Zero Tolerance for Empty Angels

Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash

Vacancy is not my friend. I’m not here to cross a river of nothingness to get to the other side of nothing in no time for no reason – and that’s why an empty letter in the mail that won’t say what it wants and keeps showing up at the house for the last month finally makes me heated enough to tramp

down to the return address and demand why they keep sending me blankness, as if I were an empty mind. But the girl at the desk just smiles and says I’ll be with you when I’ve finished my introspection. She switches the telephone from blue to red which means no more incoming news I suppose and then directs me

into the back room where a large man in an apricot coat shows me my appointment slip to recover my senses. I never lost them, I say and he: That’s what they all say, but have a seat and we’ll get this done.

I do. And I realize I haven’t been this compliant since a cop pushed me into a jail full of rapists and stoners and I – too stunned to protest my innocence – propelled my legs into a bench. Where went my belief? I ask the man in the apricot coat, but he only smiles and holds up a syringe with a greenish liquid and says for me to take it

easy, like the song sings, but my jukebox is out of platters. My rhythm is out of breath, my melody fusty and flat. I like to look for myself in the afternoon mirror, and the man in the apricot coat says that’s fine, we can read your thoughts, but it must be a prank. My mind goes south when the roses wither. It soaks up sun there and never sends a card, which is how I got here in the first place, an empty card in an envelope addressed to me, in my own hand, twice a week for a month, until I snapped and came running to find

myself alone. Alone, inside a senseless world that never covers its ceiling with sun except on the Wednesday of no regrets, or a Sunday of palm trees begging me with breeze. Climb our trunks to see the world, they say, and the man in the apricot coat nods, says: that’s right, it’s your turn now, this will balance your brain, but I grab my god

by the neck and run. If I must be a valve in a giant engine of society with all its cylinders firing in smooth precision in the same pattern and with the same proportions of acceptance to their machine fate to get my gas, then I say no. Let me live

quietly in a back room of deserts where my cactus air still survives and angels that guide my messages always preface their testimonies with a bluntness that doesn’t stab me in the heart or make me throw up my lunch.

I love them and love them more each year. They give me guts when I come up for air in a fresh world after drowning in sleep. They roll me out of bed and drag me outside when the sun is still a child learning to climb the sky, trees are still shaking off their shadows, and birds are forming a chorus to let me know that death has yet to send me its decree and that I have been granted – for better or worse – the miracle of another day.

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Thanks for Reading

and Happy New Year. I’m back after a short break, ready to head into 2023, an odd numbered year for odd fiction. More evocative strangeness coming your way. Keep your inbox tuned up. The fiction pistons spark on Tuesday morning.

I’d like to take this opportunity to say thanks to everyone who has helped support this project since I started in late September. I don’t mean financial support (that’s not why I’m doing this), but the support of being there, reading, both here in Dynamic Creed and in other stacks/articles where we’ve exchanged thoughts and ideas. It means a lot to me. I’m slow to get to know people, but I feel like it’s happening.

As always, if you would be so kind, share this post, subscribe, comment, or all of the above. There’s a lot of people out there that haven’t yet discovered oddly created fiction and would surely enjoy the opportunity. Spread the love. And the solidarity. Now, I hope the New Year is treating you right and things are off to a good start.

Next week a piece titled The Passages of War and Sickness. Meanwhile, if you’re new here, here’s another you may enjoy, my first post:

Connections

Thanks again, and all the best. Victor David