WINDOW VIEWS - What She Has Seen

Some said, she couldn't possibly have seen what she said she'd seen. Hers was a small bay window on the second floor, on an oblique corner plot, not looking directly out on to the street at all. So at an angle to Seaborne Terrace, at a further diagonal to No 5. How she could have seen more than the briefest shaft of a shadow? A figure seen only from out of the corner of her eye, was no figure at all. That was, for them at least, not good enough.

However, she knew what she'd seen was far more than a shadow. It was at twilight admittedly, so she understood why people would doubt what her vision was of this liminal manifestation.  But, she would not renounce or revise what she had seen either. That figure was suggestive to her of something touched with the divine. It did not feel benign though. She was scared of it, by what she was not sure at the time. Realising later that she'd drawn too close to what was truly sacred, frighteningly so. There was something in the fluttering dusky wing of it as it flashed across the road and vanished through the door of No 5. 

This changed her so profoundly. For days she had the sensation of herself glowing, in a golden aura type way. The next day crossing the road to lay flowers where she'd seen the charcoal black angel. She did that regularly, until a local TV journalist approached her to ask why. Before that interview was finished, her vision, her sanity and her past was being called into question. and found wanting. It felt, to her, that her experience was being taken away from her and publicly trashed. 

Everyone behaved towards her differently after that. Pubs went quiet, people crossed the road. Homeless folk appeared to understand, perhaps because they were treated in a similar manner, or they had seen it too. But over time she hid herself away more in her room, becoming more reclusive. Until no one saw her at all. Several weeks later the landlord called round to find the flat apparently uninhabited. With only a scorched silhouette mark on the sofa to prove anyone had ever been there.