How To Pluck An Angel

Shiva was a good daughter. Her only fault was that one day her skin, usually tan and fine, was flaking off.
It was a small moment in the shower, she reached back to lather her shoulder and there were little ridges there behind her shoulder-blades. Dumbfounded, she ran to the mirror where she stood in naked shock until her mother and grandmother and sisters all stood beside her, observing in horrified silence. There were mounds growing out of her back.
"Devil," the old woman spat.
Shiva went to school disguised in as many fabrics as she could find that morning. Her friends whispered that she had caught religion. The boys now considered her exotic. She would have been glad for the attention, but she could feel the fabrics digging into her back, hot and itching.
The next day went no better. Schoolyard intrigue, as morbid and violent as any high court, circled around the girl in black. Shiva only felt nauseous.
That day, her wings had come out like malformed knobs of flesh, and everywhere her skin was flaking off, turning golden and hard. Even her irises reflected metallic shine.
"So..." Arya slid in with that dreadful phrase, cementing the beginning of a prying conversation. In her mouth, those two letters may as well have been the hammer and crowbar of a social burglar.
"What's under the dress?"
"Nothing. I don't want to talk about it."
"Oh come on, you can tell me. I won't tell." Shiva knew for a fact that she could not tell, and she was already irritable. Only one good way out.
"Would you shut up and leave me alone?" she said, snarling beneath the covers.
Arya's jaw dropped, before her eyes hardened and she slunk off to an enemy table where accusatory eyes began to flash. A sad excuse for a friend.
Shiva couldn't eat. The world was spinning, crashing into her head like it was the pinnacle of the vortex into oblivion.
Arya and the others at her table were glancing at her too much. She felt a pain in her chest, like a spear had pierced her lung.
The second Shiva walked into the yard, it was over. Bodies lined up around her, pushing, prodding. She couldn't breathe in the glaring sunlight. Then the hands came. A swarm of hands, picking, pulling at her from all directions. She felt, she thought, at the center of some terrible mandala made of reaching hands and tangled bodies. These were not her classmates. There, outside the inner hub of hands, an outer rim of shadows watching, letting it happen, like watching a pack of dogs ripping apart a piece of meat.
The concealment was stripped from her shoulders. Shiva held herself, strangers's tears on her cheeks coming unbidden as the crowd dilated, taking in her wilted, blackened wings, the rest of her body covered in black-mottled bronze feathers.
One moment was breathless. Before the hands contracted, descending, peeling the feathers from her back, her arms, her face, her legs.
Nothing in Shiva was sacred.
They took everything.

She spent the rest of the day at home and the day after. Slowly, the pockmarks left by the feathers filled, and she turned into a pale marble creature with dark empty eyes, eyes of scorn. Words did not pass her lips.
In her chest, she felt one last crest covering her heart, swelling with-- what? Pain? Humiliation? Loss?
Her family avoided her completely, but she didn't mind. When the house was empty, she left, drifting to the city park barefoot.
She laid among the bushes of roses in the failing orange twilight, heady with the scent of rose petals and earth and the drone of insects.
She pulled at the spike, and it slid out, slick with blood, and she smiled as her anima flowed into the mulch, staining her stomach and fingers with ochre.
From her hollow statue, gold-flecked roses flowered, and the rose gardens never were so pretty again.
And if someone cared to notice, they might have seen that a few mottled-bronze feathers had been laid at her feet.