An Exodus of Angels

We were not entirely heedless to their inexpressible marvels of creation, but we were no longer especially thankful either

An Exodus of Angels

On the climb of the steep narrow street to my house, with evening stripes of reddish light painting bars on my face; as my shins stretched uphill and my feet issued their tired complaints of age, it’s not only conceivable, but likely, that I wouldn’t have noticed when they began to desert us, when they began their slow exodus and their final death.

On several occasions, I do recall a seemingly weary movement from the periphery of my step, something sad and shadowed, but the sharp slope of my breath kept me focused on the near cobbles.

And one afternoon, I dismissed the appearance of a young angel near the fountain as some adolescent bewilderment or angst made material by the heavy net of wicker he wore to ensnare the nascent splendor of his wings. My denial convinced me that he was only a confused child, and that his appearance was not a foretelling.

Here on the plateau, we knew that the angels among us were singular and exceptional, but over time, familiarly maneuvered us to complacency. We were not entirely heedless to their inexpressible marvels of creation, but we were no longer especially thankful either. We valued them, but no more than we valued other aspects of our existence such as our vegetables and horses.

Simply put, we had lost our sense of wonder.

I needed to be wrong. I needed to be blind again. And so, on several more occasions, as autumn coaxed summer to slumber, a sudden speck assailed my eye when a bowed and bound angel crossed my sight on a street ahead. I turned away, as if a breeze had gusted my frail vision to one side.

But slowly, and of necessity, my blindness retreated, and I was compelled to perceive more and more angels with imprisoned wings dripping a thick wax. And I began to see the rough stucco walls of my familiar town, walls that normally refracted the amber fingers of the midday sun into a ruddy labyrinth of ferric pigments, grow smooth and glossy until all the mystery of their secret peaks and pores was worn down to a marbleized shiny sameness.

Came a day we found ourselves falling. Providence, for lack of a nobler name, had earthquaked the town on its side, and we were forced to cling to ruts in the road and each other to keep from plunging through doorways. A thunderous applause of dirt and debris rained down on us from the berms and wagon beams.

When settled, shocked, and bleeding blasphemy, we descended upright streets onto storefronts and stared through recumbent windows. We all had the same judgment, it seemed. With our angels in exodus, in withdrawal from our existence, up and down were now left and right, and we had begun to deform into fraudulent children.

Among the rubble, an old man, almost a child again with his childlike innocence that frequently returns to the aged in their extremity, clapped his hands, and pronounced that our final days of angels had arrived. And in their departure, he said with delight in his voice, they would grant his most urgent wish. He had reversed his spirit through a long unwinding of birthdays and wives, and now carried a stiff determination to resurrect his childhood self who once ran squealing with squirrels along a lakeshore.

But that boy disappeared in a storm of savage years. And besides, the old man had it backwards. A chance of resurrection, if any chance of one had ever existed, had vanished with our angels. The liquescent life of the old man’s earlier self, as with all our earlier selves, had long since flowed from rill to river to sea.

One last angel, old, female, and with wings caged by reeds woven tightly enough to stop a flutter, yet loosely enough to still admire the vibrant colors of her plumage, appeared before us.

With a soft bassoon in her throat, she told us that their miraculous age had indeed come to an end, and that they, creatures once exalted, would now withdraw from belief into doubt.

In the silence of our response she left the plateau, and disappeared into the trees below. We stood alone, our final truth, and for a moment, in a perverse convulsion of liberation, I sensed myself lifted to a height.

But it did not, could not, endure. Without the unassuming parading and noble silent suffering of the angels I grew up with, I saw only red spots where their astonishing spirits had been. To go on, to survive in this new age, I shuttered my eyes and draped a black sheet over their memory. I could not bear witness  to their disease, and refused to speak again of their departure.

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Thank you for reading Dynamic Creed. I suppose we shall file this one under legends or maybe metaphor for the present day. I hope you enjoyed it. Let me know in the comments.

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Victor David