The sweet smell of raw beef accented the aroma of honeysuckle. An open jar of hamburger sat slowly browning in the heat of the May sun. She was seventeen.
The tilting wingspans of the three vultures cycled ‘round like the blades of a ceiling fan against the high, blue sky; around and around, as though they were chained together like ponies at the county fair.
Cindy lay naked with her back to the sky. Her skin, anointed with meat, glistened in the sun. The scars on her shoulders and back were faded but conspicuous. She watched the sky in a mirror propped at a slight angle to the flat, mission-style roof that she lay upon, clothed only by its two-foot-high perimeter wall, with her dark curls shading her eyes, her mind focused on her inhalations and exhalations so as to lie still as possible, hoping to bring the winged reapers down to earth.
Cindy grew drowsy in the warm sun, and let her mind drift off to sleep.
As she slipped under the conscious surface, he appeared to her once again, soaring twenty feet or so above her in the viscous air, periodically breaking the rays of the sun with his mighty sails as he drifted downward in a tightening gyre.
She was jolted into consciousness as her sleeping body tipped slightly, and she woke to a wild flapping of wings, ten to twenty feet overhead, as the startled vultures strove to escape the sudden resurrection. In a moment, the sky was empty and silent. A moment later, Cindy pulled her clothes on, clambered over the perimeter wall, and eased herself down until her feet touched the top of the boundary fence.