“…no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root…”

—    Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“…the angel leaves their body as the person exits your life.”

—    Lang Leav, “Angels”

“Hey. It’s a root,” Hafiz Jesse Gabriel said to no one in particular. His best friend, the one who got him through the pandemic, Lya, had taken to calling Hafiz “Hey,” and it stuck. Without Lya around Hey got in the habit of talking to himself in third person. “What’s it doing in the desert?”

            The “desert” was a sandy patch at the side of his very old house. The story goes that a previous owner had buried a busted Victorian-era stove there that was made of soapstone, ceramic, and isinglass. Over two hundred years the soapstone crumbled to talc and quartz kernels, the ceramic tiles to clay-dust, and the isinglass to mica flecks. It had become a sandy spot where nothing could grow. For some reason it always seemed unusually hot there. Perhaps the sun beat down especially hard on the desert. Or perhaps it was remembering being a stove. Today the sun’s heat was rising from it.

            But here was a small white rhizome poking out of its center. Hey tugged on it revealing a feathery root that ran deep. He started to clear away the dust to dig deeper until he lay on his chest scooping away hot sand, following the root.

            The sun pressed its ancient heat on him and he began to get very weary. “Don’t let go, Hey. Even if you’re tired,” he said to himself.

            A tan rabbit loped carefully to the far end of the desert. Settling into a relaxed pose on its belly, it watched Hey. It didn’t seem to be afraid of him. Just curious.

            Hey uncovered a partly decayed rubber ball and brushed the sand from it with his free hand. He rolled it to the rabbit that didn’t flinch. “Here you go,” he said. He began humming the tune “Red Rubber Ball” as he dug. But he couldn’t remember the words except the part about the morning sun rising, “like a red rubber ball,” which he sang out loud.

“Isn’t there a saying about red skies?” he said.

            Hey noticed a mirage of filmy heat just at the surface of the sand, glinting from mica like the flashing of blue-green waves at sea. Seeing the rabbit across the sand, it appeared to be almost floating, a vessel at sea. And its fur seemed to be herringbone through the lens of hot air. “Ha. You’re one dapper rabbit,” Hey laughed. “Where are you drifting to?”

            The rabbit just watched him, until its large olive eyes slowly became narrower, only the smallest slit visible, and then they were closed. His rabbit friend had drifted to sleep.

            Hey was drowsy too. He had been holding on so tightly that he seemed to feel a pulse in the taut root. Or maybe it was his own pulse, his hand aching from its tight grip. The pulse seemed faint and irregular — almost like morse code, like it was a message for him, one he had no way to understand or make out. But something vital, necessary — a living thing — a dying thing conveyed in this root. It persisted, faintly.

            A memory arose of waking from a nap as a very small child. He had clearly seen an angel’s foot reaching its long pale toes toward him from a curl in the wool blanket that he’d just shoved off upon waking. At least he had thought it was an angel’s foot. He had touched it and it felt cold and hard — a ceramic foot. He had leapt from bed and the blanket fell with a clunk to the floor. “Abba! Abba!” he had yelled for his father, Abe, who rushed into the room.

Eventually, Abe had pulled up the blanket and held it high over Hey’s eyes. “Hafiz. See. No foot. No angel. You must have been dreaming.”

            Dreaming. He must have been dreaming. Eyes closed, Hey thought he heard a wispy, but kindly voice just at his ear — very close, “You struggle with something you think you’ve uprooted. But, oh, you earthen vessel, what you need is a feather.” Hey opened his eyes. He was alone. The herringbone rabbit was gone. Perhaps it had sailed off on its mirage. How long had he dozed?

            He crouched. Giving the root one last tug. Something seemed to snap somewhere he couldn’t see. He landed on his buttocks. To his amazement he was not holding a root at all, but a pale white feather about three feet long, bedraggled by sand. He shook most of the sand out of it. It was magnificent. Hey blew on it and a fine cloud of mica dust hung in the blazing sunlight — a rainbow from his own breath sparkled back at him, red, blue, yellow, green. And Hey smiled. “I can’t wait to tell Lya,” he said, just as some of the sand got into his eyes.

            Suddenly Hafiz awoke from all of this, his radio alarm clock playing the Coldplay song “What If” way too loud: “Take a breath. Jump over the side.” And his phone shone a white-green light of a text. The light was so bright it seemed to fill the room. Through bleary eyes he could see that the text was long, and it started, “Hey.”

Something tugged deep within him, just below his heart, feathery and light. It was Lya, his friend.

Jumping up, he kicked the blanket off and stretched. He had to really wake up to be able to see the message. Hey stood clearing sleepy seeds from his eyes. The blanket was looped about his foot on the floor. Everything seemed to be growing brighter. It was hard to see anything for all the searing light. He could just make out the rubber ball at the sill, the cold play of the stove’s reflective isinglass, and the herringbone newsboy cap Lya had left. “What a weird dream that was,” he said.

He stretched his fingers toward the ceiling as far as he could, trying to wake up, to get some circulation going. And, as he did so, Hey stretched the very tips of his long pale wings as far as possible, until their white feathers trembled and could just touch the opposite walls of his cabin — the mirror — the door.

And slowly, he turned his deep olive-colored eyes to a message he would never know how to comprehend. The letters seemed to swim in bleary light like dots, dashes, and drops of rain, endless and unfathomable. He tried again, but could not make it out, how it ended, or where it welled from. The words seemed to float in waves. Hey just could not see Lyas’s words, as they shook his phone, shook the room, over and over — endlessly rocking in the blinding green lightness of friendship torn free.

Reed H.F. Grad is the pen name of writer whose work has appeared in Black Moon Magazine, Entropy Magazine, Harpy Hybrid Review, Pif Magazine, and other magazines and anthologies. He writes from a small cabin atop an old house in rural New England.