Painting Angels |10,769 PCS|

painted over them.

She didn't mind. It had become a kind of conversation. She would arrive at two in the morning with a rucksack of spray cans clinking like wind chimes, and paint a single pair of wings across the grey concrete: magenta feathers bleeding into tangerine, turquoise tips dripping down the wall like rain. At eight, a man in a hi-vis jacket would arrive with a roller and a tin of Municipal Grey and erase her. At two the next morning, she would start again.

People had started to notice. Commuters slowed down to see whether the wings had survived. Somebody chalked a scoreboard on the pavement: MEI 30, COUNCIL 30.

On the thirty-first night, Mei did something different. She didn't paint the wings onto an empty wall. She stood with her back against the concrete, under the streetlight, so that her own shadow fell across it, and she painted the wings growing out of the shoulders of her shadow.

The colours went on brighter than they ever had. The paint ran faster, as if it were in a hurry. And when she sprayed the very last feather, the wall gave a soft, papery sigh.

Mei felt something settle on her shoulders, light and warm and impossibly heavy all at once. Behind her, very slowly, something unfolded.