This is just a story.
Any resemblance to real people living, dead or metaphysical, is purely coincidental.
1.
No one sees him arrive. The street is dark and empty, and the dismal weather has driven the last of the shoppers indoors, where they can sit and go over their purchases with a hot cup of tea and the television. They smile smugly at one another, enjoying the roaring of the gale outside and the lashing of rain across their window-panes, safe in the knowledge that nothing outside can touch them now. They close their curtains and shut out the night. For a while, at least, they can pretend that the darkness doesn’t exist.
He comes into the world the way most of us go out of it: completely alone.
Even if anyone had seen it happen, there wouldn’t have been a lot to see. There’s none of the pomp or ceremony that you might expect from such an event; just a brief, eerie glow and then suddenly there is something where a moment ago there was nothing.
He is born on his feet, though of course feet aren’t something he’s ever had before. He shakes each of them experimentally, and then each of his arms, folding and unfolding his limbs with a mild curiosity. There’s no rush to his movements; he seems almost oblivious to the rainwater beating down all around him and running in mad rivulets across his face and neck.
The first person ever to see him is Leslie Saywer. She’s pulling her curtains closed, her children on the floor behind her and squabbling over whose turn it is to look at the Big Book of Dinosaurs. She is 37, juggling a part-time job and full-time child-care without the help of a husband, wife or significant other. She gets through with the help of her ageing mother, who babysits the kids whilst she’s at work, and with a jealously-guarded and blissful glass of red every night once she’s got them to bed.
But this isn’t her story. We won’t see her again - and she won’t see him again - but she just happens to be the one that glances out of her window at exactly the right completely arbitrary moment and catches a glimpse of him when he’s still brand new. When he’s drenched to the skin and shivering with a cold he’s never felt before. And she wonders, idly, how someone can look at the same time somehow so impossibly old, and yet also like a small child that’s managed to get itself lost.
For a second, she has the faintest impression of wings.
