It was raining when she fell from heaven, legs up, arms down, heavy-feathered, wings like two limp doilies. The other celestials laughed. Rookie flub, they said. Showing off, doing a loopdeloop below cloud. Even with the widest, whitest, wings don’t work with wet feathers.
She caught a down-draft to solid ground and hunkered. Pretty, smug thing she once was, but not much to brag about now. A celestial creature caught below-cloud can really lose her looks. Subject now to all sorts of mortal flubs, spine crushing gravity, sunburn, hunger, smog, and whatnot. And whatever the legends say, earthbound celestials are not all that good looking. Like an albino bat, but bigger.
Now it was time to settle down and she built her house from bones. She collected the bones from behind restaurants. Fried chicken places were the best. She made the furniture from wheels and other moving things that she pinned down to the ground with bits of wire. Sometimes they broke free, slid from kitchen to bathroom. She really couldn’t be blamed. She was just doing her best.
Celestials don’t have wombs so she had to gather her children from cribs or playgrounds. She got tired of that and started making them from piles of smooth rocks. Her oldest child was called Snap and her youngest was called Car. She forgot to name the ones in the middle.
They were all her children and she loved each one equally.
One day a man came to admire the bone house. The children clustered around him. They liked his hairy forearms. He decided to stay and she made him her husband. She said children should have a father. She said this with great authority, as if she had always known.
The husband liked to sit in an armchair made of wheels and admire the bone rooms, while the children gathered bones and stones, to make more rooms, and more children. After a while, he didn’t want any more children. He said they had enough. So she said OK and made him into a bone, a big one, that made a nice mantle for the fireplace. At Christmas they hung stockings on him and said Merry Christmas Father and it was very merry.
The other celestials looked down sometimes and frowned at all those bones, and children and wheels but they had a strict policy of noninterference.
Lisa Carroll-Lee has recently completed a collection of short stories set in the imagined past, present, and future of central Texas. One of those stories has been published in the Austin Chronicle. She can usually be found teaching or wrestling with her first novel. She lives in central Texas with her husband and two geriatric dogs.