Given To Fly

“My little saving grace! D’know what I’d do without you, Angel,” splutters a stubble bearing man laying back in a giant leather armchair, elegant with its look of value and dusty with sheer age, just like the elder sitting in it.
         The seated man slips a number of glossy sheets between his fingers, analysing them closely with a growing smile on his wrinkled face. Before him, on the other side of a lavish oak office table, sits a woman in her mid-twenties, adorned with rose-perfect skin and a complete set of celebrity-white teeth. She wears a smile big enough to melt hearts.

Angelina Peterson, photographer for The Saint, the city of San Brooke’s top tabloid, straightens her flattered smile. Opposite her, her multi-millionaire boss Dennis Witherspoon, who runs the tips of his bumpy fingers through his hair like a Bayliner speedboat cutting through a grey sea.
         “I wasn’t too sure if you’d like them or not, you know… they’re fragile,” sounds the Carolina native, who made the move to Maine six years ago. She is softly spoken, with a warming voice.
         “Wasn’t sure? These snaps brilliant! So damn brilliant that they’re goin’ on tomorrow’s front page!” Witherspoon returns in a raised voice, not at all angry, just extremely happy, thinking of his increasing fortune.

The man who gave Angelina her ‘Angel’ nickname stands up and steps over to a huge window behind his armchair, a mass of dull office buildings are outside, much like The Saint’s headquarters. He stares briefly before turning and pouring himself a large glass of whiskey from an impressive bar, with a reddish, maple-like finish.
         “You don’t mind, do you?” enquires the whiskey drinker.
         “No… not at all,” replies Angel, somehow transfixed by a piece of art that is locked away in the bar. The 1984 Miss Teen Raleigh is in a daze, her dolphin blue eyes shine an honest reflection of what engages her.
         “It’s the original Nataraja. You don‘t want to know how much that set me back by, I’m tellin’ ya,” scoffs the chairman in a speedy tone, “You like it?”
         “I think it’s beautiful… and yeah… it looks pretty expensive…” responds a still transfixed Angelina.
         “It cost me over five hundred grand, I’ll say that much. But that’s life. This is life. And this is the game,”
         As the spluttering old chairman finishes his sentence, a cloud instantly casts itself above Angel. She is transported to another place. The past.

Angelina lets out a faint sigh of relief and briefly closes her worn eyes, lightly resting against the metal door of a convenience store. She has an  edition of The Saint folded neatly under her right arm. She has just arrived in San Brooke to start life over again, away from the hardships of Carolina, at the age of nineteen. She has her innocence.

She smiles to herself as she opens her eyes, sleepily composing herself and clocking back into reality, her Oh My God, I’ve Done It reality, where all her Carolinian negatives have just congregated into one intricate positive, lined with gold and faraway thoughts.
She holds the door open for a fellow pedestrian, exchanging crystal glances and sunlit smiles as she closes the tubular handled rectangle and begins the short journey to her navy blue 1991 Mercedes-Benz.
         The walk is blustery, her skirt ripples madly like a grey ocean. The spring air is strong and wild, yet warm. It cuts and winds through her hair, blonde and sun kissed. Peachy.
         The mild rays breathe lightly on her legs as the leathery heels of her black stilettos clap the dusty sidewalk. One by one her shoes raise and fall, raise and fall, raise and fall. The stilettos orchestrate shadows like dark puppeteers, conquering the concrete in a black sparkle.

She arrives at her vehicle. The navy blue paint glistens in the sun like diamond teeth. Her bubbling shadow stands up, backing against a morning fresh palm tree, cowering from that yellow blob in that blue sky, with those giant clotted cream clouds swimming, like a kindergartener’s painting.

It’s hot. Smoked woodchips.

The Smoked Woodchips Smell. Angel’s acknowledgement of a hot spring. She could feel the heat and the light breeze kissing her limbs, and she could smell the palm trees, roasting under the sun as if they were on tree-sized barbecues. The smell of woodchips she always thought, smoked woodchips.

The last delightful smell, humid and articulate, that she inhaled that day.

She suddenly feels her suit jacket being tugged and her arms being pulled away. She drops her newspaper, dust immediately begins to blow over the top of it, blurring out the text like censorship. The wind attacks her hair franticly, she can barely focus as she is violently pulled into an alleyway that is hidden from the sunlight and drowned in darkness. A grainy human figure presents itself and barges straight into her, spearing the dizzy Angel into a hole-ridden, crumbling wall. Intrigued sniffs interrogate her hair and a husky, wheezing breath blackens her rosewater cheeks. The pleasant Smoked Woodchips Smell is replaced with an acrid whiskey and cigarette smoke fuelled pant.
         “Don’t try and struggle, baby. This is jus’ the way it is… this is life. And this is the game,” whispers the figure in the tone of an older male, whilst loosening and ripping her skirt down.

She had her innocence no more.

The cotton white cloud that hung over her moves on, stained a miserable black. Her vision of the past creeps back into its mental crypt and her sight returns to normality.

“-so I told him to get the hell outta my office before I call the god damn boys in blue,” beckons The Saint’s chairman, before downing his alcohol. He stares inquisitively at Angelina.
         “Angel?” he questions, there is a silent delay.
         “No. No I’m not… You. It was you, wasn’t it,” the photographer answers in a dangerous rhetoric.
         “Come again?” the multi-millionaire once again questions.
         “The whiskey. The cigarettes. Your breath. Your words,” Angel straightens her legs in one action and jumps to her feet, toppling the chair over. She begins to shout across the oak table in a chaotic, broken hysteria.
         “You son of a bitch. You animal. You monster. I left Carolina because I hated every little thing about my life, and on the first day that I arrive…” The hysteric screams turn into barely coherent screeches. Distraught tears of anger and hatred run down her cherry face like blood. She begins to move towards her boss.
         “All this time I have been working for the man who made my life an even bigger hell. The man who killed me inside.”
         Witherspoon’s hands tighten and then loosen, he drops his glass onto the carpet behind him and stares directly at the oncoming emotional freight train as it inches closer and closer to him. Dennis takes a step backwards, the heel of his left foot catches the whiskey glass as he treads and he stumbles. The glass takes off and shatters against the maple coloured bar, just below the Nataraja, whilst the chairman’s back crashes through the window behind him. For a split second, a Dennis Witherspoon shaped hole is cut into the glass, before the rest of the gigantic pane comes down and he leaves Angel’s sight.
         She looks blankly at the broken window and walks towards the edge, looking down and seeing the man who terrorised her life plummet into a car, hundreds of feet below.

Just like on that warm spring day, she closes her worn eyes. She raises her head and looks blankly, like her mind, at the office buildings outside before opening her arms and having no second thoughts. She leaps. Like a diver rocketing into an urban ocean, where the bottom is made up of cars, concrete and people. Blood and bones.

Given to fly, but destined to fall.