuck. The face was different from the one he’d expected. For some reason he thought he’d be blonde. Strange how a person feels and looks don’t always match. He knew that his hair was longer than it should have been. It got in his eyes and stuck to his neck in cold clumps, still wet from the shower.

  His eyes were black and he frowned when he saw them. He didn’t think eyes were supposed to be that black. Hers weren’t. He peered this way and that way, turning his head in the light but his eyes remained black. Not dark brown or even dilated. They were black. The whites of his eyes were small and very white in comparison and he didn’t like how he looked.

  He stood abruptly, not wanting to see his face any longer. He kicked off his slippers and collapsed on the bed. The mattress dipped under him.

  He woke in the bed with no recollection of having fallen asleep. It was dark in the room, there were curtains over his windows and he felt like it must be day. When he peered around the fabric that hid the glass, he saw the stars on a blank slated sky. It was night and he wondered where she was.

  When he found her, she was outside, kneeling in the dirt. He stood in the shadow of the house, feeling out of place as he watched her. She was barefoot again. He wondered if she ever wore shoes. It seemed he must have, from the pain his feet were in last night. They had no calluses and nothing to prevent the pain. Even now he wore his slippers, with their hard, ridged soles. He felt like a man in his clothes. His khakis and blue sweater did nothing to hold the moonshine and she looked more ethereal than him.

  She spotted him and wound her way back around to him. Her smile was contented. He pushed his hands through her hair for the simple and pleasing contact between people. Her white silk hair slipped through his fingers. It felt natural for him to do and she didn’t look alarmed.

  “A shadow of what you were,” she whispered, cupping his cheek.

  He stood there and let her, wondering how he’d found her. Of all the land he walked, the houses he passed, how had he found her? The one person in this world who might know who he was.

  “The mouth of an angel.” She touched the tip of her finger to his lips.

  He smiled and echoed her movement. She pressed a small kiss to his finger before pulling away, laughing.

  For a woman dressed in white, she was hard to track. He tried to follow her from tree to tree and dappled, moonlit grass to the bushes which rustled under no breeze. But like a will o’ the wisp, she was a flash of light, a scrap of elbow and the tip of a nose. The chase and the night ended too swiftly. And when the sky started turning pink, he found himself back at the house. It seemed diminished in the coming dawn and he was suddenly afraid to see his woman in the daylight.

  So when she appeared and let him into the house, he followed quickly, blocking the coming light behind him with the fall of a curtain. When he turned, she waited with a hot cup of tea and a smile. He took both with gratitude. They sat silently side by side on the couch, her ankle touching his.

  While he had questions, he still couldn’t voice them and she didn’t offer any answers. Even when he tried pantomime, she looked at him, confused. He mimed pen and paper. She rose and fetched some for him, placing the pad of paper down on the table, a pen on top.

  She read what he wrote as he wrote it, leaning over his arm to see.

  “You don’t know your name?” she asked, a frown puckering her eyebrows. He reached over and smoothed away the lines.

  “Do you know mine?” she asked without answering his first question.

  He shook his head, knowing as he did so that he was hurting her somehow. Comfortable as he felt with her, he didn’t remember her at all, let alone her name.

  “I’m Annabelle,” she told him. “But your name changes. I don’t know who you are right now.”

  That didn’t make any sense and he wrote so on the paper. When she read it, she shrugged.

  “That’s the best I can do for you.”

  He drained his tea as he thought of the next question he wanted to ask. But when he placed the cup back down on the glass, exhaustion fell over him like a cloak, bending him in half. She placed a hand on his shoulder.

  Rising at her direction, he stumbled after her as she led him back to his room. He fell onto the bed and she knelt to remove his slippers. She tucked him into the bed, still clothed. Again he could not remember the passage from wakefulness to sleep.

  She was in the kitchen when he woke and left his room, slippers firmly on his feet. She smiled at him and passed him another mug of tea. It finally occurred to him that he hadn’t eaten since he woke in the field, confused and covered in blood. He wasn’t hungry, however, so he sat down at the table, unconcerned.

  Annabelle slid into the chair across from him
, a dainty pink teacup and a piece of toast on a dainty pink plate in each hand. He watched her eat as he drank his tea, rising only to refill it and to grab the paper and pen from the living room.

  Before he’d even written a word, she held up a hand. He stilled. “I don’t know your real name, you never gave it to me. Don’t you remember anything?” she asked wistfully.

  He shook his head. His memories began with waking in the field.

  “Born in the mouth of an angel,” she said, her eyes narrowed as she watched his face.

  He frowned and wrote on the paper, ‘what does that mean?’

  It was the same phrase he’d heard echoed in his thoughts as he whispered it to himself that night. It had to mean something though what, he couldn’t say. Maybe she knew.

  She shook her head, dashing his hopes. “It’s just something you used to say. You never told me what it meant.”

  Depressed, he hung his head, letting his hair scrape the table top. The mug sat next to his elbow, empty.

  “Would you like some more tea?” she asked, her toast gone and her own teacup almost empty as well.

  He shook his head, watching the dark hair swing back and forth.

  “Is there anything you need? Anything I can do for you?”

  He shook his head again.

  “Ok, then I’ll be upstairs.”

  He didn’t watch her leave, but felt her walk past him, the air stirring. The stairs creaked behind