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Description
They sent an angel, of course. They did every year, and the angels fluttered back with broken wings, pearlescent skin chipped like old porcelain. It was easy enough to repair the cracks that leaked blood like quicksilver, to mend the fingers bound in strips of cloth where sections had gone missing. But the angels were never quite the same again. Their eyes darker, warier, like pearls dipped in ink. Their golden hearts a pale dying amber within their translucent chests.

(Sometimes at night, you can pass a clump of the ones that have been sent down, clinging together, their sleep interspersed with screams, wordless sounds like the child-cry of a wounded panther. They toss and turn like maggots writhing in a fetid corpse, clawing at nothing.)

If all had gone as planned, the angels would return each year in full regalia to kneel at the Maker’s throne and offer a precise report of the progress of Man. It was not expected that Man should be perfect—heavens, no—but it would be nice (the Maker thought) if now and then He might receive a report that consisted of something other than terrified whimpering.

Still, each year on Christmas Eve, the Maker sent out an angel or two to see what Man was up to now, hoping against all experience that he might be treated to an articulate report. Faith-based creations tend to rely on faith quite a bit, after all.

But the angel this year was a stronger sort. He had fought in the Heavenly Campaigns when Lucifer stormed the Kingdom, cannons blazing; he had tended to the hurt angels when they returned from the realm of Man. He knew what he faced—or at least he had a vague notion—and he felt he would be able to carry through, for his innocence (and angels value innocence above all) burnt within him to the point of tangibility, as if it were a coating one might taste upon the tassels of his wings.

And so he left, descending from the heavens in the cold of winter to discover with delight the fragile beauty of snow.

“Is this Earth?” he asked with shock, marveling at the crystalline tufts that fell upon his bare skin with a kiss like cold fire. And he marveled, too, at how his voice sounded in the unfamiliar air, rippling and resonant as a well-varnished cello. He had never heard anything so enthralling before, and he could not help but indulge in a moment of narcissism, admiring his skin, his feathered wings, how the pressure of this strange air sent him spiraling at the slightest motion on his part.

It was just his luck, of course, that the first human he should see upon touching the ground—lightly, toe by toe, relishing the firm manner in which the concrete pushed back—was her.

She was a pale thing, young still though no longer a child, eyes like liquid onyx and dark brown hair. Such strange eyes…he could not help but stare at the contrast, dark, dark, and skin as white as the snow itself. He stared so hard that he forgot to blend in, to hide his angelic countenance, until he noticed that the girl was staring back, blushing. But he did not want to hide, to disappear. He did not want the roses in her cheeks to ever flow back to her heart.

But they did, and slowly the pale girl came closer, one hand extended like a question mark to touch his glistening arm. He watched as if he were a third party, with curiosity, with trust, yet all the while feeling her touch to the core of his vast golden heart. Humans were warm, he found, and this startled him more than anything—he had never known heat before. He could not resist raising a hand in turn to shyly touch her cheek, and jumped, startled again. Humans were soft, too, as soft as…he did not understand the comparisons for it yet, his comprehension of this world was taking too long to congeal. Soft as…soft as…

He found the word in a flower pinned to the girl’s collar, out of place in the cold weather, incongruous as the angel himself.

“Rose petals…” he breathed, wondering at the strangeness of it all.

He followed her home like the lost puppy that he was, careful now to hide himself from any besides her. She turned from time to time to see that he was still following, reaching back occasionally to take his hand that she might better lead him through some convoluted bit, a dank alley strewn with cardboard boxes and mendicants, or a busy street. He was quite confused by all the noise and bustling about—it was that, after all, that usually began to drive the angels insane first, but he hardly paid attention to it after the initial surprise. What were taxis and homeless people and crushed squirrels in comparison to this girl who led him without fear through what seemed to be the lowest pit of Hell? Earth could not be so bad if there were people like her.

Her apartment was boxed away in a rough sort of building, ugly as anything, with colors so drab that his soul ached to see her in such surroundings. The walls were rough and caustic to his fingertips, so he chose instead to place them on her neck, where the increase in temperature had caused a light dampness. He was fascinated by it, and by the soft downy hairs at the conjoining of her head and neck.

For the first time, he began to wish that he were human.

Not surprisingly, the girl had fashioned an oasis of beauty for herself amidst the stark ugliness of the building. Simple but immaculate, unfolding to the eye like…well…like a rose. With accents of pink, and red, and gold, and green, such that his skin shimmered with a hazy rose-hued glow when she turned on the overhead light. He marveled at the sheen of it upon his forearms.

Some minutes later—after she had glided off to the kitchen to make tea—he finally noticed that she had not uttered a single syllable.

It was peculiar, certainly. From what he had observed so far, humans seemed to be awfully noisy creatures, always maintaining an incessant din and babble as if they could not bear to be left alone with their thoughts, as though their empty heads were ravenous and must be constantly occupied by some voicesome fluff or the heads might turn and devour their owners from the inside out. Really, what were they so afraid of?

But was the girl…? Was she…?

“Are you mute?” he asked when she re-entered the room.

Her dark eyes wide as if she would never stop looking. Mouth crimson, budlike. She nodded, touching her throat self-consciously.

It was oddly perfect. Like a painting. Beauty in which the play of every emotion was its only speech. He did not mind in the least.

And so it was that the angel fell in love.

He knew it in an instant. Angels, after all, are semi-omniscient, and to feel is to know. And he comprehended, in one sharp moment that stabbed him like the thin point of an awl, the implications and complications of his situation.

How could he return to his Maker if he desired more than anything to stay with her? He wished only to look at her for another eon or so. Surely such a favor might be permitted?

Somehow it did not matter, though, and he felt that he could deal with it later, for there were more pressing matters at hand—the sweet, flowery scent pervading the room; the sudden realization that angels did not wear clothing but humans did; a soft, silky pressure around his waist as the rose girl hugged him spontaneously. It all confused him, and yet he did not care. He liked this world, and wondered at those angels who had come back blackened and battered, whimpering at the very thought of Man.

He did not know when he kissed her, but there he was, silver lips pressed to her red ones, and strangely befuddled as to why Heaven dared to call itself Heaven without this.

*       *       *

He spent the night before Christmas with his wings curled about her in a green-gold couch bed, surprised every instant—snow-cold angel that he was—by the feel of her warm skin. He knew that everything they had done, their very chance encounter, was forbidden, and yet if everything were so perfect, how could it be wrong?

*       *       *

Christmas morning, the girl woke him early, and pantomimed prayer.

The angel blinked.

She made a steeple with her hands.

The angel understood.

Somehow the girl conveyed to him by fluid gesture alone that—no offense—but she mostly went to church on Christmas for the smell of cinnamon and the pretty Christmas songs. She liked music; she had always wished she could sing, but obviously that hadn’t worked out, so oh well… She shrugged and smiled, and the angel was distracted by the play of light on her bare shoulders…

He should have been ashamed of himself. But he wasn’t.

So the girl bundled herself in the coat she had worn the day before, pale as her skin and the snow outside, with a single red rose pinned to the lapel. And the angel cloaked himself so that only she might see him.

Together they left the rose-colored apartment and stepped out into the alley.

Three men dressed entirely in black stood blocking their path.

The tallest of the three, who exhibited a coarse air of authority—the sort of authority where you ran the risk of being stabbed in the side if you misbehaved, not to kill, mind you, but just as a warning—was a thin sort, gangly and sallow, with absurdly long hands like oversized spider’s legs. He held a knife.

The shortest of the three was pudgy and pig-like, with a snubbed and turned-up snout of a nose and beady eyes. He held a small pistol with a grip that bespoke his lack of knowledge on how to use it, but his infinite pride in possessing and holding it. His hair was greasy and did not look as though it had been washed for a very, very long time.

And the middling of the three was neither tall nor short, fat nor thin. But his face was the most frightening, for there seemed something horribly wrong with it, and the apparent but unnamable lack of something was enough to drive one mad. He held no weapon. His body seemed weapon enough.

“Now, now, perfect, isn’t it?” observed the tall man in a voice not unlike a small child guessing the contents of a Christmas present.

“Indeed, indeed,” said the pudgy man, nodding his head.

And without further ado, the three men grabbed the angel’s poor little rose girl. The tallest of the three snatched her purse and rifled her pockets while the pudgy man tore off her ivory pale coat and the third…the third gave her a kiss that sent such a rush of fury though the angel that he could hold his invisibility no longer and rushed straight for their throats with his pearl-like teeth. But though he had fought with other angels, he was too ephemeral to be of much threat to the men. The pudgy man pinned him to the ground, tearing out his wing-feathers with all the malevolence of a disobedient child, and through the pain, he was forced to watch as the tall man did dreadful things with his knife to the rose girl and the middling man did even more dreadful things with his body, until the poor girl was left a bloody, half-dressed heap on the pavement and the angel, only partially conscious, could do nothing but stare.

The men ran off, laughing and tossing the girl’s purse back and forth like a football.

Once they were completely gone and some time had passed, enough so that the pain was not utterly blinding, the angel dragged himself to the girl’s side and wept tears of molten silver over her lifeless body. There was nothing he could do to close the gaping rips, to mend the plum-colored bruises, to breathe life back into her beautiful, battered mouth. The least he could do was close her dark, frightened eyes with his thumb and index finger, and wish that he could do the same for his. Permanently.

Angels cannot die.

But they can be maimed.

And so he took a piece of stone from the ground beside her curled legs and dug it into his eyes, deeply, purposefully, first the left eye and then the right, until the world was no longer there, and the quicksilver blood ran down his cheeks in agonizing rivulets. And when this was done, he turned the stone to his breast and cut out his great golden heart and left it, still throbbing, in the folds of her snow-white arms.

He turned, fumbling, and unpinned the rose from the lapel of her coat, clutching it to the hole in his chest as if it were the only thing on the face of the earth worth having. Which it was.

*       *       *

If you walk the streets and alleys of New York in the wintertime, you may see a man huddled in the snow, his body enshrouded in a black cloak, a tattered fedora perched upon his head. Peer closer—he is no ordinary man. See how his skin shines like alabaster in the light of the streetlamp? How a tuft of broken feathers peeks from beneath his cloak?

Sometimes, if you touch his arm gently, he will look up at you with empty eye-sockets, his face expressionless but beautiful. Sometimes he will even unfold his arms and let you see the pit in his chest and the rose that lies there, fresh as the day the florist pinned it on a girl’s white coat.

Say nothing.

Kiss him softly, if you will.

And perhaps he will take you by the hand and tell you his story.

Description
They sent an angel, of course. They did every year, and the angels fluttered back with broken wings, pearlescent skin chipped like old porcelain. It was easy enough to repair the cracks that leaked blood like quicksilver, to mend the fingers bound in strips of cloth where sections had gone missing. But the angels were never quite the same again. Their eyes darker, warier, like pearls dipped in ink. Their golden hearts a pale dying amber within their translucent chests.

(Sometimes at night, you can pass a clump of the ones that have been sent down, clinging together, their sleep interspersed with screams, wordless sounds like the child-cry of a wounded panther. They toss and turn like maggots writhing in a fetid corpse, clawing at nothing.)

If all had gone as planned, the angels would return each year in full regalia to kneel at the Maker’s throne and offer a precise report of the progress of Man. It was not expected that Man should be perfect—heavens, no—but it would be nice (the Maker thought) if now and then He might receive a report that consisted of something other than terrified whimpering.

Still, each year on Christmas Eve, the Maker sent out an angel or two to see what Man was up to now, hoping against all experience that he might be treated to an articulate report. Faith-based creations tend to rely on faith quite a bit, after all.

But the angel this year was a stronger sort. He had fought in the Heavenly Campaigns when Lucifer stormed the Kingdom, cannons blazing; he had tended to the hurt angels when they returned from the realm of Man. He knew what he faced—or at least he had a vague notion—and he felt he would be able to carry through, for his innocence (and angels value innocence above all) burnt within him to the point of tangibility, as if it were a coating one might taste upon the tassels of his wings.

And so he left, descending from the heavens in the cold of winter to discover with delight the fragile beauty of snow.

“Is this Earth?” he asked with shock, marveling at the crystalline tufts that fell upon his bare skin with a kiss like cold fire. And he marveled, too, at how his voice sounded in the unfamiliar air, rippling and resonant as a well-varnished cello. He had never heard anything so enthralling before, and he could not help but indulge in a moment of narcissism, admiring his skin, his feathered wings, how the pressure of this strange air sent him spiraling at the slightest motion on his part.

It was just his luck, of course, that the first human he should see upon touching the ground—lightly, toe by toe, relishing the firm manner in which the concrete pushed back—was her.

She was a pale thing, young still though no longer a child, eyes like liquid onyx and dark brown hair. Such strange eyes…he could not help but stare at the contrast, dark, dark, and skin as white as the snow itself. He stared so hard that he forgot to blend in, to hide his angelic countenance, until he noticed that the girl was staring back, blushing. But he did not want to hide, to disappear. He did not want the roses in her cheeks to ever flow back to her heart.

But they did, and slowly the pale girl came closer, one hand extended like a question mark to touch his glistening arm. He watched as if he were a third party, with curiosity, with trust, yet all the while feeling her touch to the core of his vast golden heart. Humans were warm, he found, and this startled him more than anything—he had never known heat before. He could not resist raising a hand in turn to shyly touch her cheek, and jumped, startled again. Humans were soft, too, as soft as…he did not understand the comparisons for it yet, his comprehension of this world was taking too long to congeal. Soft as…soft as…

He found the word in a flower pinned to the girl’s collar, out of place in the cold weather, incongruous as the angel himself.

“Rose petals…” he breathed, wondering at the strangeness of it all.

He followed her home like the lost puppy that he was, careful now to hide himself from any besides her. She turned from time to time to see that he was still following, reaching back occasionally to take his hand that she might better lead him through some convoluted bit, a dank alley strewn with cardboard boxes and mendicants, or a busy street. He was quite confused by all the noise and bustling about—it was that, after all, that usually began to drive the angels insane first, but he hardly paid attention to it after the initial surprise. What were taxis and homeless people and crushed squirrels in comparison to this girl who led him without fear through what seemed to be the lowest pit of Hell? Earth could not be so bad if there were people like her.

Her apartment was boxed away in a rough sort of building, ugly as anything, with colors so drab that his soul ached to see her in such surroundings. The walls were rough and caustic to his fingertips, so he chose instead to place them on her neck, where the increase in temperature had caused a light dampness. He was fascinated by it, and by the soft downy hairs at the conjoining of her head and neck.

For the first time, he began to wish that he were human.

Not surprisingly, the girl had fashioned an oasis of beauty for herself amidst the stark ugliness of the building. Simple but immaculate, unfolding to the eye like…well…like a rose. With accents of pink, and red, and gold, and green, such that his skin shimmered with a hazy rose-hued glow when she turned on the overhead light. He marveled at the sheen of it upon his forearms.

Some minutes later—after she had glided off to the kitchen to make tea—he finally noticed that she had not uttered a single syllable.

It was peculiar, certainly. From what he had observed so far, humans seemed to be awfully noisy creatures, always maintaining an incessant din and babble as if they could not bear to be left alone with their thoughts, as though their empty heads were ravenous and must be constantly occupied by some voicesome fluff or the heads might turn and devour their owners from the inside out. Really, what were they so afraid of?

But was the girl…? Was she…?

“Are you mute?” he asked when she re-entered the room.

Her dark eyes wide as if she would never stop looking. Mouth crimson, budlike. She nodded, touching her throat self-consciously.

It was oddly perfect. Like a painting. Beauty in which the play of every emotion was its only speech. He did not mind in the least.

And so it was that the angel fell in love.

He knew it in an instant. Angels, after all, are semi-omniscient, and to feel is to know. And he comprehended, in one sharp moment that stabbed him like the thin point of an awl, the implications and complications of his situation.

How could he return to his Maker if he desired more than anything to stay with her? He wished only to look at her for another eon or so. Surely such a favor might be permitted?

Somehow it did not matter, though, and he felt that he could deal with it later, for there were more pressing matters at hand—the sweet, flowery scent pervading the room; the sudden realization that angels did not wear clothing but humans did; a soft, silky pressure around his waist as the rose girl hugged him spontaneously. It all confused him, and yet he did not care. He liked this world, and wondered at those angels who had come back blackened and battered, whimpering at the very thought of Man.

He did not know when he kissed her, but there he was, silver lips pressed to her red ones, and strangely befuddled as to why Heaven dared to call itself Heaven without this.

*       *       *

He spent the night before Christmas with his wings curled about her in a green-gold couch bed, surprised every instant—snow-cold angel that he was—by the feel of her warm skin. He knew that everything they had done, their very chance encounter, was forbidden, and yet if everything were so perfect, how could it be wrong?

*       *       *

Christmas morning, the girl woke him early, and pantomimed prayer.

The angel blinked.

She made a steeple with her hands.

The angel understood.

Somehow the girl conveyed to him by fluid gesture alone that—no offense—but she mostly went to church on Christmas for the smell of cinnamon and the pretty Christmas songs. She liked music; she had always wished she could sing, but obviously that hadn’t worked out, so oh well… She shrugged and smiled, and the angel was distracted by the play of light on her bare shoulders…

He should have been ashamed of himself. But he wasn’t.

So the girl bundled herself in the coat she had worn the day before, pale as her skin and the snow outside, with a single red rose pinned to the lapel. And the angel cloaked himself so that only she might see him.

Together they left the rose-colored apartment and stepped out into the alley.

Three men dressed entirely in black stood blocking their path.

The tallest of the three, who exhibited a coarse air of authority—the sort of authority where you ran the risk of being stabbed in the side if you misbehaved, not to kill, mind you, but just as a warning—was a thin sort, gangly and sallow, with absurdly long hands like oversized spider’s legs. He held a knife.

The shortest of the three was pudgy and pig-like, with a snubbed and turned-up snout of a nose and beady eyes. He held a small pistol with a grip that bespoke his lack of knowledge on how to use it, but his infinite pride in possessing and holding it. His hair was greasy and did not look as though it had been washed for a very, very long time.

And the middling of the three was neither tall nor short, fat nor thin. But his face was the most frightening, for there seemed something horribly wrong with it, and the apparent but unnamable lack of something was enough to drive one mad. He held no weapon. His body seemed weapon enough.

“Now, now, perfect, isn’t it?” observed the tall man in a voice not unlike a small child guessing the contents of a Christmas present.

“Indeed, indeed,” said the pudgy man, nodding his head.

And without further ado, the three men grabbed the angel’s poor little rose girl. The tallest of the three snatched her purse and rifled her pockets while the pudgy man tore off her ivory pale coat and the third…the third gave her a kiss that sent such a rush of fury though the angel that he could hold his invisibility no longer and rushed straight for their throats with his pearl-like teeth. But though he had fought with other angels, he was too ephemeral to be of much threat to the men. The pudgy man pinned him to the ground, tearing out his wing-feathers with all the malevolence of a disobedient child, and through the pain, he was forced to watch as the tall man did dreadful things with his knife to the rose girl and the middling man did even more dreadful things with his body, until the poor girl was left a bloody, half-dressed heap on the pavement and the angel, only partially conscious, could do nothing but stare.

The men ran off, laughing and tossing the girl’s purse back and forth like a football.

Once they were completely gone and some time had passed, enough so that the pain was not utterly blinding, the angel dragged himself to the girl’s side and wept tears of molten silver over her lifeless body. There was nothing he could do to close the gaping rips, to mend the plum-colored bruises, to breathe life back into her beautiful, battered mouth. The least he could do was close her dark, frightened eyes with his thumb and index finger, and wish that he could do the same for his. Permanently.

Angels cannot die.

But they can be maimed.

And so he took a piece of stone from the ground beside her curled legs and dug it into his eyes, deeply, purposefully, first the left eye and then the right, until the world was no longer there, and the quicksilver blood ran down his cheeks in agonizing rivulets. And when this was done, he turned the stone to his breast and cut out his great golden heart and left it, still throbbing, in the folds of her snow-white arms.

He turned, fumbling, and unpinned the rose from the lapel of her coat, clutching it to the hole in his chest as if it were the only thing on the face of the earth worth having. Which it was.

*       *       *

If you walk the streets and alleys of New York in the wintertime, you may see a man huddled in the snow, his body enshrouded in a black cloak, a tattered fedora perched upon his head. Peer closer—he is no ordinary man. See how his skin shines like alabaster in the light of the streetlamp? How a tuft of broken feathers peeks from beneath his cloak?

Sometimes, if you touch his arm gently, he will look up at you with empty eye-sockets, his face expressionless but beautiful. Sometimes he will even unfold his arms and let you see the pit in his chest and the rose that lies there, fresh as the day the florist pinned it on a girl’s white coat.

Say nothing.

Kiss him softly, if you will.

And perhaps he will take you by the hand and tell you his story.