say you’re an angel cast down from heaven.
(not a fallen angel, who chose to abandon their post and ally themselves with lucifer, or a corrupted human soul, which is a different animal altogether, but an angel who was called before the tribunal and found guilty. Dishonorable discharge. And maybe you wished you’d jumped, instead of being pushed, but the sentence is handed down anyway—)
…and then you’re just human. Sort of. Because the thing is, they can’t turn an angel into a human—you aren’t water, humanity isn’t wine. The best they can do is strip you of your wings and spirit and teeth and surety, and reassemble you smaller, blind, with poison in your joints. They best they can do is make you into a uncertain fleshy thing, hollow on the inside where a soul should go. Neither human nor angel and they were being merciful, you see. Better a thing than unmade.
but your body is new, fresh out of the box, and it doesn’t know how to be in the world any more than you do. You find yourself vomiting up food because your stomach doesn’t understand what digestion is; you wear sweaters in mid-July because your blood stubbornly refuses to go above room temperature. You have shadows like bruises beneath your eyes.
you smell wrong. When you pass, animals cower as before a storm.
(some nights, you dream—you were allowed to keep your memories, in stunning technicolor detail, but some of the parts that don’t fit in the human brain have gone blurry around the edges, metaphorical and soft-focus. You can’t remember the certain bits of string theory you need to get home, for example, or what ultraviolet looked like. When someone says, wings, you think of feathers and updrafts and that’s not right, it’s not right, but you can’t remember why)
you spent that first day in a church, trying to plead with your father to reverse the ruling. You have never known such profound silence as greeted you there, and it shakes you to your (new, runny) marrow. it will be a year before you dare to shout into the abyss again.
(no wonder humanity spent so much time looking up, looking out, looking at each other. How lonely, to be shut up all alone in your skull)
but you live in the world because there is no other choice. (that is very human too, you learn.) You tend the garden of an old woman, who makes you soup from a can and dry sandwiches, and rubs your back when you vomit them up again. She lets you wear her sweaters, smelling of lanolin and mothballs, and you are cold together, old together. You tell her, I used to be an angel, and she pats your hand.
how are you with hostas? she asks.
(it did not occur to you to lie to her. that was very angelic of you.)
You saw Sodom leveled to ash and salted earth, and she was there during the Harlem Riots of ‘64, which, she assures you, looked much the same. what’s the secret of life? she asks once, humor dancing in her dark eyes.
I don’t know, you tell her, honest in this too. I only just started mine.
