Angel in the City

She woke on a bench in Tompkins Square with pebbles in her hair and the taste of pennies on her tongue. She didn’t know her name. The sky was the color of old glass; pigeons arranged themselves around her like a crown.

“Hey, Sleeping Beauty,” said a woman with a cigarette and a waitress apron tied over a denim jacket. “You okay?”

“I think so,” the girl said. Her voice sounded like a chord she recognized but couldn’t place. “Do you work nearby?”

“Rosa’s,” the woman said, jerking her chin toward a flickering neon sign: OPEN 24 HOURS or 2 FOR 1 PIES depending on how it blinked. “You hungry?”

“Always,” the girl said.

“You got a name?” Rosa asked, walking her across the street.

The girl tasted words and chose one that fit like a coat she’d once loved. “Lark.”

“Cute,” Rosa said. “Coffee?”

“Yes,” Lark said. “Sugar, please. I like the way it makes the bitterness honest.”

Rosa raised an eyebrow. “You talk like a fortune cookie that went to college.”

“Sorry,” Lark said, meaning it. “I might be new.”

Rosa slid a mug over. The coffee smelled like storms. “New to what?”

Lark watched the old men at the counter stir their lives. “Everything.”

“Join the club,” Rosa said. “I’m Rosa. I am a recovering optimist.”

“From what?”

“From thinking people change because you ask them to,” Rosa said, then laughed. “What brings you to my fine establishment?”

“I woke up over there,” Lark said. “And I feel like a magnet.”

“For what?”

“Cracks,” Lark said, surprised at her own answer. “Things that need a shoulder.”

Rosa’s mouth softened. “Well. You found the right corner.” She topped off the cup. “You got somewhere to go?”

“No,” Lark said. “I am very good at being alone and not liking it.”

Rosa’s hand paused. Her eyes were a city at 3 a.m., half closed, still lit. “Yeah,” she said. “Same.”

“Tell me something true,” Lark said.

Rosa’s knuckles went white. Then she set the pot down. “My son died in this neighborhood,” she said, voice flat as a fork. “I told him to toughen up the night before. I wanted him to hate weakness less than I did. That’s the worst thing I ever did.”

Lark didn’t reach across the counter. She didn’t say I’m sorry like a Band-Aid. She said, “Do you want me to sit here while you say his name out loud?”

Rosa looked at the floor like it might forgive her. “Gabriel,” she whispered. “Gabe. He liked dumb magic tricks and garlic knots and making me mad.”

“Gabriel,” Lark repeated, like a window opening. The pigeons pressed their little dinosaur feet against the diner’s glass. “You loved him. You love him.”

Rosa nodded once, sharply. “I don’t know how to stop apologizing to a person who isn’t here.”

“Start with yourself,” Lark said, surprising herself again. “Say, ‘I didn’t know how to love a hurting person yet, but I’m learning.’”

Rosa laughed, a wet sound. “You a therapist?”

“No,” Lark said. “I’m…a somebody.”

“That’s something,” Rosa said, and slid her a plate of eggs on the house.

After breakfast, Lark found herself on a roof in Bushwick, drawn by the hiss of a can. A boy in a hoodie was painting wings twelve feet high. His knuckles were bandaged; the bandage was the color of sky before a bruise.

“Those are crooked,” Lark said.

He didn’t startle, which meant he lived in a world where strangers arrived on roofs. “They’re supposed to be.”

“Nothing is supposed to be crooked,” Lark said. “It just is.”

He squinted at the outline, then at her. “You ever paint?”

“I hold color,” Lark said. “It goes where it wants.”

“That’s poetry,” he said, but not unkindly. “I’m Theo.”

“Lark.”

“Like the bird?”

“Like the verb,” she said.

Theo laughed, then winced. “You ever mess something up so good you can’t tell if it’s grief or guilt?”

“Which one buys you a ticket back?” Lark asked.

He shook the can. “I was supposed to keep an eye on my friend. I was high. He got higher. He didn’t come down.”

Lark sat on the ledge, feet dangling, not afraid. “What would you say if he were here?”

“That I wasn’t bored,” Theo said, voice breaking. “That I was just scared of sitting still.”

“Say it anyway,” Lark murmured, to the sky, to the pigeons now landing in a shining row along the parapet. “Paint it. Make the wings crooked. Make them honest.”

He angled the spray. The mist haloed in the late light. “You’re weird,” he said softly.

“Am I?” she asked.

“You make me feel like I haven’t ruined everything,” Theo said, stepping back. “That’s weird.”

They stood together, watching a pair of crooked wings become a place to rest. A breeze slid over her shoulder blades warm as breath. She reached back without thinking and felt ... not feather, exactly. Something like heat remembering shape.

“Careful,” Theo said, eyeing her back. “You’re bleeding light.”

“It’s the sunset,” Lark said, and stood up.

On the B train, a man in a suit held an orange bottle like a secret. He was sweating; his eyes pinged around like trapped flies.

“Bad day?” Lark asked, sitting beside him.

He smiled in that way that is not a smile. “I just got promoted to no one,” he said. “I am the newest CEO of Failure Inc.”

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Isaac,” he said. “Do not joke about the Bible. My parents already did.”

“I wasn’t going to joke,” Lark said. “I was going to ask if you want me to hold that for a minute.”

He stared at the bottle, then at her. “Why would you do that?”

“So your hand can learn not to,” she said.

He handed it over. His fingers shook as if something were leaving them, not the bottle. “I lied on my resume, Lark. And I told my father I was fine, and I am not. And I have not told anyone the truth in three years without a spreadsheet.”

“Tell me something true,” she said.

“I am so tired,” Isaac said. “I want to sleep without dreaming about email. I want someone to say I can come over with takeout and not be brave for an hour.”

“That is not a lie,” Lark said. “Do you have a person?”

“My sister,” he said. “We haven’t talked since I said her art wasn’t practical.”

“Call her,” Lark said. “Tell her you were an idiot.”

He laughed, a sound like tripping and catching yourself. He dialed. When he said “hey,” his voice became a younger one; his shoulders lowered. He started crying. He didn’t stop.

When he got off at Seventh Avenue, he hugged her without asking. “Who are you?” he asked.

“An excellent seatmate,” she said.

“Don’t jump,” he said, inexplicably, and then looked embarrassed. “Sorry. You just ... people like you don’t know how much we need you until you’re gone.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Lark said, and meant it for him, for the pigeons, for Rosa and Theo and the boy across the aisle drawing a dinosaur. The lights flickered, once, twice, like someone agreeing.

That night, she stood on the Manhattan Bridge and watched the city breathing in rectangles. A kid on a scooter stopped, stared at her, and said, “Are you an angel?”

Lark laughed. “I’m just lost.”

“You smell like rain before it happens,” he said, very seriously, and scooted on.

She touched the bone under her skin where wing might be if wing were real. The air thrummed. Down below, sirens stitched a thin blue line through Chinatown.

Rosa found her before dawn, holding two paper cups with a careful tenderness. “I made you coffee,” she said. “It’s terrible. It’s ours.”

“I like terrible,” Lark said, accepting it like a sacrament.

“I wrote Gabe a letter,” Rosa said. “Then I read it to the alley. I don’t know if that’s crazy.”

“I’m new,” Lark said. “I don’t know what anything is. But I know that was brave.”

Rosa looked at her for a long time, then said, “You got people?”

“I have corners,” Lark said. “And roofs.”

“And me,” Rosa said, not asking. “You got me. Come by when your magnet starts buzzing.”

“Thank you,” Lark whispered.

By noon, Theo texted a picture of the finished mural: crooked wings over a bench. “For anyone who needs to sit,” the caption said. “You should see it in person. It looks like it might take off.”

By evening, Isaac sent a photo of a table covered in takeout containers, a girl with purple hair in the background holding up chopsticks like a truce. “You were right,” he wrote. “I am an idiot. Also, dumplings.”

Lark read the messages on a stoop in Harlem, pigeons lined like punctuation at her feet. People passed ... limping, laughing, dragging, dancing ... and every time her heart snagged on someone’s jagged edge, she stood and walked toward them, a coin in her pocket she didn’t remember earning, a sentence on her tongue she didn’t remember writing.

“Tell me something true,” she would say.

And the city told her, over and over, until her bones hummed with all of it, and her shoulders ached with a soft, impossible weight she never turned to see.

- Julia O’Hara 2025

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