There was a stain forming under Auntie, piss and shit and death-juice, and as I looked at her, I had a firm sense that it wouldn't be *right* to bring people up to her apartment with her like this. I'd seen dead people on TV. They were propped up on pillows, in clean hospital nighties, with rouged cheeks. I didn't know how far I could get, but I thought I owed it to her to try. I figured that it was better than going outside. She was lighter in death, as though something had fled her. I could drag her into the bathroom and prop her on the edge of the tub. I needed to wash her before anyone else came up. I cut away her dress with the sewing shears. She was wearing an elastic girdle beneath, and an enormous brassiere, and they were too tough -- too tight -- to cut through, so I struggled with their hooks, each one going *spung* as I unhooked it, revealing red skin beneath it, pinched and sore-looking. When I got to her bra, I had a moment's pause. She was a modest person -- I'd never even seen her legs without tan compression hose, but the smell was overwhelming, and I just held to that vision of her in a nightie and clean sheets and, you know, *went for it*. Popped the hooks. Felt it give way as her breasts forced it off her back. Found myself staring at. Two little wings. The size of my thumbs. Bent and cramped. Broken. Folded. There, over her shoulder blades. I touched them, and they were cold and hard as a turkey neck I'd once found in the trash after she'd made soup with it. # "How did you get out?" "With my wings?" "Yeah. With your wings, and with no shoes, and with the old lady dead over the tub?" She nuzzled his neck, then bit it, then kissed it, then bit it again. Brushed her fingers over his nipples. "I don't know," she breathed, hot in his ear. He arched his back. "You don't know?" "I don't know. That's all I remember, for five years." He arched his back again, and raked his fingertips over her thighs, making her shudder and jerk her wings back. That's when he saw the corpse at the foot of the bed. It was George. # He went back to school the day after they buried Davey. He bathed all the brothers in the hot spring and got their teeth brushed, and he fed them a hot breakfast of boiled mushroom-and-jerky stew, and he gathered up their schoolbooks from the forgotten corners of the winter cave and put them into school bags. Then he led them down the hillside on a spring day that smelled wonderful: loam and cold water coursing down the mountainside in rivulets, and new grass and new growth drying out in a hard white sun that seemed to spring directly overhead five minutes after it rose.