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Ducks.
There were ducks on the lake that day. Quite a few of them, in fact, which was not remarkable at all because there are nearly always ducks on lakes, and, to the ducks at least, this was their lake. Other details of that day have blurred into uncertainty. The air might have been perfectly still, or it might have been whispering with a breeze through the trees. The water might have gleamed, or it might have sulked, turning grey beneath the kind of clouds that gather before deciding whether or not to unleash a proper downpour. These things have a way of slipping from even the most careful memory.
But the ducks—the ducks remained.
Mallards. Five in total: two drakes, resplendent in the kind of green you only ever see in catalogues, promising things that will never look like that when they arrive, and three hens, sensible in speckled brown. Nesting season was nearly done with, which meant less frantic chasing about and more earnest dabbling.
There lingered, just at the edge of his recollection, some odd fact about drakes and their unsettling anatomy. However, the specifics refused to come, which probably was for the best. Romance among ducks was never quite what it appeared on the surface, but that might be true of other partnerships as well.
Now, food was the ducks’ main concern. Heads tipped down, tails comically upright, they sifted the murk with utter devotion, as if the entire world existed only in the inches of water before them.
He had seen them fed by strangers before: greedy beaks snapping at whatever offerings were tossed in their direction. Lettuce, grapes, even the occasional pear. But bread was their true delight. Bread caused the lake to erupt into a frenzy of wings and outraged quacks, as though they had received their literal manna from Heaven. Which, depending on perspective, they might have. Still, he wondered if the gift was more curse than blessing, given the way they waddled about afterwards, looking as though they regretted everything.
Yet, that particular day, no one had scattered crumbs across the water. The ducks were left to their own pursuits.
The bench had been there, too, of course. A simple wooden thing, worn soft with age. How many stories had it held, quietly supporting everyone that had rested upon it? The surface still bore the faint carvings of idle knives and pens, one side showing scratchings of initials joined by a heart, a declaration of love that might or might not have outlasted the mark itself. A small lock hung in a nearby fence, attached in a fit of human sentimentality that the bench endured in patient silence.
And he had not been sitting there alone.
That was the important part. The most important part, the detail preserved in aching, excruciating clarity. The memory of posture, the wrinkles in fabric where coat and shirt met. The line of a shoulder, the shift of weight. Every ordinary line became extraordinary when glimpsed out of the corner of an eye that was trying, with very little success, not to look. He had tried, as he always did, but he had failed, as he always failed.
It was the sweetest of failures. It left him with all the small impressions that could be tucked away, stored up, and savoured later. A turn of a smile, the peculiar shape of silence when it was shared. Treasures to bring out in quiet hours, polished by memory until they gleamed brighter than they ever had at the time. They warmed him still, those recollections, like fire coaxed from the thinnest of sparks. They allowed him the pretense, however fleeting, that such moments might not be borrowed, but belonged entirely to them.
And through it all, there were the ducks.
Drakes bowing their emerald heads. Hens vanishing into the water, resurfacing sleek and untroubled. Feathers shedding droplets that rolled away as though they had never been wet at all. Ducks are remarkably good at this sort of thing, as though designed for the express purpose of reminding the rest of creation that most problems are, in fact, water off a duck’s back.
It had been an ordinary day, really. The kind of day nobody writes down, because it doesn’t seem to matter. Which is, naturally, the sort of day that ends up mattering most of all. For what could compare to the silent luxury of a bench shared, of company wordless and certain? What could possibly matter more than that?
The memory had found him with an unexpected intensity, as though recalling it could summon its warmth back into being. The reminder itself was sustenance, like bread for the ducks—a simple, common thing, and yet, for him, a feast.
But none of the feathers he had seen on the lake that day had been black.
The one before him now was.
A single feather, dark as midnight, lying across his hands. Each barb smooth and perfect, each vane aligned as though it had never known disorder. It gleamed in the harsh white light that poured from above—light far too sharp to be sunlight, too pure to be kind. It made the feather shimmer with a cruel illusion, as though it still belonged to a living wing, as though it might yet lift itself back into flight. But it didn’t. It couldn’t.
It was separate now. Entirely, irrevocably separate.
Supreme Archangel Aziraphale, custodian of Heaven's latest grand and dubious project, looked at it and held very still. The ducks, the bench, the warmth of another presence pressed into memory, all rose up around him, luminous and fragile. And in his hands lay only this black feather, the only proof that such moments would never come again.
The next time he sat by the lake, there would still be ducks. Ducks always found their way to the water.
But he would sit alone.
And all the times after that.