On the fortieth day of winter, I felt a false spring. The sun cast itself deep into the valley, scattering a flock of southbound birds like fish beneath a plunking stone. The world had been warm since Christmas. Animals, confused into lust, rubbed and sprayed against stucco and adobe, packing the air with territorial scents—white vinegar, ammonia, and falling smoke. The menagerie's rankness found its way into homes with house pets and taunted them with desire, pressing cats and dogs to spray silk cushions and cherry wood with jets of amorous urine. The funk trapped and amplified itself in the early morning inside my lover's one room home, causing me to leave his side and cross the warm stone path towards a patch of fresh and dewy grass by the road. As I stood there, smelling the wet earth, I noticed a shining thing in the gutter, and as I approached it I saw that it was two, two white wings, one facing up and one facing down.

         On the fortieth day of winter, I felt a false spring. The sun cast itself deep into the valley, scattering a flock of southbound birds like fish beneath a plunking stone. The world had been warm since Christmas. Animals, confused into lust, rubbed and sprayed against stucco and adobe, packing the air with territorial scents—white vinegar, ammonia, and falling smoke. The menagerie's rankness found its way into homes with house pets and taunted them with desire, pressing cats and dogs to spray silk cushions and cherry wood with jets of amorous urine. The funk trapped and amplified itself in the early morning inside my lover's one room home, causing me to leave his side and cross the warm stone path towards a patch of fresh and dewy grass by the road. As I stood there, smelling the wet earth, I noticed a shining thing in the gutter, and as I approached it I saw that it was two, two white wings, one facing up and one facing down.
       I gazed dumbly at the things. They were diamond white with a dusting of an ivory something around their middles, with ladyfinger feathers arched like scythes over a soft spell of fuzz. There were no beaks or feet or tails in sight; the wings had no hint of a biological past despite a tiny bone that protruded from a cradle of down. They remained superbly clean despite the blackened streets that prickled with heating garbage pales and scraps the cats dragged out. I expected to see parasites, but was greeted with dew speckles and soft naps of peachy fluff. They looked as though they had been ripped from a cherub.
       I ran to my lover, who had followed me outside towards the day. He paused by gutter, took a look, and gasped,
                                     "Angel wings!"

       He immediately caught himself, half ashamed by superstition, half giddy with the scent of animals. Of course, they cannot belong to an angel, surely.
       I leaned in to touch them, and hesitated. I thought of the summer before, when jays and crows dropped dead from their high wires and the government told us not to move them, not even a little bit. The mosquitos rose with the heat, piercing the birds and passing on a fever that swells the brain and seals the lymph and unnerves the lives of Californians from equinox to equinox. Although the chances of contracting the foul plague are very slim, no risks were taken. Men from vector control donned their plastic suites and peeled chickadees off pavement, bluebirds off tarmac. Fear fell fast like night, and the public slathered themselves with repellents and passed by nestlings that had fallen from their mothers' branches. That summer, I found a sparrow in the road, hopping and tipping, eye cocked towards the tree line, peeping up a scream. I knew that it had little time left, and feared that, if left to its own distemper, would die an ignominious death in the street or deep in a gutter. As I bent down to scoop up the tiny thing, a passerby stopped and scolded me for my reckless handling of the beast.  I ignored him, and nestled the bird beneath the far corners of a crepe myrtle. It released a joyful sound. The next week my spine froze and I was left holding myself in the night in an extraordinary pain that emanated from my hips up through my solar plexus and out my cracking lips.
       Perhaps this early heat, this Indian spring, had stirred the mosquitos to bite the birds, and as I hesitated, my hand wavering over the right wing, my lover reminded me that, if indeed these were—of course they must have been—a bird's wings and not an angel's, they might carry a deadlier disease, one that newscasters and Nostradamus alike predicted would wipe out billions and trillions of people and cells and bring about a new world order, a hot malaise, a planet of the birds.
       What are the chances, I thought, that these precious wings could harbor the seeds of a great pandemic? Should I report them to the government and have them whisked away and burned? Or should I rest them beneath a blooming azalea and wash myself clean?
       My mind wandered from their disposal to the circumstances of their arrival. Perhaps a neighborhood animal, drugged with heat and craving, had peeled the wings off a bird of an unknown feather and dragged them out to the gutter in a florid madness. Yet, there was no carcass or trace of meat in sight. I knelt to eye the space between the wings, and noticed that, despite their close arrangement, there was no connecting sinew or tendon between them. Whatever brought them out had done so in two trips, and had tried to re-arrange them in their natural formation, only to have accidentally flipped one over so the down faced up towards the sun. I wondered if the predator had the insight, or foresight, or tenderness to so tidily display, side by side, the last lovely pieces of his meal to the world.
       And I hoped for this, for I had heard of the neighborhood kids and their cruelties. I had an ink black cat that, tempted by the same Indian spring, scratched and howled at the doorpost of my home in a vain attempt to escape towards the steaming street. I plucked him from the post and held him in my arms: I had heard that black cats, in this valley, went missing during high times like these.  Some say it is voodoo, or initiation rights, or madness that slaughters the hoot doves and black cats and cottontails and weaves them into pendants and shrines, stealing them away and leaving them to turn up on a lawn or in a gutter. I hoped that these gentle wings were placed so perfectly by fate, by a pragmatic and honest predator, rather than a calculated human hand.
       Perhaps, I thought, these wings found themselves in the valley by some other event, something less nefarious. They were so flawlessly pearlescent, so deeply white, that they could not have been native to these parts, where mourning doves and quails hide beneath ash-gray plumes. Maybe they belonged to a wedding dove that had been caged and then released from an ivy-laced veranda after the first kiss of the rest of a lifetime of love and good health. Perhaps the dove scattered into a flock of southbound birds and missed its trainer's call, and eventually fell from the sky into the hands of something. Long after the wings disappeared, I would learn that a wedding dove is really just an albino pigeon squab from the family columbidae and that "pigeon" is from the French pijon but "dove" is an English word.
       I crouched above the wings and wondered if they possessed a memory of their misfortune; if they indeed knew what they were and how they got into the gutter of my home; if they knew if they were loved or if they were feared; if they knew where they came from; if they could feel the spring.