Angel

• Rachel Beverly, Grade 9
• Short Story
• 2009

My mother’s favourite colour is white. She loves it for its purity, its unmarred simplicity. The way when it mixes with anything, it makes it lighter too. She loves it for its peace, its benevolence. Like the wings of an angel, she told me once.
As I look out the window of the bus, I watch the bright white spark of the sun traveling along beside me, beyond the trees lining the railway track we drive beside. It’s almost evening. The sun sinks toward the ground, about to leave us all to travel on in the darkness as best we can.
The bus pulls up and I sling my backpack over one shoulder. For a moment all is movement, hurrying off the bus. Then, all of a sudden, I am left alone, watching the bus receding into the distance. I turn away.
The walk to the cemetery from the bus stop is long, but I don’t mind. I like watching the sun slowly descend behind the houses, glimmering through the leaves of the jacaranda trees. A couple of cars whoosh by, but no one pays any attention to me. I could be just any neighbourhood girl. I like the way that sounds. ‘Just any other girl.’ But I’m not. I’m walking quietly toward the cemetery, contemplating all that’s brought me here. Somewhere, back up the road I’ve already traveled, my family is waiting for me to arrive home. I look down at my feet when I think of the worry I’m causing them, but this is important. Special. Over the years, it has become vital to me. So my feet keep on carrying me forward, and I go along with them.
I enter the cemetery just as the sun disappears over the hill, its golden nimbus so expansive it seems to fill the sky with its brilliant orange light trailing after it. In the twilit half-light, I sit cross-legged by one grave in particular, just one more headstone among the carpet of them rolling over the hills. But so important to me, like a part of my heart.
For the first time since leaving home I open my backpack and I pull out a little figurine. It’s an angel. Her wings are purest, brightest white.
I sit her atop the headstone and watch the last of the light disappear behind her.
After a while a new light illuminates the scene, harsher than the sun. Leaving the headlights off, a man climbs out of the driver’s side of the car parked at the gates.
“Jessica?” he calls. I look up, over towards him, but he can’t see me, lost among granite reminders of the dead, and I can’t answer him, choked by tears. “Jessica Marshall?”
So I stand up instead, and run over to him. Dad holds me close, and he’s shaking from the tears as well.
We drive away from the cemetery gates again. I can’t see her grave among all the others, and it makes me sad.
“Bye, mum,” I whisper, and we drive home through the dark.