“Are you an angel, then?” I asked, swallowing back the frantic wings beating in my throat.
“I thought perhaps thou wert,” she said. I floated on those rounded syllables and leaned into her breath, her arms, her wings, her everything. My world’s center shifted, and I fell toward it.
Then she kissed me.
Falling is a kind of attraction — it is clasping gravity to your breast. This is why we fall in love, not fly in it.
It took me a week to purge the sin of her kiss, rose stems wrapping my arms and legs. Holy women mustn’t love. The sin would weigh me down on the ascent so I would die before I reached Heaven.
It took a long time to ascend.
Love made my mother fall, so hard and fast her body never fully healed from the impact. A fallen saint is worst of all, for she drags the prayers of others to Earth with her. Now I must be holy in her stead.
I locked the hut’s door and slept under the open sky, but the chirping swifts in the eaves kept me awake.
“Hello?” said a voice behind the door. “Art thou well?” Six wings thumped against oak rafters. “Art thou there? Is it thee that is in’t? I am after falling with an urgent message. Wilt thou open the door?”
It took my grandmother forty years to ascend. When I was little, I would watch her on clear days high above the tree line, receding by inches as the sin sloughed off until she was light enough to take the next step.
The chimney swifts fed her on seeds carried from my family’s garden. Poppy and parsley, mostly, and rose hips in the winter. We would lay out sweetened seedcakes on holy days as a special treat, and the birds would swoop low and bear them up. Seeds are the only food a holy woman should eat. Anything else is weight.
One day, while pruning roses, I shaded my face but couldn’t see her anymore. I ran for my mother and brother, but their eyes could not find her either. No one knew how long she had been gone. She had disappeared like a steady star which quietly shuts its eye in the night, unmarked and unmourned.
The forty-year drought broke a week later.
She was the last saint to make the journey in living memory. Now all their prayers weighed me down.
Fall is both a season and an action. So is spring.
To spring is to act against entropy, but it is not true flight; it’s just another kind of falling. The darling buds of May belong to the Earth, not the sky. But you can find them in the sky-people’s gardens anyway, because the chimney swifts bring them seeds.
“Now then. Thine Paradise here, it does not be what I am expecting to find, sure,” she said through the door, voice so low and close I thought she must be leaning cheek to cheek with me through the wood.
“Well, what did you expect?” I asked, because I was lonely and bored from long hours of repentance.
“Gods and gardens. Whole cities of earth-walkers.”
“Well, we do have cities. Just not here,” I said. “I have to live alone because I’m holy.”
“With our holy women, so they do, too.”
“Do I disappoint you?” I asked.
“Well, thou dost not, precisely. Only, to be sure …” Her flapping wings stuttered to a standstill. “Thou dost not seem so happy as I expected thou wouldst.”
The chimney swift spends its whole life in the air, and comes to Earth only to build a nest from things caught in the wind, joined together with its own saliva. It sleeps on the wing, drifting in a torpor as it rests.
It dreams, perhaps, of falling.
A swift isn’t sure what would happen if it ever stilled its wings. Perhaps, like certain sharks, it would die if it stopped. Perhaps it would transcend its own nature, become a mad bird-saint hell-bent on betrothing Heaven to Earth.
We chatted through the door whenever I wasn’t purifying or repenting. I could feel myself growing lighter each day, light enough, perhaps, to bear the prayers. My mother had begun her ascent at a younger age than mine.
“Are you hungry?” I would ask the angel. “Do you need anything?”
We shared the seedcakes beneath the gap under the door one bite at a time. When they ran out, I dug up wild onions in the garden, and we ate those. That repentance was easy. Harder, though, to repent of her.
“What hath the name of thee?” she asked me.
“You know that. You said it once. Ananda, same as my grandmother.” It was an odd question. “What is yours?”
“Sano.” Dark, clawed fingers curled under the doorframe like inchworms. “Ananda, I’ve a message for thee.”
“No. Please, not yet.” An angel without a message would have to leave me.
I wanted to unlock the door, but I was afraid.
The holy women in the sky practice the art of falling in ascending stages.
First, an acolyte meditates until she can command each wing still. This is done in utter silence and isolation, for her wings never rest in life, and it takes immense self-control.
Next, she suspends herself over the void and stills her wings, one after another after another, as many as she can stand. Usually the first wing will flutter again before she gets through even the first dozen. It’s easiest to start with the wings of the feet, but these are also the most impatient, and won’t pause long.
When all her wings stop, she will slowly begin to descend. It can take years to fall. If she loses concentration for even a moment, she will jerk upward like a kite in a strong draft, borne up all the way to the cloud-cities, and will have to fall again from the beginning.
As they fall, the swifts bring them fruits from the earth to weigh them down. Holy women should only eat earth-food. Even the acolytes cultivate gardens from the seeds the birds bring. In this manner, the flying peoples’ gardens have become the wildest and most variable in the world.
Occasionally, their gardens sprout roses by mistake.
It grew harder to stay grounded. I filled my pockets with rocks to hide my lightness from my mother when she limped up the path that week.
“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” she asked, craning her neck toward my hut. It was a long walk from the village, especially for a lame woman, and we were accustomed to taking rose hip tea for refreshment. It was threatening to rain.
“We might disturb the nesting swifts,” I said. “I’ll prepare tea in the garden.”
I struggled to sit down. I had grown so light already, the ground shrank from my touch. My skin itched. Already prayers flocked to me, clamping to my skin like mosquitoes, opening the scabs left by the rose thorns. I scratched running sores beneath my sleeves.
“It’s nearly summer.” My mother poured herself a cup of tea. “I began my ascent in summer, you know.” It happened before my birth. My grandmother took to the air the next day, even before she knew if her daughter would survive her injuries.
“Mm-hm.” A prayer floated on my tea’s amber surface, its ten black legs floundering for purchase, its proboscis extended. I tried to sip around it.
“It’s a good season for it, don’t you think? Weather’s nice. Plenty of seeds to eat. I remember seeing the garden in summer from high over the trees, everything green and growing and the roses in bloom.”