Reapers Are the Angels by Alden Bell Page B

eight stories tall, with one elbow akimbo, one fist on his waist and the other resting on top of an oil derrick. A severe and mighty thing, looking like a soldier of God who could shake the earth with his footsteps. The locals had told her about it, said it was an artifact of the past, a towering homage to the petroleum industry during its heyday decades before.
    Malcolm had to see it.
    So they took a detour and stopped and gazed up at it and felt puny.
    Who built it? Malcolm asked.
    I don’t know. The city, I guess.
    Why?
    She shrugged.
    I don’t know, she said. It makes people feel good to build somethin big. Makes people feel like they’re makin progress, I reckon.
    Progress toward what?
    It don’t matter. Up higher or down deeper or out farther. As long as you’re movin, it don’t matter much where you’re goin or what’s chasin you. That’s why they call it progress. It keeps goin of its own accord.
    Do they still build things like this?
    Not much, I don’t guess.
    Is that cause there ain’t no progress anymore?
    What you talkin about? There’s still progress. It just ain’t in iron man statues anymore.
    Where is it then?
    Lots of places. Like inside you.
    In me?
    Sure. In the history of the planet, there ain’t never been a kid like you before. A kid who’s seen the things you seen. A kid who fought the same fights you fought. You’re a new thing altogether. A brand-new thing.
    He scratched an itch on his nose and thought about that. Then he looked up again at the iron man.
    Anyway, he said, I like it. It ain’t never gonna die.
    He was right. He made her take the detour, and he made her stop and look up at it, and then everything after happened the way it happened, and there’s nothing she can do to go back and change it—but he was right about the iron man. It was a powerful sight and spoke of ingenuity and human pride and the deathless specter of evolution—a thing of mightiness that cast its shadow far out past the road, and beyond that to the fertile plains of America. A country of foolishness and wonderment and capital and perversity. Feeling like God at supper in the sky, horizons pink and blue, a frontier blasted through with breath and industry, like God himself could suffocate on the beauty of the place, could curl up and die at beholdin his own creation, all the razor reds of the West and the broke-down South always on a lean, elegantlike, the coyote howl and the cannibal kudzu and the dusty windows that ain’t seen a rag of cleaning since—
    Hey, James Grierson says. Where’d you go?
    She realizes she hasn’t said anything for a long time. There are some things she doesn’t like to think about because thinking about them takes up every part of her mind and body.
    Huh? she says.
    I asked you about the boy. What happened to him?
    He ain’t with me anymore.
    Did—what happened?
    James Grierson and his pale skin and his dark eyes. He is different now than he was before. He could swim in circles in the air.
    To shut him up, she leans over and kisses him hard on the lips. The bottle between them falls to the ground, and she can taste his breath and it tastes like her own breath, and he takes her head in his hands and kisses her like he would consume her if he could.
    She kisses him hard for a while, and it’s like the two of them are wolves nipping at each other.
    She lifts her body and swings it over to straddle him on the bench. Then she reaches down and unzips his pants.
    Hey, he says, pulling away from her kisses. Wait. We can’t—you’re—
    It’s okay, she says, feeling the wetness from his lips on her neck. I can’t have babies.
    She reaches down and takes it in her hand—it’s hot like it’s been cooked all through—and she presses herself down hard on his leg.
    But, wait, he says again. It’s not right. I’m twenty-five and you’re—
    Hush up, she says. Just do it. I’m done thinkin. Just come on and do it.
    She covers his mouth with her own and reaches under the