Out the Nest

Genre: Cliche
Date: 4/24/20

Fruit flies picked at the exposed tender flesh of an apple. Elaine's pale wings
twitched in annoyance at the sight. The spasm fanned a puff of wind that blew over
several nylon cups and scattered the bugs. The angelic teen looked over to her dad
on the other side of the Ikea dining table. She smiled at her incidental victory over
the insects.
Luis gripped his Puerto Rican flag coffee cup, his last remaining ceramic item after
years of raising a Valkyrie alone.
Her proud smile became nervous after a few wing beats. She knew her father had
an awful tendency of being less helpful when annoyed. She tucked her wings
tightly behind her. "So, when someone dies and I help them to pass, they're gone
for, uh, good?" Elaine had a deep-rooted understanding that she was a Valkyrie.
She knew that she would grow up to be a winged guide of the dead, but there was
so little she understood; mainly, where she was leading the dead to. Where do they
go, she thought.
His thick brow furrowed as he was forced to stop collecting the last remaining bits
of eggy rice. "Eli, I have to go to work." Elaine’s father was a mere wingless
mortal who found himself too exhausted most of the time to clean oil stains off his
jeans. She knew even on good days, she would have a tough time wringing him for
useful information.
Elaine bit her lip; her time to save a soul was short. "I need to know what mom
said about it.” He looked down into his coffee cup. The terribly thin line drawn at
the corner of his mouth prevented Elaine from ignoring her own sadness and
frustration at that emotion. Elaine’s mom was only in her life long enough to leave
an uncorrupted impression; an unflappable angel that she desperately wanted to
live up to.
He took the last sip of his coffee before speaking. "Your mother told that wherever
she sent souls, the living cannot follow. There could be heaven or hell, or another
world beyond the point of the threshold. Mom had her theories…"
Annihilation, she thought. “Why then even bring spirits to pass? Why not just let
them chill out as a ghost." She felt pangs of guilt at the uncomfortable shifts in her
father’s posture.
"She said a soul without a body was like a slab of meat without its packaging: it
goes bad."
Some unsettling gears clicked into place as her eyes flickered to the insects
feasting on the rotten apple. "Heh, makes sense." She forced some yolky globs of
rice down her throat to hide all expression. The tension of the wings behind her
blossomed into a dull ache.
He spoke, as he often did, directly and flatly. "Eli is this about your friend?"
"No." Her wings sprung forth, each extraordinary limb narrowly longer than her
arms. It took concentration to bring them back into her soul. Her thoughts spiraled
to the day her friend’s ruined body was taken to intensive care.
"Eli," his phone alarm went off. "Ay dios mio. It's not your fault. Please be safe.
We'll talk later." He scooped the rest of the rice into his mouth and then ran off to
work.
For once she was happy he had little time for her. Elaine waited, her focus on the
bugs that have returned to devour the apple. She only moved a muscle when she
heard her father peel out of the driveway. She got up to finally deal with the
infestation but was stopped by the hiss of a television turning on in the garage.
Elaine hastily turned out of the open kitchen and through the cramped loft with the
fuzzy floor. She weaved between her dad’s giant brown recliner and the coffee
table. Elaine practically jumped into her boots before rushing toward the garage
door then violently halting her momentum to turn. Elaine dutifully sprinkled fish
food into the goldfish’s bowl, training to prove she can handle a dog on top of her
other responsibilities.
Elaine jogged through her house to the garage which her father hardly used despite
being a mechanic. She had converted the garage into her personal training room.
At the center was a dummy made of tires, heavily scarred due to practicing with
her blade. She frowned because the television and lights were on. She closed her
eyes and reached into the same place in her chest where her wings came from.
Upon opening her eyes, she saw a lanky figure of a boy one year her senior. He
had his head through the garage door as if it was not there.
The ghost boy pulled his head out and gave his friend a shit-eating grin. "Hey
beeeeeech! Dude look what's outside," the ghost boy said.
“Hey Ollie,” she said as a grin uncontrollably spread on her face that comforted her
and her almost-dead friend. "Just because I can see you does not mean I can see
through walls. I'm not superman."
“I mean you can kinda fly…”
“Shush!”
He rolled his eyes toward the garage door. "You absolute bimbo," he said in jest.
"Open the garage door."
Elaine complied with a smile. For a few moments, she could pretend things were
normal. Whenever Elaine was having a bad day, Oleander was there. He would
rope her into childish arguments that distracted her from stress. She was fond of
debating which fictional characters she could take on with her actual powers in
hushed whispers.
"Whatever you himbo-looking-" Something got caught in her throat after the
garage door opened.
Rows of lightly dusted Oregon evergreens walled the house off from the rest of the
world. Only a winding road connected her to the rest of the town. Her eyes traced
from the distant point that her father’s car just went over and to the monster on the
driveway. A heap of grey-blue flesh; arms, mouths, and more faces than there
should have been were writhing on the gravel road. It attempted to put itself back
together again just enough to get to Oleander.
"You should have seen your dad ram into the thing." His words faded as she
focused on the source of her wings and eyes to draw something else.
A sword appeared in her hand, a literal extension of herself. She walked toward the
creature, stepping over a grey smear on the driveway. As the thing was managing
to pull itself back together, she cleaved it in half as easily as she did the others, the
magic blade doing true damage to them. "So he hit it, but did not see it?"
"I think so. He swore like he hit a brick on the road," he said.
That had implications she was not willing to deal with right now. The cold-induced
goosebumps prickling her skin gave her an excuse to shiver. "We have to get you
to the hospital and return you to your body right now."
"Why?"
"I just figured out what those monsters are. They're scavengers; they're drawn to
you like how flies are drawn to a carcass. I don’t think they’re gonna stop until
you’re gone or you have a body."
“What are they gonna do, lay eggs in me?”
She thought about this. “Them needing your spirit as a step in some reproduction
cycle would kind of explain why they’re aggressively going after you.”
“Hot.”
Elaine grew flustered as she threw her hand up to cover red cheeks. She cut
through the emotion after realizing she was getting distracted. “We’re going.
Now!”
"Or! Or! Or! I could just chill out as a ghost forever instead of returning to my
thoroughly fucked to shit body."
"No. I can't just keep killing those things."
"What do you mean no? It seems pretty easy, you're not willing to do something
for a friend?" He sounded pleading and mocking at the same time.
She hated this part of him that guilt-tripped others. She decided to not respond to
that even if it seriously hurt her. "How did you try to kill yourself? We need to
know what timer we're on."
Oleander snapped his fingers and pointed at Elaine. "Autoerotic asphyxiation,
baby!" The boy delighted in every syllable.
"No," she said with a grimmer tone than she intended.
He made a fart noise with his tongue. "Why not?"
"You were found at the school. Logistically- just- no. I will not entertain the idea.
Stop deflecting!"
He shrugged his shoulders. "Jumped." He always withdrew and looked away
whenever called upon to be serious. He looked outside the garage door, she saw his
eyes track the swaying of the pines. During his life, she liked to think that they
brought balance to each other. She could be the source of urgency and relative
maturity while he acted as a force of levity and chill. Though more often than not,
he would combat her efforts to bring balance toward her side of the scale.
She grabbed a remote and searched local channels for news on Oleander's
condition. "Did you regret it?"
"Why the fuck does that matter?!"
She was told part of her job would be to soothe those who needed passing. She
realized how much practice she needed for this moment. "I dunno. It might be
important to helping you…" her voice became smaller. She desperately wanted a
target to strike at, a message she could get across which would act as a remedy to
the whole situation. When that approach failed her, she could normally tamp down
the underlying feelings. She wonders if he had the same instinct.
"I don't regret shit."
She heard his detached voice crack. She landed on a news channel and saw the
update.
Despite the best efforts of the hospital, Oleander White has passed away in the
hospital. Oleander's ghost reacted by becoming expressionless. The color drained
from her face. "We can fix this."
One of the grey colored rat kings of limbs showed up again in the front driveway.
Like a coiled spring, she struck out at the creature. On instinct, she turned back to
give a reassuring smile but saw that two shambling forms blocked her path. On one
of the creature's back, a child's face stared at her. She grew her wings out and
sheared their top half's off. They never attacked with this many at this frequency.
Oleander went into a corner of the garage.
"I got this," she said as more came from the woods that surrounded her home.
~ Elaine was fairly sure it was evening. She could see nothing through the wings
that hugged her to protect from the hoards. She was finding it hard to keep dodging
the unliving. As a Valkyrie, Elaine was stronger and more durable than any man.
Every breath was ragged and sounded as if it was flowing from a maze made of
blades. Her legs were ready to give in. She could, in theory, kill these creatures
indefinitely. In practice, her reserves of adrenaline were running out, and fighting
for so long made her sloppy.
Her breaths joined the cacophony of agonized voices that outnumbered the bodies
on the field; she felt a need to cut through it. "I won't let you take him!" She
realized that was foolish considering that they were surrounding her and likely
nearing Oleander who was huddled in a corner. She needed to act. She unfurled her
wings, turning two of the unliving into grey smears. She used her wings and the
last bit of strength in her legs to clear the creatures around her. Her deadly yet
maladroit pirouette cleaved through all but one of the unliving. The one that got
away clamped down several jagged teeth onto Elaine's arm. Her own momentum
did the rest as a strip of flesh was shaven from her. She could only drive her blade
into that one before screaming.
Her face and hair were covered with sweat and grey blood. She looked stupidly at
the new wave of creatures that were coming down the driveway. Thoughts escaped
her. She saw a light at the end of her tunneled vision.
Her dad's truck beat through a wave of the creatures. She wanted to smile but
found that hard. She barely even processed the fact that her father had got out of
the car or that she was only able to stand up straight due to the gentle waving of
her wings. Her father grabbed her shoulders, grounding her.
“Elaine Castilo, what the hell is going on?” he asked.
“They’re trying to take them.”
“Who is trying to take who?”
She heard what he said, but the pounding of blood in her head silenced the
thoughts. “Dad- I don’t- want anyone else taken from me.” She stood still, but her
wings spasmed as she began to lean against a wall. Guilt and bile crept up her
throat. She was supposed to protect them.
She felt her father’s hands on her shoulder and his gaze looking over the damages.
“You can’t do this.”
Maybe those words were just a response to the confusion, or maybe Luis saw
something in Elaine that he recognized in that imperfect woman he knew. Either
way, they allowed her bedraggled mind to take the next step. She dragged herself
to Oleander. Before her grip finally faltered, she drove the blade into his stomach.
A sickening shockwave was sent through her arm as if he was there and she was
the one to kill him. There was no pain in Oleander’s eyes; he was never the one
hurt by his death.
She knew that whatever they were going to do to him was worse.
It looked to her as if Oleander was searching for something in Elaine.
“I think I do regret it,” he said.
She let him go.