You see an angel on the inner-city train, sitting between a homeless woman with glassy eyes and a student of a school whose name you can’t remember.
It is starlight under the mid-evening fluorescents. All wings and eyes and broken bones. You understand why Gabriel told Mary not to fear.
The archangel Saraqael lives in the alley between the church and the liquor store. You wear your best suit to meet her there on Fridays. She doesn’t notice. Her mouth always tastes of blood. Afterwards, you buy lottery tickets and forget to check the numbers.
The third is locked in the basement of your grandmothers house. Through childhood, you talk to it through the vents and leave peanut butter sandwiches at the top of the stairs. On your eleventh birthday, it whispers back; tells you to call it grace. You tell her your grandfather fought in the great war. She asks which one?
Remiel and Raguel live above the diner across town. The floorboards are rotting and it always smells of frankincense. A tarot card appears under your door, three of swords, with their phone number in metallic sharpie.
You cannot remember the next. Maybe it was your second grade teacher with the bandaged wrists, or the imaginary friend that scared you out of sleep.
Raphael gives the eulogy at your funeral. Your mother thinks she recognizes him from the bakery down the street.
The stars you see are already dead, he will say. So are the people, you will come to learn. But does it truly matter? Do you love something less for the absence of it? Love perseveres.
They’re on their deathbed by the time your fingers first touch. Six feet deep on your three-year anniversary. Returned to dust on the first Tuesday of your favourite month.
They are here and then they are gone. You will love them always. You buy the rights to a dying star; name it after your sweetheart.
You should like to mention fruit.
Clementines and figs and mulberries. Persimmons and rhubarb and custard apple.
Your mother slices citrus, sunshine on fine-bone china, and brings it to your room. You simmer the peels, cinnamon and cardamon, and light up from the inside out.
Your best friend’s peach tree is dying. On the last day of summer, you pick out the bruised; turn them into a jam. That weekend, everyone on the block washes down their coffee with the honeyed taste.
You meet a girl who prays five times a day. Her heart, you think, is on loan. By spring, she is praying for you.
You learn the language of another just to wish them good morning. You do not see them again for a month. When they return, you have learned to ask after their children.
On vacation, your brother finds a wolf and comes back with a dog.
You knew a girl in middle school who stopped eating. Her ribs ballooned and the doctor said it was depression. The priest cried stigmata. You saw her in the changerooms once, blood caked under her fingernails from clawing at the pimples on her back, and decided they were both idiots. By ninth grade, she’d sprouted wings. They bury her in moss covered dirt, and you pray to her sainthood all your life.
The closest you get to stigmata is grass stains on your acid wash jeans. You are no further from God.
On your springbreak roadtrip, you count every Hell is Real! sign on the freeway and run out of fingers. If it is, you cannot see it. A snake bites your leg in the sin city desert, and you remember you left your tourniquet in the rinse cycle.
Even the tallest of angels seek glory in purpose. You are content watching the wind through the trees.
This is humanity. Bear witness.
Maybe heaven is a garden.
Maybe it is a path lined with vermillion dahlias, or a lake that spits blushing pearls. The birds sing in iambic pentameter and the air is honeysuckle through a straw. Your head is always cotton wool.
Maybe it is a smoke-filled club in the Bristol underground where you pull yourself in and out of existence to a technicolour beat. Here, you are a god of your own making. Everything edible is pink, and the bartender tells you he was born backwards.
Perhaps it is the street-market in Bangladesh you visited two years ago on long service leave. The fishmongerhands glisten in the sun, and the air you breathe is ten thousand volts.
Perhaps your childhood bedroom and the sound of the moving van hitting the curb on its way up the driveway. The pearly gates sit in the mouth of the boy you first learned to kiss. God waits in the space between your second and third ribcage.
You ask the angels, and all they do is laugh.
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Author:
jaye (
Offline) - Published: January 8th, 2023 05:50
- Category: Unclassified
- Views: 7
Offline)
Comments1
this was an amazing introduction to the the ink you are so very clearly capable of spilling when the need arises ... I sincerely hope you will allow more to flow across subsequent pages .. Oh' and welcome to MPS .. I hope you hang around forever ....... Neville
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