Page 36 of Angel of Thursdays

“Jesus Christ. I’ll remind you.”

May beamed, reached across to steal a wing. Louis let him. Outside, the little dog had lost interest in the pumpkin. The fog thickened. The money sat in his account, one hundred and sixty dollars, and the lock screen sat in his phone, Schrödinger’s Angel.

He wiped his fingers on a napkin, pulled out the green notebook and a pen and scribbled Kevin C podcast PHONE NUMBER GOES HERE, then slid it across for Louis to fill in.

The notebook came back to him with the number in his brother’s handwriting and a small smear of grease in the corner of the page.

“You’re a piece of shit,” May told him, drawing in the checkbox next to his new quest.

“You have brain damage,” Louis replied. May couldn’t argue that one.

Outside, the fog kept pressing in. The chicken remained totally edible. The election was still happening, but not to him. Not then and there.

May sat with his kid brother in a restaurant on Balboa Street, thankful for all the things he didn’t have to think about at that moment. He drank his too-sweet boba and stared out the window. The dog from before came back to check on the pumpkin one more time before being pulled away into the dark.

10

CASSIEL

The week after Halloween, Cassiel identified two problems.

The first was the tick. One of the ceiling fan blades had warped, and at the lowest speed setting, it produced an asymmetric pulse every 1.3 seconds. He kept the fan on for air movement, even in winter, and it had been unproblematic until this point. Cassiel lay in bed in the dark and counted twenty-seven rotations before he got up, turned the fan off, and opened the window. November air came in.

He stood at the window in his boxers and a t-shirt and breathed until his arms prickled, then closed it, returned to bed, and stared at the ceiling where the fan was not moving, not ticking, and ultimately, not the problem.

The second problem had no tick. What it had was a shoulder blade that wouldn’t release from his ear, a jaw that woke him at three in the morning, and a persistent buzzing behind his breastbone that he couldn’t attribute to caffeine or arrhythmia. His social obligations had doubled in eight weeks and the effects of that had arrived in bone and nerve.

He tried the numbers. He’d calculated the total weekly hours of social contact, September versus November. Seventy-three minutes more per week, averaged. Not dramatic in absolute terms. But seventy-three minutes of interaction with a person whose patterns he was still learning took more out of him than seventy-three minutes of family dinner or Lauren or the shop. New people required effort, invited or not, and familiar people didn’t. His body made no distinction between pleasant and unpleasant.

The numbers explained what. They didn’t explain anything else.

On Halloween morning, he’d come into Sparrow late with nothing in the tank, his ring still, his hands inert. May had been waiting in a striped shirt and a wig for which no charitable description existed, and said nothing. Sat there across from him, doodling empty checkboxes in a notebook while the espresso machine cycled.

The ring had been still that morning. May had put his hand on Cassiel’s arm and then blamed it on brain damage. All Cassiel had managed to say was ‘okay.’

He hadn’t appreciated the enormity of this until the following week, replaying it at the bench with a pair of needle-nose tweezers in his hand and the Omega’s mainspring still unresolved. May had been quiet for him, despite what he’d said otherwise.

On the first day of November, a text came:

May

Nice Mr ratburn cosplay yesterday btw

Cassiel stared at it for six full seconds. Mr. Ratburn was the name of Arthur’s third-grade teacher, a cartoon rodent man with a green blazer whose primary character trait was ‘strict’ and had notably married another cartoon man a few years ago, to much furor across the country.

And Cassiel was—the comparison was⁠—

The green blazer. He’d been wearing a Spier & Mackay sport coat and May had looked at him and seen a gay rat. He rolled his eyes at the screen, left a ‘haha’ reaction, and did not text him back.

The texting had long since bled beyond Thursdays. One Friday evening he received a thirty-two-second voice memo of May saying “ottoke” in as many voices as he could muster. Cassiel had listened to it twice at his bench and then saved it.

The Thursday mornings had begun to move outside, too. Golden Gate Park was minutes from Sparrow’s door, and Cassiel knew which paths carried the least foot traffic at 10:15 on a weekday. The Lily Pond trail, the path behind the Conservatory where the ferns blocked the wind. They walked with drinks in to-go cups, the talking easier side by side, the six-inch gap between their shoulders holding steady, narrowing, then holding steady again.

The touching, too, had changed since Halloween. May’s shoulder against his on a park bench. May’s knee under the table at Sparrow, staying a beat longer than accident allowed. May reaching across to brush something off Cassiel’s jacket, a leaf, or nothing at all.

Thanksgiving fell on a Thursday, so the Thursday didn’t happen. May was visiting his own family. The quiet was the wrong kind. Cassiel knew restorative silence. His apartment at the correct temperature, under the correct lighting, nothing required of him. He’d resolved the ceiling fan problem and expected the other one to correct itself, relief from a week of conserved energy, his body returning to baseline. Instead, the quiet was a room where a clock had been taken off the wall. The nail hole was still visible and yet the room was fine. The room had been perfectly fine before the clock.

He didn’t text May on Thanksgiving. He drafted one attempt and deleted it. Happy Thanksgiving. The words were generic and the sentiment was empty. The holiday itself was hardly something worth celebrating to begin with. He couldn’t find anything that deserved a response, and sending something bland was worse than sending nothing at all.