Jane Lebak

        I'd been a guardian angel for all of ten seconds, and already I hated it.

         This thing was only four cells big, and I was supposed to stay nearby for the next what, eighty years? So yeah, I could do my job on it—my real job—and make sure its soul dropped like a concrete balloon into Hell. But I'd rather see one of the wretches end up in Heaven than be shackled to a prison of flesh. It had to die.

         A thousand years ago, another demon claimed God had muddled up which angels were which, and as a result he'd been enchained to the human he'd have guarded if we hadn't escaped Heaven. He thought he was important because Origen documented it; and ooh, the condition even had a big name, "apokatastasis."

         He recounted the tale with relish. No one tells campfire stories like we do around the big campfire ("Most demons yoked this way are never heard from again!" Boo.) Scariest was that when it got older, he could feel its emotions, sometimes even heard it praying. He urged his revolted audience just to kill it while it's small.

         In a way it was a fascinating entity, and I found myself staring at the viscous soul as if it were a carcass in the woods. It would have been mine if things had worked out differently.

         I could have taken the advice, but then no one would have known the thing existed. Far better to use the thing to snag its parents, good little Christians attending a good little church while living good little lives.

         I returned in two weeks, after they found out about it, then shot it full of energy. Only a second of my time.

         Fourteen more days passed, during which I spent my time in and out of Hell, a  perpetual layer of ash graying my hair and wings, showing my black-eyed, sharp-edged face in children's dreams.

         I returned to build in the breeders a sense of injustice over a kid flushed out of the woman's body like sewage, only the thing was still parasiting away. And by then God must have realized how badly he'd botched things, because when I tried to zap it again, I couldn't.

         The thing appeared primordial, a slug with a mickey-mouse head that looked subtly different from the ones I'd seen before. How nauseating to think I might be getting attached to it.

         The breeders' guardians kept their swords drawn during my visit.

         I spread my wings ("Ooh, scary angels. I'll flee for my life") and flew fifteen feet before a constriction leashed my soul, jerking me from the air. I struggled to fly, to flash to Hell, to run, and never got further than the picture window.

         The mother's guardian used a third-grade teacher voice. "You're tethered."

         Thrashing, I tried again. The hold tightened.

         An hour later I panted on hands and knees, head dropped.

         The father's guardian folded his arms. "Even you can't escape God. Welcome to the family."

         How galling. I was incarcerated in the vicinity of two guardians and two good little Christians who thought of my anchor as a gift.

         The breeders told everyone about it, made plans for it, then visited a doctor to get pictures of it.

         That's when I learned it was going to die anyhow. Although I'd failed to kill it, my zap had prevented some parts from sealing to become the nervous system. The upper brain and skull hadn't formed. This explained those froggy-bugging eyes and flatness behind. The doctor called it anencephaly.

         I stood on the back of his chair shouting victory.

         The doctor and I both urged them to kill it now, since it would die anyhow once the woman birthed it. It would be blind and deaf. It wouldn't think. Useless.

         The good little Christians had their good little list of questions: Is it dangerous to her? Could you be wrong? Is that an abortion? Isn't there any hope? And he answered, no, no, no, and no again. No hope. No, not an abortion. No, never wrong. No, remaining pregnant wasn't dangerous, but he didn't recommend it. He called it less than human; it wouldn't be any use.

         They said the baby wasn't supposed to be useful. They kept it.

         I begged them to deliver now and set me free. They kept it.

         They talked to their friends. They saw other doctors. They mewled to their pastor. But they kept it.

         I resigned myself to five more months' enchainment unless the thing was so badly damaged it died on its own.

         And the parents—now instead of daydreams, it was repetitive tears and questions. They did ask how God could have done this, but then they invented answers. They told everyone God gave them the baby just as he was, that the baby's life had a purpose, that all children were gifts no matter how they arrived. They had a hundred people praying for it. They named it Joshua.

         "Hello," I'd tell startled guardians, angels alongside the pimpled grocery clerk or the prim geneticist or the cigar-smelling man who pre-booked them at the funeral home. "I'm Nezeq, Joshua's guardian."

         That wasn't the name God saddled on me, of course. I just thought it was funnier that way.

         When people asked why she'd stay pregnant with a dying baby, the mother said the time seemed both long and short. Nonsense: it was short. Even in comparison to the eighty years she'd live, it was short, but I could compare it to eternity. Repeating that a handful of months was brief kept me sane.

         Besides, even though the flames of Hell scorched my heart no matter where I went, a living room with tasteful furnishings and generic prints was better than a lake of fire and the weight of coal-black catacombs. My numbers would be down, but I hoped to win Joshua's parents.

         I told them God had no choice but to heal Joshua because of their faith, then chortled during yet another ultrasound that showed my flat-topped baby still flat on top. I highlighted every news report about child abuse and neglect, and every parent who didn't deserve a healthy baby. I wondered aloud if maybe God didn't exist, and they repeated it to one another.

         The trouble was, I didn't stand a chance. By Joshua's sixth month they had four hundred people praying for the family: their whole church, their relatives, their friends, a convent full of nuns who heard about them through a crisis pregnancy center, and an online support group for parents of anencephalics. The parents listened when their guardians promised Joshua's death wouldn't be due to lack of faith. They preached that babies were a gift, not a reward or a commodity.

         And the parents listened. It wasn't fair.

         "Why is she doing this?" I asked the mother's guardian, Zaranel. The parents were sleeping, the mother cuddled against the father, but Joshua was kicking. "Is she trying to prove she's pro-life?"

         Zaranel said, "It's not a political issue. It's her baby."

         "He can't possibly benefit her." I moved across the room to sit on their dresser, the mirror behind failing to pick up my reflection. I knew I looked different anyhow: after so long out of Hell, my hair had lost its ash to become black again, and my wings had reassumed a gorgeous blue jay pattern. I used to look striking.

          Passifer, the father's guardian, sat on the edge of the bed with  relaxed wings. "They didn't have a baby for their own benefit."

         I huffed. "Then why have one?"

         Passifer said, "You wouldn't understand."

         "I'm pretty smart," I told him. "Try me."

         "It's emotional understanding you're lacking." Zaranel knelt alongside the bed, peering into the woman's heart with that same view I had of Joshua's, then inserting a hand through the woman to feel my kid. "You really should touch him. They can sense us now, and they respond."

         I shuddered.

         Zaranel continued, "They wanted a baby because they understand children as the fulfillment of their marital covenant."

         He had finished the sentence even though I snorted.

         Passifer said, "I knew you wouldn't understand.

         "The kid would have tied them down." I kicked my heels against the drawers. "They're better off with it dead. They can go on vacations, spend their money on their hobbies. They won't have to worry about it breaking their pretty stuff."

         "But they would have had the privilege of showing a soul the way to God," Zaranel said. "The privilege of giving love, and later to be receiving love."

         "Idiocy." I folded my arms. "It's in vain. It won't take care of them when they're old. It won't work on their farm or contribute to Social Security or give them grandchildren."

         Passifer said, "Then God gave them an even greater gift. Not many people experience unconditional love from the giving end."

         I said, "That was my gift."

         Zaranel wore a smile calculated to irritate me. "Joshua is exactly as God planned."

         "By loving unconditionally," said Passifer, running his hand over the father's hair as Joshua kicked his hip, "they get to do exactly what the snake promised, and be like God."

         I didn't bother contradicting Passifer, but I was thrown into Hell because God made his love conditional on my obedience.

         If God loved unconditionally, why demand blood for an apple? Why the creation of flesh at all? We angels were fine alone. But he kept forging things, and because we were right under God and he couldn't make any light brighter than Lucifer, he went down the scale: solid. Clumsy and weird.

         Then he showed one to us and told us to worship himself incarnated in it.

         I couldn't. I just couldn't.

         Thousands of years later, I followed a line of singing angels and encountered Jesus newly born. In retrospect, I'd felt the same nausea as the first moment I saw Joshua.

         Kneeling at the manger with their heads bowed and arms crossed over their chests, the angelic worship position, the angels sang with delight that God had defiled himself.

         Then at the end, that same body got crucified while I stood gaping at the uselessness. The angels said he did it for love, to preserve animals that couldn't even realize let alone repay what he was giving. Humans were the kitschy decorations in a furniture showroom, generic and replaceable. They possessed none of the angels' glory, yet there he was, bleeding to bring them life as if they had value.

         "You didn't bleed to save me." And I walked away from the hilltop.

         One month until I would be unshackled from Joshua's existence.

         I sat in the unrelenting beigeness of the mother's living room while she read a book about why God lets babies die. Zaranel prayed by the window. Falling snow reminded me of the white ash drifting over Hell's cisterns.

         Zaranel looked up when I moved closer to the mother, but I had a right to be there. He didn't interfere when I put one immaterial hand through her body and touched Joshua's.

         Joshua had a solid feel for one only melon-sized. For one mortally wounded. I yanked back my hand.

         "You damaged him thoroughly, didn't you?"

         I glared at Zaranel. "I want to be free."

         "Then you'll be happy when it's over." Zaranel glanced out the window. "He's got your name."

         Nezeq means Damage. "It was the least I could give him."

         Zaranel said, "What was your real name?"

         "That is my real name."

         "What was the one God gave you?"
         I rolled my eyes. "Nazirel."

         Zaranel said, "Consecrated to God. Like Nazarite. Like Samson or Samuel."

         I huffed. "You'd have changed it too."

         "Only if I disliked being consecrated." He shrugged. "What choir are you?"

         "Can't you tell?"

         He shook his head.

         Both parents' guardians were ninth choir angels. "Sixth choir," I said. "Powers."

         I fixed him with a stare, noting how he glanced at the mother and then back at me in order to harden his own heart: doing it so he wouldn't pity me. That's the way with angels. They hate us because we have our freedom, but give them a chance to talk to themselves about it and they'll pity us instead of envying.

         I serve no one. That's not the way I wanted it, but God demanded more than I was willing to give.

         My touch had awakened Joshua, so I reached for him again. It wasn't a real touch, not like skin on skin because skin is vile, but my essence met his essence. This time I lingered. His substance felt familiar like meeting your own eyes in a reflection, the double-touch of tracing your fingers over your lips.

         I focused further until I enfolded him in my mind. Zaranel was right that he'd respond. Inside his prison he shifted closer, and for an instant my hand was within him.

         I withdrew to the surface of him again, then ran my hand up over eyes which protruded because the orbital bones had failed to form. From there I let my fingertips slip over the top of his head, to the exposed tissue of his brain.

         Joshua shuddered, and even as I jerked back, he had a seizure.

         Both Zaranel and I stared, and I trembled all over. He only seized for a second, but it felt so much longer to me while I clutched my hand as if it were a lethal weapon.

         Zaranel was on his feet, wings flared. "Don't do that again!"

         Joshua's mother hadn't identified the peculiar shudder for what it was. My voice was a whisper. "It didn't hurt him."

         But I didn't do it again. I didn't touch him at all.

         Two weeks until Joshua would be born.

         The parents cleaned after dinner. With them at the corner of the house, I was able to slip outside onto the roof. As soon as the mother moved from the sink, she'd pull me inside. Dishes took fifteen minutes, though, and I would hoard fifteen minutes for myself.

         The guardians liked it as much as I did when I left, but I did it anyhow.

         Eight months out of Hell, I could smell again. I never realized winter has its own scent: frosty air, piney lushness, and traces of hickory smoke homier than the chemical stench of eternal fire.

         While Joshua's parents worked, their guardians made music, one a clarinetist and the other a tenor. (Give an angel an instrument, even his own voice, and it's like handing a crack addict his next hit.) In future years, would they form a household choir composed of the children's guardians, a trio or a quartet or a full ensemble? And I wondered, if God hadn't asked the impossible, how would we have harmonized? Would I have conducted? Or would I only have served as audience while dishes passed through soap and spray on the way to their ranks in the dish rack?

         I used to sing, back when "all the morning stars sang together." For the past six thousand years, there just hadn't been anything to sing about, not since God betrayed us.

         Joshua slept, lulled by his mother's movement as she washed dishes, dried dishes, put away dishes and pots and silverware.

         Head tilted back, I allowed the starlight passage through me. Snow-covered housetops reflected the full orb of the moon, round as Joshua's mother's belly and just as inexorable. Two weeks and it would be gone.

         The wind lifted strands of hair gone curly. I'd forgotten it curled without the ash.

         While the music wafted past, I sang. I invented inane words solely to fit into Zaranel's melody, the stresses falling in verse where they fell in the musical phrases.

         Human breath would be visible in this chill, only my hot heart never sent up steam while God's anger consumed my soul. So I sang about snowflakes and rooftops and trees stripped of leaves, bare branches stark against the stars and a wind that creaked its way over naked boughs.

         Someone listened. I shut my mouth. But it wasn't either of the guardians.

         Joshua?

         Slipping through the roof, I dropped to the tiles behind the mother and put my hands onto the baby, both hands this time, and as I sang again before the gleaming eyes of the guardian pair, Joshua's soul reached for me.

         The doctors said he would be deaf. But I sang for the first time and he awoke to hear. He wanted to hear more.

         I sang, this time unaccompanied, sang about betrayal and the unfairness of the God who had damaged us both.

         Six hours until Joshua would be born.

         His private ocean had ruptured. His mother's body forced him forward, and every five minutes his raw head rammed against the outlet of his world.

         I would be free. Mere hours and it would be finished.

         Zaranel spent his time calming the mother, telling her it wasn't yet time to go to the hospital, and then when it got more difficult, telling her now, go now, and they went, and I followed because I had no choice but to follow.

         Nurses and doctors and machines met our entourage, and shortly we were in a utilitarian room, a bed at the center of the room, the mother at the center of the bed, and Joshua at the center of his mother.

         Forgotten, I watched the drama. The mother concentrated, panted, breathed, then concentrated again as she bled to give him life. With hard work you will bring forth children, God had said by way of condemnation, and now with hard work she would let him go.

         The mother made lower sounds, more animal. Joshua got compressed, pushed, flooded with hormones. The doctors had claimed he couldn't feel anything, so I checked into his soul to learn he did feel, but not pain. Just information: I am being squeezed. I am resting. I am being squeezed again. And then, I am out.

         He was out.

         Now I could see him with my eyes rather than my heart, and I approached, unable to stop staring. Naked, bloody, mucus-drenched, still corded to his mother, but it was Joshua. A nurse covered his head's red welt with a cap. She laid him still filthy in his mother's arms.

         I pushed past the angels to touch him.

         "Hello, Joshua," the mother whispered. "We've waited so long for you."

         His eyes were open. Hadn't they said he'd be blind and deaf? But he'd heard two weeks of songs, and as I positioned myself before him, he seemed alert. Was he searching for me?

         The angels wore a raw hush. I too kept silence, only regarded him. Damaged.

         His mother held him. They cut the cord. They cleaned him. I didn't hear the other angels speaking, if they spoke at all. The father held him. Grandparents arrived. The chaplain arrived. Their pastor arrived. There were songs and prayers, and I paid no attention whatsoever, only watched. His heart slowed. His breathing faltered. He grew cold. His mother told him goodbye.

         He died.

         It came over me as compulsively as the contractions that had overtaken Joshua's mother. I wrapped my arms around him as his heart stopped, and from within me came this twist like a corkscrew's arms pushing downward in order to pull upward, and in the next moment I was holding Joshua's soul.

         One of the angels moved toward me, but I wrapped my arms and wings around Joshua and pivoted. "He's mine! He's mine! Mine!"
I fled to the corner, feeling as I did how the tether dissipated. I should drop him and escape, go anywhere else, only Joshua's soul welcomed mine, wrapping around me as if embracing my shoulders even as I clutched him close. "Leave me alone!"

         Archangels surrounded us, carrying swords and wearing armor. Snarling, I tried to flee with my bundle, but they kept me contained.

         "Nezeq!" Zaranel scorched through the Archangels. "He has to go before the throne! You can't keep him."
         The Archangels moved closer. They would take him by force.

         Joshua clung tighter.

         "Fine." I kept my wings between them and him. "I'll bring him myself."

         That was how I ended up before the throne of my Father and Creator, clasping the pliable light of a human soul against my chest.

         In his presence, the interior fire flared. White-walled, the hall rose around us like a cathedral of steel. Lining the walls, Archangels whose names I used to know regarded me with rage.

         I didn't release Joshua. They would take him once I did.

         Eyes unraised, I spoke. "I have your human. He's Joshua, my charge, and I'm given to understand you want him returned."

         I braved the brightness over the throne, which prevented me from seeing my Father's face. It stung, but I didn't squint. Let him scorch me to cinders. What was left for me? He would carry Joshua out of my arms and keep me from having him again. Joshua would be imprisoned behind Heaven's gates where he'd be given a song and locked away, lost forever.

         He might ask someday if he'd ever had a guardian. What would they tell him? You did have one, but he killed you. He hated you. And no, I didn't.

         A figure stepped from the light, the same man I'd seen crucified. He opened wounded hands. "Return the child."

         You couldn't have loosened Joshua's grip with a tire-iron. "He's mine."

         Jesus said, "You know where he belongs."

         "You gave him to me." I backed away a step. "But you're going to take him, like everything else you stole."

         Jesus tilted his head. "He belongs here. You'd have to stay too."

         I glared. "I won't worship. You can't blackmail me."

         "I'm not asking you to worship."

         Jesus touched my forehead.

         The fire that six thousand years and oceans couldn't drown simply stopped, leaving me chilled. I clutched Joshua all the closer.

         "Only behave yourself. You won't see the Father, but you can remain with Joshua." Jesus regarded me through narrowed eyes. "What changed your mind?"

         I expected to find the Archangels disgusted—but they showed less anger than tension. Waiting.

         "The parents." My head and wings dropped. "They could have rid themselves of him, but they loved him even though he was damaged."

         "I thought so." Jesus turned to leave. "One of the Archangels will escort you to the place I've prepared for Joshua, but after that, you're free to travel with him as you wish."

         "Wait."

         Then I lost the words I was going to say.

         Jesus looked over his shoulder. "Does it intrigue you that two animals softened their hearts for a weaker being, but you couldn't?"

         "I could have." I tucked my wings and bowed my head.

         Jesus stood right in front of me.

         I set Joshua on the ground, and he clutched my thigh. Would the child-sized soul age as he grew in understanding, or had I permanently stunted him?

         I went on my knees and crossed my arms over my chest, head lowered.

         "I want to present myself before you."

         Jesus laid his hands on my hair. Behind him I could for the first time see the face of my Father.

         "My name is Nazirel, and I want to come home, but I'm terribly, terribly damaged."

 

 

Copyright 2006, Jane Lebak

Jane Lebak has been obsessed with angels since she was 16. Her first novel, The Guardian (published under Jane Hamilton) was about angels, and her current WIP also has an angel. In addition to being a frequent contributor to The Wittenburg Door, she's had fiction in Liguorian and Catfantastic IV and three stories accepted by DKA Magazine, so why don't you go look now for the other two?