A CONVERSATION AND A FEATHER (A Short Story)

       It was a lovely Thursday morning, and he was at the living room of their house, playing an Android game with the tablet, while his younger sister (who was temporarily staying with them because she had just given birth) was seated in front of him, busy preparing her baby’s stuff.

       She looked up and told him, “You’ve been playing with that for over an hour. Don’t you have other things to do?”

       “I am semi-retired,” he declared and smiled. He was still young to be a retiree, especially for his job, but he had lost his zest for his work. He was a writer and he used to be busy till the wee hours almost everyday, colorful myriad creatures swirling inside his head, all wanting to be free, but suddenly, his profession and the people around him had turned hostile towards him. Now, he only worked whenever he felt like it. He was just going through the motions each time he pounded the keyboard. It’s not that he had gone lazy, it’s just that he had lost the enthusiasm to be creative. “I’m thinking of quitting and just start a small business of my own. The only thing stopping me is that I don’t have a capital for it.”

               

       “Do you have a business in mind?” she asked.

       He shrugged. “I will think of it when I already have the money to start it.”

       She suddenly picked up her cell phone and tinkered with it. Then she put it down again.

       “What did you just do?” he asked.

       “I computed how much separation pay I am gonna get when I retire this year,”  she answered. “It’s not much but I can give you your capital to start a small business.”

       “You’re going to retire just so you can give me my capital?” a little incredulous, he asked.

       “It will be our business.”

       “Regardless,” he said. He knew she already had plans for the money—to travel abroad with her family. She had been dreaming of traveling to Paris.

       “Or you can wait a few more years so the amount will be bigger,” she said.

       “Yup. And I’d try to help put up the capital, if I could,” he replied then turned quiet.

       But he vastly appreciated his sister’s initiative. His  siblings, like in the case of many people, had always been his rock. He had always thought that siblings were guardian angels conceived and given birth to by your own mother. But then, he also had always thought that angels weren’t real, that they were just the products of minds with fertile imagination.

       You could only meet angels in dreams, he thought.

       When he was younger, he always dreamt of angels, and in his dreams, angels always complained that ghosts always stealthily and playfully plucked their feathers. And it hurts like hell, whined an angel. In his dreams, only ghosts could see and touch the wings of angels.

       His sister stood up when her baby, who was in the crib a few steps away from them, started crying.

       “Ouch!” his sister cried and a feather, white and shimmering, then slowly fell from her back as she walked towards the crib to put the baby in her arms...