Prompted to Tell: Every Angel is Terrible

Prompted to Tell: Every Angel is Terrible

The writing prompt was a list of phrases.  Pick one and go with it.
Here are the phrases:

1. I am still a long way from home…
2. I’ve always hated hospitals, dentist offices, and jails.
3. If I had not known you, I would not have found you.
4. Every angel is terrible.
5. Your death is a hole in the universe
6. You were the gentle one
   I chose #4

Every angel is terrible at understanding how we earthlings worry. And we each have an angel in our bedroom closet waiting and wondering when we’ll open the door and let her out. When we’ll put her on a leash to walk through the garden of earthly delight.

Every angel cries as we dream of racing through the air, falling, falling fast into unsafe waters.

Every angel sleeps from exhaustion, waiting for us to awaken to the landmind of possibilities exploding around us, blowing us to bits of activities left and right, up and down. A mouse, a house, a spouse, a kraus.

Every angel yearns to return home to the clouds. Assignment ended. Mission accomplished. Soul released or saved. Soaring back to Source.

One night I awoke because I heard someone weeping in the closet. I opened the door and water gushed out on the floor. A puddle of angel tears seared my skin, boiling my toes. The smell of rose petals and amonia filled the room and a pale, elongated face, powdered white stared at me. No eyes, only holes like a mask, but lips that moved and whispered sounds and shapes of sounds I’d never heard before. The hair on my arms, my eyebrows, stood away from my body. A chill crept to the tips of my nipples and I felt mild dripping down mixing with the angel tears. A hand reached toward my shoulder and suddenly, the water evaporated and where the angel touched me, I felt heat go into the bone.

“So much worry,” she finally said. Or that’s what I thought she said, a river of sound flowing in a voice that covered my skin, penetrating past my fear.

“Not to worry,” she said again. And one wing snapped out of the closet door, its tip reaching to the far wall. It shimmered in the light coming through the slatted blinds. I felt myself wobble, fainting, nauseous, my heart loud in my years now.

“So big!” I said. “Can I sleep upon your wing?”

“Upon your own,” she said.

“But I have none. Only broken wing bumps.”

An ache in my shoulder blades emanating from the bone screamed through the skin and reflected in the opposite mirror, I watched the wings begin to sprout and wept.

“Always there,” she said.

“Always there?” I asked.

“Always,” she said, and pulled her enormous aviary member back into itself as my own spread across the room.

“Enough weeping,” she said. “Time to fly. Soon. Soon. Soon,” she said.

I watched my wings fill the room. The pain had broken through to a calm. I walked to the bed and with an act of imagination drew them in and crawled into the bed.

“Always,” I whispered to myself. “Always.” Smiling I took in the last of her scent and fell away back, back to the beginning before any angel was terrible or any wings could grow.