A man jumps off a cliff.
I’m gonna need some wings, he thinks.
He reaches into his backpack to get some things — wood, nails, a hammer, some string — and then gets down to work building.
That ground is coming up awful fast, he thinks, I’d better work a little quicker.
The wings he’s building just begin to flap —
When the man suddenly slams into the ground.
Little bits of the man go everywhere.
It’s a mess.
Really, it’s awful.
But then, lo, the angel rises up — effortlessly, out of the wreckage.
You know, it says, these actually work quite well!
And it whizzes off to find breakfast.
Ben Loory lives in Los Angeles. His fiction was a finalist in the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers Contest and his story, “The TV,” appeared in The New Yorker. Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day coming soon from Penguin Books. As a screenwriter, Ben Loory has worked for Jodie Foster, Alex Proyas and Mark Johnson. He is a graduate of Harvard College, holds an MFA from the American Film institute, and is a member of the Writers Guild of America west. Interviews at The New Yorker and The Emprise Review. Non-fiction at TheNervousBreakdown.