Fallen from Grace

When I woke that day, I remembered having seen an angel in my dreams. It came to me and it hung from grand wings. I remembered the shadow the wings displayed on my bedroom wall and the strange face in front of me illuminated by my nightlight. Did the angel come to me because I still used a night light? Did it think that geez, a sixteen year old that still uses a butterfly night light must need some assistance from the heavens? No matter the reason, I woke that day remembering it in gross detail and I was almost sick about it.

 The hollowness of its face was so prominent, every feature sunken so deeply that I could see clearly the bones that made up where the fat of it’s cheeks should’ve been but instead there was only a smooth vacantness that shaded the sides of its face like bruises, and it’s eyes were inky and it’s head was flattened like an anvil had been dropped square in the middle and forced the bone down until it’s skeleton looked like that of a neanderthal and it didn’t look very holy at all. It looked nothing like the Renaissance paintings I had seen at the fine arts museum downtown, with angels depicted as cherubs - babies with plump bellies and cheeks like lovely ripe apples or singular roses trimmed to be perfectly circular, and wings as white as pure lamb’s fur, surrounded by wildflowers and more golden-eyed creatures. It wasn’t like what I had seen in depictions of the Bible stories, where the angels split the sky and spoke the same words to prophet and mortal “Be not afraid”; the Bible angels were slim, almost human things in snowy, shapeless tunics down to their feet - which were somewhat entwined, stacked on top of one another in that Biblical way - and gleaming wings hovering them above the earthlings, like the one that hung atop the wall in the small, wooden nativity my mother put out around Christmas. It was the one my grandfather had made for us and thin layers of stuffing coated the roof of the barn to mimic snow. A light hung from the top of the nativity, a little round bulb that emanated an orangish sheen over the whole scene and made it look awfully divine. 

I understood now why the angels told the people to not fear them; as my eyes stared into the angel’s own black, liquid pools, I was still with fear. There was no divinity, no amount of grace. The thing wasn’t hovering, it was hanging, and the wings didn’t shimmer in moonlight like the glowing entity prepared to lift you high to the heavens. In fact, they were the most depressing thing about the angel. They were slightly torn in different places, and I remembered the tiny piece that had chipped off the wings of our nativity angel. How could it be divine when it’s blackish feathers were spilling in wayward directions, like a knife had slashed through them with a slitting scream? I thought about my angel as I sat up in bed and stared straight ahead, and shifted, but as I did, I felt a stabbing pain penetrating the area between my shoulder blades. I tilted my head slightly and I saw wings, white as snow, jutting out of my body, as if they had sprouted there violently in the night. Viriscent lights swirled and blurred in my head, clarifying and dulling themselves into something vaguely familiar, until the image of bamboo was placed in my mind’s eye. I had once read somewhere that it was one of the fastest growing and strongest plants in the world. It grows and grows and stabs through anything in the way, piercing through its path with a lack of care for other life. I remembered - I must have read it in that same place - that there was an ancient torture and execution method where they tied people to the tops of bamboo trees and let the thick green grow through them, sticking their stomach and draining their organs of deep mahoganey blood quicker than it took for the sun to fade its orangish hue on the horizon. I thought of their bodies, lying impaled and cold. The bamboo grew with such wild ambition that they would be completely dead, speared like kebab meat, by nightfall, and the bamboo would just keep growing. It would keep reaching to the blue sheeted sky, and it would not be halted until it finally touched the silky heavens, and was cut only by God’s wrath.