Coyote sneezed up a cloud of red dust from the lip of the crater. “What’s a Lucifer?”

“I am an angel.” He reconsidered. “Was an angel.”

“What’s an angel?”

“Shiny flying thing. Look.” Lucifer brushed a handful of reddish dust off the tip of his wing until the nacre of Heaven gleamed through. “My name means ‘light-bringer.’”

Coyote weighed this. “So, you’re a shiny thing whose name is ‘shiny thing?’ Ooof, unoriginal. But hey, that is a mighty fine pair of wings you’ve got there. If you ever get out of that hole, can I borrow them?”

“Can you what?” Perhaps Lucifer hadn’t heard right. The earth had walloped him hard, and his head was still ringing with it. He just wanted to roll over and languish a while longer in his crater, but he found self-pity difficult with Coyote’s brambled tongue lolling out and dripping saliva over his head. Finally, Lucifer scrambled upright and shook himself off. The crater filled with clouds of dust like a cauldron fills up with billowing steam, and Coyote sneezed himself cross-eyed.

“Come on now,” he wheedled in-between sneezes, “what do you really need those wings for anyway? You’re no good at flying, after all. Or you wouldn’t have fallen like that.”

“Well what do you need these wings for?” Lucifer asked. In a single flap, he cleared the crater’s rim and landed beside Coyote. Flying hurt, but he could already feel the itch of healing bruises at the base of his wings. The Lord had made His angels durable before Lucifer showed Him why that was a bad idea.

Up-close, Coyote looked like God had tried to make a wolf, but not all that hard.

“You see,” he said, sniffing at the lowest fringe of feathers on Lucifer’s left wing, “I have a few things to say to Raven that ought to be said face-to-face. So, if you’re not using these right now...”

“Some of my brothers have six wings,” Lucifer said, “and they could probably spare a couple, but I really don’t think I could lend out my only pair without receiving something in return.”

Coyote gave this due consideration. “How about my tail? It’s a fine tail. Much finer than your wings, if we’re being honest, but I won’t hold that against you. Not everyone can be a coyote.”

“And just what is your tail good for?”

Coyote’s furry cheeks puffed up as if he’d been stung by a hundred bees. “Good for? Bird-man, you have never seen a tail like mine!” He turned around and thrust his backside in Lucifer’s face. “See this?”

“See what? Mange?”

“I’ll just pretend you never said that, bird-man. No, see that patch of dark fur at the base of my tail? Smell it!”

“Thank you, no.” Even from a distance, Coyote’s backside smelled like rotting carcass.

Coyote seemed to realize that this required some explanation. “Never mind that whiff o’ rot, that would just be the buzzard’s pickings I rolled in this morning. You see, a scent like mine has to be protected.” He glanced over his shoulder and lowered his voice to a yip. “You know, like if for some perfectly innocent reason, I don’t want someone to know I’ve been around, I’d best cover it up with some other smell. But otherwise, you can go around and rub that spot up against anything you like and make it smell like my musk!”

“Why would I want to do that?” Lucifer asked.

“Why wouldn’t you want to?” Coyote asked back. “Look, it’s a great tail! Just hurry up and take it before I change my mind!”

Trade away his Heavenly regalia for a reeking mop of fur? Attach that to his body, and turn his perfect form into a mockery of the Lord’s labors?

Yes, absolutely.

“You’ll give them straight back once you’ve spoken to Raven?” Lucifer asked.

“Oh, you can trust me on that. So, what do you say? Swap?”

“Swap,” Lucifer agreed.

It was easy to pluck off his wings and plant them on Coyote’s back. Lucifer remembered how he’d been put together; it was simply a matter of working backwards. Coyote, for his part, detached his tail as if he’d done it before and tacked it to the base of Lucifer’s spine. Lucifer could feel it dangling there: smelly, scratchy and suspiciously damp.

Meanwhile, Coyote was admiring his new wings. “I look so fine!” he crowed. “Don’t I look fine?” He was a reddish-dun ball of fur between two splashes of white and, frankly, looked like someone had mashed a swan into a turkey. “I tell you, I was made to fly!”

Coyote gave the wings a mighty flap, pivoted in the air, and careened into a rock.

Lucifer had lost his seat in Heaven, the respect of his brothers, his Father’s love, and his purpose. Happiness should have been impossible, but he had stumbled onto a new inexhaustible font: watching Coyote try to master flight. For any other creature, the experiments would have been tragic, but Coyote seemed impervious to pain and discouragement. Between thumps, he found time to tell Lucifer the name of every plant and rock he was hitting.

“Yucca. Ironwood. Sandstone. Ooof, yucca again. Aieee, CACTUS!”

“Try not to flap so hard,” Lucifer suggested as he peeled Coyote off of a spiky pillar called saguaro.

Coyote shook off Lucifer’s hands, along with the harvest of spikes he’d gathered in his fur. “As if I needed advice! Especially from someone with no wings! Flying isn’t as easy as it looks, you know.”

“I had no idea how difficult it was until I saw you doing it,” Lucifer agreed.

Coyote sucked in air until his belly had swollen like a pufferfish. Lucifer had to suppress an urge to take a cactus needle and puncture him. If Coyote thought the gargantuan huff would get him airborne, he was sadly mistaken. One unlucky flap sent him tumbling into the trunk of an ironwood with a mighty thwack followed by an enormous belch.

“The sky,” Lucifer observed, “is up.”

“I was getting to that! Plenty of other directions to explore first.”

Coyote tried everything: pelting down the side of a rock formation with his wings outstretched; throwing himself off the tallest branches of the ironwood; jumping up from a standing position; begging the winds, with whom he said he was on good terms, for a bit of help. He even tried to propel himself by farting. Perversely, this approach worked best of all, until Coyote ran out of gas.

Perched in the scant shade of an ironwood, Lucifer marveled at Coyote’s genius. This creature would eventually succeed by running out of ways to be wrong.

And, sure enough, he did. It only took the rest of the day. By the time the stars came out of hiding, Coyote was confidently weaving through the air.

“Bird-man! Bird-maaaan! Look-look-look! I’m flying! It’s easy!” Coyote kneaded the air with his paws and stared around with bulging eyes. “I can bite the clouds! I can chase the birds! I can see the whole desert! I could piss on Wolf’s head, and he’d think it was rain!”

“You can go see Raven,” Lucifer reminded him.

“What, at night?” Coyote shouted down. “Don’t you know that ravens hunt at night? What kind of bird-man are you?”

Coyote was now a speck in the sky and rising higher. Hopefully, he wouldn’t overdo it and ascend to Heaven. The angels up there had already been through a lot.

The tail was getting itchier. It reeked of Coyote plus everything Coyote had rolled in that day. No angel had ever smelled so bad, and Lucifer found that idea satisfying.

“I have things to do!” Coyote called as he streaked off into the night. “Enjoy the ground! Take good care of my taaaaaaail!”

Lucifer killed time by guessing which parts of the yucca plant were edible. The population of a nearby anthill refused to help. No matter how small he crumbled pieces of the root, leaf and fruit, the ants would not take them. Either the yucca was one poisonous bastard, or the ants mistrusted Lucifer’s new coyote scent.

Every once in a while, Lucifer would catch himself thinking: wait until I show this to my brothers, and then remember with a wince that he was alone. Where was that stupid coyote? If he didn’t come back soon, Lucifer might end up crawling back into his hole.

Coyote finally returned late in the day, looking tired but pleased with himself. His muzzle and paws were sticky with honey, but he only had a few puffy stings to show for it.

“I can fly faster than a bee!...than most bees. One or two got me, and I think I accidentally swallowed one.”

“Was Raven home today?” Lucifer asked, abandoning the yucca leaf he had been shredding.

“Yes, but he refused to see me. Imagine that!” Coyote dipped down to pluck a fruit from the tip of a cactus. “I hope he remembers his manners tomorrow!”

And he was gone again.

The next morning, Coyote came tumbling over the horizon with the rising sun. He’d flown too high, and icicles clung to his shaggy coat; he landed and broke the ice off with a gleeful all-over body shake.

“I went to the river and snatched fish out of the water!” he reported breathlessly, “and then I went to the field and plucked corn from the stalks! And then I flew over cookfires and snatched meat from the spits! And then I flew away while everyone pelted rocks at me!”

All of these things sounded like fun, and Lucifer felt a strange itch to try them for himself. But first he needed his wings back. “So, have you spoken to Raven?” he asked.

“What, in the morning? Don’t you know that ravens sleep during the day?”

“If you cannot see Raven during the day and you cannot see him at night, when can you see him?”

“Sorry, bird-man.” Coyote trotted backwards until he was just out of Lucifer’s reach. “I’m no good with riddles.”

Lucifer picked up a rock and contemplated the distance from his arm to Coyote’s shaggy head. He still had an angel’s strength. If he timed the throw just right...

Coyote had a good sense of when to take off. The last few icicles rained to the ground as he bolted back into the sky, where even an angel’s strength couldn’t reach him.

“I can see where you’d be upset,” he called, his voice barely reaching the ground, “but what can you or I do about Raven?”

“Come down here. We’ll think of something together,” Lucifer offered.

“Thank you, but it’s awfully hot on the ground, and with my shaggy coat…”

“I could help you take it off.” Lucifer made a plucking motion with his fingers.

“Kind of you, kind of you, but I’d better go. I’ll give your best to Raven when I see him!”

And Coyote was gone.

Lucifer sat down on a rock to savor his own stupidity. There was an absence where he once felt the all-seeing gaze of the Lord judging him for his mistakes, but in its place was a newborn inner voice that said: you idiot. It was restless company, this voice. Not so bright now, eh, light-bringer? it asked. Outsmarted by a creature that perfumes itself by rolling in dung.

At this point, Lucifer would have traded anything to be rid of Coyote’s tail. Its putrid scent bored into his nostrils and could only be killed by rolling around in something even worse. A bed of crushed yucca fruit had taken the edge off, but that night Lucifer had dreamt he was sprouting spiky leaves from his shoulders, where his wings had been. In that dream he’d flapped and flapped, and fallen out of the sky, and the whole world had laughed.

Lucifer was beginning to understand the politics of the anthill. It was not unlike Heaven: each worker knew his place, and outsiders were not tolerated. A strange ant had stumbled in that night, either confused or desperate for shelter against the coming darkness. His demise had been brutal: one chain of ants had seized his forelegs, another grabbed his hind, and the invader was pulled in twain. His remains were hauled inside by the same ants who had disdained the yucca leaves.

“You have interesting tastes,” Lucifer told the hill. There was a light thump behind him, and he knew, without looking, that it had been just out of his range. “Hello, Coyote. Was Raven home today?”

“Yes, but he was just sitting down to eat. If I came in, he’d have had to offer me some, and that would have been terribly rude of me. To avoid imposing, I decided to come back tomorrow.”

“How mannerly of you.” Lucifer went to the ironwood tree and sat down with his back against its reassuringly solid trunk. It still felt strange to lean back with no wings in the way.

Coyote sidled up to the anthill that Lucifer had been exploring. A few remaining ants were cleaning up the carnage from their battle with the invader. Coyote watched them work for a few moments, and then his tongue caught up the entire brigade with a single swipe. He swallowed noisily. “I used to be the moon, you know. But I was too good at it, so they made me climb down and give the job to Rabbit.”

Clouds covered the moon’s face like the snowy paws of a giant, embarrassed bunny.

“You know what?” Coyote said. “I’m gonna go visit him! Won’t he be glad? I bet he’ll be glad!”

Lucifer watched Coyote disappear into the night sky. Poor Rabbit! More clouds were drifting across the moon’s face, but Lucifer doubted Coyote would be deterred that easily. That was the trouble with being the moon: it was hard to pretend you weren’t home.

All right, enough was enough. Coyote had been an education, but the fallen angel was tired of feeling like a fool. It was time to get his wings back.

With his path lit by the rabbit moon, Lucifer walked deeper into the desert. As he went, he picked a handful of dry cactus needles, choosing the sharpest and prickliest he could find.

A ground squirrel peeking out of her burrow was happy to answer a few questions in exchange for a fresh yucca stalk.

“Oh, everyone took a turn being the moon back in those days,” she assured Lucifer. “No one was quite as bad at it as Coyote, except for Raven maybe, what with those black feathers of his sucking up all the light in the sky.”

“Speaking of Raven,” Lucifer said, “does he live nearby?”

“Just there, past the rock shaped like a smiling head. You’ll find his nest up a dead tree, but this isn’t the best time to go a-visiting. Ravens hunt at night, you know.”

“So I’ve been told,” Lucifer said.

When Coyote fell from the sky, he made a much smaller crater.

“Say! You!” Lucifer called over the rim. He resisted the urge to say ‘bird-wolf.’ “Are you alive down there?”

Coyote whimpered a little as he scrambled to his paws and climbed out of the crater, dragging the sad remains of what had once been a pair of angel wings. There were peck marks all over his muzzle, and patches of fur had been clawed away.

“Raven’s gone mad!” he yipped, barreling into Lucifer’s arms. “I’ve barely said hello when he jumps on me, cawing about how he’s been plucking cactus needles from his backside all day!

“‘Raven,’ says I, ‘I was with Rabbit all night— ask him!’

“‘Liar!’ says he, ‘I could smell you all over my nest!’

“As if I’d ever waste my musk on that dump!”

“My musk,” Lucifer corrected gently, stroking Coyote’s mangy fur. “My tail.”

“Oh.” Coyote’s ears drooped. “Oh. So, uh, could I have it back?” he suggested meekly, gazing into Lucifer’s face with soulful eyes.

“That depends. Where are my wings?”

Coyote looked at the nubs on his back then jerked his head vaguely at the trail of tattered feathers stretching back into the desert. “I bet you can put them back together, no problem. If you find all the bits. Except the ones Raven used to plump out his nest; you don’t want to ask for those back.”