by Zoe Cannon
The angel blinked. Seconds ticked by, and he said nothing. He stared at me like I was a puzzle piece that didn’t fit.
“Was that it?” I asked. “Can I get back to work now?”
“Did you not hear what I—”
“I heard you,” I interrupted, before he could go into his big speech again. I didn’t need to hear about the glory of war. I had seen it for myself. I never wanted to see it again. “Do you not remember how the first war went? Triumph and glory are not the words I would use.”
He leaned in toward me, eyes blazing with fierce intensity. The kind of intensity I remembered all too well from the war. The kind that had convinced my fellow angels to throw themselves onto the pyre of endless battle, as if their lives were worth nothing more than one more scrap of kindling for the enemy’s fires.
“Our victory was decisive. We drove the enemy from our gates.” His eyes burned into mine, as if he thought he could pass the memories from his mind into mine if only he stared hard enough. As if I hadn’t been there to see it for myself. “We banished them to hell and sealed the door behind them. We—”
“We died,” I interrupted, my voice flat. “By the hundreds. By the thousands. Have you forgotten that part? Their lives were only a footnote in the tales of great victory you passed around afterward, I’m sure. I may not have stuck around long enough to hear the stories, but I remember the celebrations. I can still smell the singed feathers on the air, as the bodies of the dead burned while we all promised to honor their memory.” I forced my next words past the lump in my throat, my voice suddenly thick. “Tell me—does it honor them to call their deaths a triumph?”
He blinked at me again. “All war requires sacrifice. You understood that once.”
“Until I almost became one of the sacrifices.” I shook my head. “War taught me a lot of things. First among them being that deep down, I’m a coward at heart. And I’m not entirely convinced that’s such a bad thing to be. Which is better—to value your life so little that you’re willing to spend it cheaply without a thought, or to have a life that’s worth enough to you that you’ll do whatever it takes to preserve it?” I stood. Something sticky caught at my pant leg—someone must have spilled a soda over here yesterday. “I waited until the war was won to walk away. I gave heaven that much. They don’t get to ask for anything more.”
I saw no trace of understanding on his face. But before I was done speaking, he was already starting to recover from his bewilderment. When I finished my speech, he leaned back and regarded me anew. The look in his white-fire eyes shifted subtly. I was no longer an equal to him, a fellow angel, but an underling. A thing. His to command. I had seen that that look on the face of every commander who had ordered me into battle.
He rose from his feet, and took a step toward me. “Whatever your… personal reasons for leaving, or for staying in this benighted world for so long,” he said, the slight pause and curl of his lip making it clear how he felt about my decision, “you are still a part of heaven’s army, and this is not a request. It is an order.” He held out his hand to me. He had forgotten to give himself fingernails. “Your game of make-believe is done. Return home with me, and report for duty.”
But even though I hadn’t lived among my own kind for millennia, I still remembered heaven’s rules. I remembered, for instance, that although he could order me back home until he was blue in the face, he had no way to drag me there forcibly. If I didn’t take his hand of my own volition, if I didn’t make the mental shift in my mind that equaled assent, I would stay right where I was. And there was nothing he could do about it.
I looked at his outstretched hand, and then at him. I shook my head. “I already gave you my answer. I’m staying.”
His inhuman eyes widened. Until that moment, I wasn’t sure it had occurred to him that I could actually refuse. I supposed I wasn’t surprised by that—he looked like the kind of angel who had never refused an order, or so much as considered the possibility, in all his long immortal life.
His hand hung between us for a long moment before he dropped it to his side. “The war is coming,” he repeated. “You can’t stop it. Hiding away among humans won’t change anything.” He said humans the way a human might have said cockroaches.
I stared back at him, my gaze level. “I’m not saying I want to stop it,” I said. “All I’m saying is that it will happen without me.”
For a moment, he regarded me in silence. Maybe he was trying to figure out how he could circumvent the laws of heaven to force me back with him. Or maybe he was simply grappling with the fact that one of us was capable of doing what he had never imagined—defying not only an order, but the very purpose I had been created for. Who knows, maybe he even thought I was brave for doing it—ironic, since I was only doing it because I was a coward.
More likely, though, he wasn’t wondering how I could be so brave. He was wondering how I could be so foolish.
I could live with that. It was better than the alternative. I would stay here, and be a fool, and live.
Wordlessly, the angel strode out the door, letting it slam shut behind him. By now, the parking lot was empty. Which meant I was the only one who saw him wink out of existence as he stepped out from under the neon green Burger Barn awning.
* * *
When I opened the apartment door that evening, heat from the oven billowed out into the hallway as I stepped inside, along with the aroma of baking bread. Danielle was standing at the stove, stirring something in the big soup pot. I leaned in for a sniff, and took the opportunity to kiss the hollow at the side of her neck. I breathed in the combined aroma of minestrone soup and Danielle’s honeysuckle perfume. Normally, the smell of the soup would have set my mouth watering, and the familiar scent of her perfume would have brought a soft smile to my lips. This time, though, I didn’t feel a thing.
Danielle turned to me with a smile of her own, still holding the soup spoon. As soup dripped onto the floor, she leaned in for a kiss, then pulled back with a frown. “Is something wrong?”
My emotions must have been showing on my face more than I had thought. That was one of the downsides of sinking so deeply into the human disguise, and for so long—it became almost impossible to keep what I was feeling off my features. Nevertheless, I tried to smile. “Rough day at work, that’s all.”
Danielle didn’t return the smile. “It seems like every other day is a rough day for you lately. You’re always complaining about your manager blaming you for something going wrong, or a customer going off on you, or just the gross smell of the crap they cook there. But you always smile when you tell me about it—did you know that? It’s like you don’t think you have the right to be upset. Like you don’t expect anything better from your life.”
I knew where this was going. It was an argument we’d had many times before. She wanted me to get a better job. A degree, maybe. I, of course, had my reasons for being happy where I was—but none of those reasons were anything I could share with her.
“But the way you looked when you walked in the door?” Danielle’s frown grew. “That’s new. No matter how bad your day is, I’ve never seen you come home looking like that before.”
“Is it that bad?” I resisted the urge to peek into the bathroom to get a look at my own face in the mirror. I hadn’t realized I was still that rattled. But despite the thick smell of tomatoes and yeasty bread on the air, I still felt like my belly was full of stones. Maybe she was right. Maybe I hadn’t put this afternoon’s encounter behind me as much as I liked to think I had.
Danielle nodded. “Have you looked at yourself? It’s bad. You don’t just look look stressed—your face is bone-white. What happened, did your manager pull a knife on you or something?” A second later, her frown took on a sharper edge. “Wait. Did someone threaten you? I don’t like the way you keep watching the window. If you’re afraid someone followed you, you need to call the police.” She cast a nervous glance over her shoulder at the window I hadn’t realized I was looking at.
I forced my eyes away from the window. It was harder than I had expected. I didn’t know why. If the angel wanted to find me, he could appear inside the apartment just as easily as out on the sidewalk. “It’s nothing like that.” I tried to stretch my fake smile wider.
Danielle strode to the window and took a long look up and down the street. When she turned back to me, she still looked far from convinced. “Then what happened?”
I didn’t want to bring this into our apartment. I wanted to sit down at the table, and eat soup and fresh-baked bread, and let the stones in my belly crumble to dust under the warmth of Danielle’s smile. This was my space to be human, my den of warmth and comfort, where I could forget the past. I had worked hard to build this life for myself. To find a meaningless job I didn’t have to think about, and a pair of warm arms to come home to.
But it was too late to keep it out. It had already followed me in the door—otherwise, I would have been able to enjoy the smell of the soup, and keep this afternoon’s fear off my face.
“I saw someone today. Someone who took a different path than I did, a long time ago.” I spoke the words slowly, not liking the taste of them. I didn’t like talking about my old life, not even in vague and coded terms. The more I talked about it, the more I had to think about it, and remember what I had left behind. “I guess it made me do some thinking.”
“About what you want to do with your life?” I wished I hadn’t seen the way that made her eyes light up with sharp hope. “If you need any help getting your thoughts in order, all you have to do is ask.”
As if I didn’t know. We had been around the subject before—and around, and around. She kept encouraging me to apply to other jobs, ones that didn’t leave me smelling of grease and insincerity at the end of the day, ones where I could actually sit down once in a while. In her more ambitious moods, she didn’t stop there—she insisted that I should sit down and make a big plan for the future. Do some soul-searching to figure out what I really wanted to do with my life, and then go back to school to make it happen. She promised she would help me every step of the way.
I didn’t know how to explain to her that I had no desire to be anywhere other than where I was right now. My job might not have been the most fulfilling thing in the world, but it kept me invisible, which was what I needed to be. And what I wanted to be.
In a couple of my early attempts at hiding among the humans, I had gained some limited notoriety. It had never been intentional, and I had always regretted it later. Once, eager to share my firsthand knowledge of the spiritual realms with humanity, I had become a priest. That was my first bad decision. The second bad decision was speaking the unvarnished truth. That was when I learned what it was like to be burned at the stake. Luckily for me, angels are hard to kill. But it took some time to rebuild the human shell, and even longer for the memory of the pain to fade. Even now, a ghost of that memory still lingered, waking me screaming out of a sound sleep just when I finally thought it was gone for good.
A couple of centuries later, fueled by a surge of guilty discontent, I had taken it upon myself to do some good in the human world, and opened an orphanage. That actually hadn’t been so bad. At least at first. For the first time since I had set down my sword, I had felt like I was making a real difference. I had even felt, at times, like I was beginning to redeem myself for my cowardice.
But the children just kept coming. They kept coming, and they kept dying. That was when I had learned another lesson. That nothing I could ever do for humanity would amount to anything more than a drop in the bucket.
Even so, I might have kept on with it, if not for the fact that I had become a fixture in my community. My neighbors knew who I was. They knew my name; they knew my face. And after a few decades, they started to ask questions. Questions like, Why do you look as young as you did the day you first showed up? Questions, eventually, like, Were you sent here by the devil?
That time, I had run before the flames could find me. And I had never risked sticking my neck out like that again. Humanity didn’t miss my efforts—it wasn’t as if I had ever been able to save more than a handful of them anyway. At least that was what I told myself, on the nights I couldn’t sleep. The nights when I wondered if I was still just making excuses for my own shameful lack of courage.
Midnight doubts or not, though, it had been centuries since I had so much as considered doing anything that might draw attention to myself. And just about anything ran the risk of drawing some amount of attention, as long as it involved leaving behind the anonymity of my uniform and my place behind the counter. When I stood there in that ridiculous hat and said, “Cock-a-doodle-moo,” I became a category in people’s minds, a cardboard cutout. There was no risk of anyone seeing me as an individual—an individual who didn’t age, and never got sick, and whose eyes looked subtly wrong to anyone who got too close.
Danielle cleared her throat. I realize, a few seconds too late, that I had left her question unanswered for too long. “It’s not about that,” I said, more sharply than I intended. It’s never about that, I wanted to say, but didn’t. No matter how much you might want it to be.
Except this time, I wasn’t so sure about that. Maybe that was what made me pull away when she took a step closer, and stare out the window instead of meeting her eyes.
Even though I wasn’t looking at her, I could sense her disappointment. She always tried to hide it, but she never tried very well. “Then what’s the issue?” she asked.
“It brought up some bad memories.” I forced myself to turn to face her. None of this was her fault. I had brought her into my life to be a source of warmth and comfort; I could hardly fault her for trying to be just that. “It made me start to wonder if it’s ever possible to truly leave your past behind.” I meant to stop there, but my mouth kept going, revealing the part I hadn’t meant to admit to her. The part I hadn’t meant to admit to myself. “It made me wonder if I did the right thing so long ago,” I said under my breath, “when I chose this life.”
Danielle rested her hand softly on my shoulder. “You did.”
“Practically from the moment I met you, you’ve complained about the life I’ve made for myself. Now you want to tell me I did the right thing?” I shrugged off her touch, and instantly regretted it when hurt crossed her face.
She tried to cover up her reaction with a smile. “Well, if what you left behind was bad enough to haunt you this much even after so long, of course you did the right thing.”
She was right. More right than she knew—she didn’t know just how long it had been haunting me. But her words didn’t leave me as comforted as they should have. “He talked to me about things that used to matter to me. Things I used to believe in. I was a part of something, back then. Now I just… exist. And that’s always been enough for me. But…” I trailed off, unsure of my own thoughts.
“But sometimes it’s not,” Danielle finished for me. “Especially when you come face to face with what you could have been.”
It was a surprisingly astute comment, for someone who didn’t understand the situation. I didn’t want to let on how right she was. Not only because that would mean acknowledging more of my own feelings to myself than I was comfortable with. But also because I didn’t want to give her more ammunition for her next push to get me to do something else with my life. But she deserved better than to be rejected for something that had nothing to do with her, so I said, “Exactly.”
“Were you happy in that life?” Danielle asked.
How, in the name of the four mighty archangels, was I supposed to answer that? “I was until I wasn’t,” I finally said. And I had been. Happier than I had ever been since. Until I had seen the reality behind that fierce, addictive sense of purpose. Until I had learned that real battle wasn’t triumph and glory. It was blood and pain and death. And none of the others had seemed to see what I had seen, or feel what I had felt. No matter how long the war had dragged on, no matter how many we had lost, they had always been read
y to charge in and die for the cause.
“And did you leave for a reason?”
Was wanting to live a reason? “Yes.”
Danielle took my arm. As on edge as I was, I almost pulled away. I resisted the urge, and let her lead me to a chair and sit me down like a doll. It was easier to be led than to fight. And maybe, I thought, I should give her a chance. Maybe her warm human comfort was exactly what I needed.
She sat down across from me and leaned in toward me, hands on her thighs. “We all change. That’s what life is. The trick is in allowing yourself to change, instead of getting stuck between the past and the future.”
Almost immediately, I regretted not fighting. I tensed in my chair. “Don’t turn this into another talk about what I’m doing with my life.”
“But it all comes back to that, doesn’t it? Why you work at that place. Why you’re with me.” She held up a hand as I opened my mouth to speak. “No, you don’t need to reassure me about what I mean to you. It’s okay, I won’t break. I figured out the truth about our relationship a long time ago.” She smiled, sad and resigned. “You’re in limbo. Because you don’t know what you are, only what you aren’t. And so you’ve just been living day to day—not even living, but surviving—and trying to convince yourself that’s enough.”
The worst part was, I couldn’t even argue. Not without lying to her. And I had lied to her enough over the course of our relationship. “I do love you. That’s always been real.” Even if it was more about comfort than passion. There was more than one way to love. And I didn’t remember how to feel passion anymore. I had only ever felt that kind of passion for one thing: the purpose I had been created for. The thought of feeling that way about anyone or anything again left a bad taste in my mouth.
Her smile grew a shade sadder. “I know. But I’m not your life’s purpose, and that’s okay. The way I see it, I’m here to help you figure out what that purpose is. You haven’t wanted to figure out your future because you haven’t been ready to let go of the past. But maybe it’s time. Maybe what happened today was a sign.”
