Angels on Overtime

by Ann Crawford

  Emily nods. As always, the heavy scent of flowers and soil calms her.

  “How’s she doing?”

  Emily shrugs, then slowly shakes her head.

  “She’s had such a full and rich life,” Marion smiles. “All used up—and very well used—and no regrets. That’s the way to go.”

  Emily nods. She is surprised at the peace she feels amidst the sorrow, and it was from a place far deeper than the scent of flowers and soil.

  Sam climbs into bed and tries to gauge if Emily’s asleep or if she’s just pretending. (He knows, of course—no one can be that out of it. And Emily knew that he knew, and he knew that Emily knew that he knew, and she knew that he knew that, too.) He taps Emily on the shoulder.

  “NO!”

  Ching! Once again, the door broadcasts Emily’s arrival at the flower shop/healing locus. Once again, another morning’s fight with Sam has left her beyond frazzled.

  “Good morning.” Once again, Marion smiles as she greets Emily while tending to an ornate flower arrangement. “How are you, dear one?”

  Once again, Emily bursts into tears, which quickly wend their way to wailing. And, once again, while Emily’s angels cover their ears, Marion calmly retrieves the box of tissues for her.

  When the wails subside, David slaps his hand on his thigh, angelically. “How can she be so at peace that her mother, her best friend, is dying, but then be such a wreck over....”

  “Nothing?” Angela snipes.

  “They’re very good at the big things. Maybe because they galactisize the smaller things.”

  Angela slaps her hand on her thigh, angelically, but for a different reason than David. Her cackles resound through the shop.

  After a quick glance around her store, as if hearing something very strange, Marion enfolds Emily in a hug. “You have eternity, dear one. But you might want to get started on the happy part of eternity sooner than later.”

  “Hey, she’s still taking our job!” David laughs.

  Jack’s lawyer places a stack of papers on the visiting-room table. “Your wife is suing you for a divorce.”

  The feelings flooding through Jack’s entire body amaze him. That night, staring up from his bunk bed, he is still amazed. “You know,” he announces to the ceiling, “I felt more imprisoned with her than I feel in here.”

  From the depths under his top bunk comes the voice of Raymond, his bunkie. “Man, I didn’t want to tell you this, but you never sounded like you thought much of her, respected her, even liked her.”

  “Ever hear that saying, be careful what you ask for?” Jack asks, the question more for himself than his friend. “I asked for more time to read and meditate. I asked for more time to work out. I asked for time to get a master’s degree. I asked for her to file for divorce, because she would make life hell for me if I pursued it first.” Jack sits up. “And it all happened. But it happened by default. I’m done living that way. I’m going to figure out exactly what I want for the rest of my life, and how I want to live it, and who I want to live it with.”

  He pulls out a notebook and starts to write.

  Dawn arrives and finds Jack still staring at the ceiling as he lies in his bunk. He pulls out his journal, writes a few more notes, and then lies back down again. After a moment of trying to sleep, he sits up and meditates. His angels meditate with him.

  By the way, ever wish you could see what the angels see and do what the angels do? You can, and do.

  The leaves on the tree just outside the window, via their caress by the gentle wind, create a dance of sunlight on the kitchen floor. The cats pounce on the moving spots, lifting Emily out of her slump for a moment. The moment is short-lived, however, as Sam coughs, yanking her back from the dancing sunspots and into her self-inflicted misery. Oh, sure, she knows it’s self-inflicted. And she’s getting tired of it. She suddenly imagines that life is an ongoing etching and sketching plaything. Don’t like the picture? Shake it up and draw a new one. Don’t like that picture? Shake and draw again. And again.

  Emily rises from the breakfast table and relishes the loud clatter as she drops her dishes into the sink. A very startled Sam lowers the paper just long enough to shoot her a withering glance. But Emily doesn’t much feel like being withered today. She walks outside, leaving the room and its objectionable ambiance behind her.

  She picks a couple of cherry tomatoes off the potted vine just outside the kitchen door. She pops them in her mouth, one after the other, tasting the warmth of the morning sun and the cleansing of yesterday’s rain in their tart sweetness.

  Her cats follow her as she ambles along the path to the driveway. She picks them up and holds them close to her. The clouds play with the sunshine on the mountains, a much grander version of the light show on her kitchen floor.

  The next thing Emily knows is that she is much closer to those clouds as she sits in her car halfway up the very tall mountain close to her town. The clock showed that more than an hour had passed, but she has no awareness of the time passing nor how she got there.

  David would tell you, “That’d be us!”

  Emily climbs out of her car, soaking in the scenery, the fresh air, the sunshine on her face. It strikes her as strange how few cars are in the parking lot, given this day just made for hiking. She pulls a blanket out of the trunk and starts along the trail.

  Several minutes later, a grassy spot on the hillside beckons to her to abandon the path. She spreads out her blanket and then spreads out her long body and limbs on top of it. She gazes at the sky and the tops of the pine trees in a nearby grove. She could swear the trees are whispering to her.

  Laughter from the trail causes her to look back in that direction. A mother and father, who are about Emily’s age, with their daughter, about ten years old, seem to find their hike very amusing. But their amusement is a sharp contrast to the sudden, searing pain in her heart. A mother, a father, a ten-year-old girl. She is losing her mother, has lost her father, has not only lost her twin sister when they were both ten, but also at this point in her life would probably never have a ten-year-old or a child of any age. She and Sam had tried, but she was never very disappointed that their attempts had failed—until this very minute.

  Her tears and sobs come so fast, so furious, so hot, so deep that she struggles to breathe. She cannot see or hear her angels consoling her, but even through the keening that seems to be emitting from her entire body, not just from her heart and throat, she feels the ground under her. It’s almost as if Earth is cradling her, drawing her pain out of her. If she could see her angels, she would see David holding her hand.

  What does come to her sight is a light beam originating from the center of the planet up through her body and up to the farthest ethers. And even way, way beyond that.

  Note to you, our reader: that’s how big you are. No, bigger. No, bigger than that, even. Yes, really. And when you get into fear of any kind, you shrink. No, smaller. No, smaller than that, even. Yes, really.

  In this minute, Emily gets that. Really. She lies in her blissful, expanded state for a long, long while. A gentle breeze stirs her, and she opens her eyes. The low rays of the sun alert her that night would soon be coming, so she prepares to go home.

  Home. Her beautiful home that she loves so much. But just the thought of seeing Sam bursts the bigness, the bubble of infinity she’d been reveling in for hours and hours. Poof! Back to small.

  That night, David watches Emily’s sleep-and-dream monitor:

  On a beach, two children run into her arms and the three tumble to the sand. The laughing puddle of three becomes a pond of four as a man joins the laughfest.

  The dream stops abruptly as Emily tosses and turns in her bed. Once assured that he won’t need to be popping into her room at any second, David turns to watch her day-in-review.

  Bliss shines on Emily’s face as she weeds the garden and then picks a few vegetables.

  “The universe has already given them everything,” he sighs to Angela. “All of them. Everyt
hing. It might not be in the form of millions of dollars, the new house, the new car, the ten-year-old child, but the universe is a place where all is provided. One way or another. Part of the game is drawing that—literally—into their lives. They can draw the picture.”

  “Think you could do better?”

  “I sure hope I would!”

  “What’s the thing you’d try to remember if you ever did the human gig?”

  “Shake and draw. Shake and draw. Like that toy Emily was thinking about.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Remember this conversation.”

  “Good luck with that! All humans go to Earth thinking they’ll remember all the conversations like this one. But so few do. That’s part of the point.”

  “Great.”

  Brooke watches the monitor that shows the overview of Jack’s day:

  As he washes dishes in the prison kitchen, the thermometer on the wall behind him reads one hundred and twenty degrees.

  In the prison’s weight room, with the help of a couple of other inmates, a getting-very-buff-and-handsome Jack lifts a set of heavy weights over his head.

  Just down the hall from the television room, Jack lounges on a sofa with a book. He sits up, pulls out his notebook, and writes a few words.

  That night, Jack lies down in his bunk and falls asleep instantly.

  Well, it was almost instantly. There was enough time for him to say something to whomever was listening: “Thank you.”

  Very strange how things work out sometimes, isn’t it?

  Jack walks the track en route to the bleachers, a book tucked under his arm. His shoulders are no longer hunched, plus he’s not really walking—he’s strolling. Cool. Strolling cool was far from his repertoire B.P. as he refers to it (Before Prison, but you probably figured that one out). Several inmates walking the track toward him nod their heads politely and step out of his way.

  “Morning, Mr. Anderson,” one calls to him.

  “Name’s Jack,” he calls back.

  “Yes, Mr. Anderson.”

  Another inmate approaches and walks along the track with him. “Good morning, Mr. Anderson.”

  “Name’s Jack.”

  “I’d love to talk to you about something, Mr. Anderson. Have you been saved?”

  Jack thinks for a moment about how he wants to respond. “As a matter of fact, I have been.”

  “So you know you’re going to Heaven?”

  No thinking is required this time. “I’m already in Heaven.”

  He gives an understanding smile to his fellow inmate’s obvious confusion. He takes a seat on the bleachers and opens his book.

  That night, Brooke again watches the review of Jack’s day:

  The inmate who asked Jack if he was saved sits by him on the bleachers and they talk.

  Jack and the same inmate talk while they push their lunch trays through the cafeteria line. They sit down at a table together, still talking.

  Jack wanders into the prison’s music/game room where he picks up a guitar and starts to play. Another inmate joins him and shows him how to play a few chords.

  Amidst the usual din of the inmates calling to and joking with each other before lights out, Jack meditates on his bunk.

  With snores echoing down the hall, Jack stares at the darkened ceiling. A smile spreads across his face.

  Shifting her view to the other monitor, Brooke watches Jack sleep. As Christopher and Sapphire attend to their tasks, Blake touches Brooke’s arm. “Something’s on your mind.”

  Brooke sighs. “It’s the strangest thing about humans—if you put them in a bad situation, they rise. If you put them in a good situation, they sink. Not always, of course, but sometimes.”

  “Well, there can always be something good about the bad and something not so good about the good.”

  “He’s become gallant. Confident. So much more than he was.”

  “I hear a ‘but’ in there.”

  “But did it have to happen this way? And what about Dick, the guy who got him sent to prison? What happened to him? I know you said awful things were going to befall him, but didn’t he sign up to help someone awaken?”

  “Yes, he did. But if he chooses not to awaken, the guilt will make him sick.”

  “Will his angels arrange all that?”

  “Well, not really. His angels don’t really have to do anything in that regard. When people are unkind, unhappy, disgruntled, their bodies fill with toxins that can make them sick, prematurely age them, and cause them to die a miserable death.”

  Brooke digests this information.

  “Or not. Depends.”

  “Oh, thanks!”

  “Take smiling, for instance. When someone is genuinely happy, why even the mere act of moving the facial muscles into a smile does a world of good for his or her body. Meditating and smiling and being kind and goodhearted does a lot more good than a good heart doctor or a good plastic surgeon. And laughing massages the internal organs. Living a life of peace and joy and being true to the self keeps the cardiologist away.”

  Brooke digests this information, too.

  “Or not. Depends.”

  “Oh, thanks again!”

  “Everything always depends on other thoughts, actions, effects, choices, decisions made before incarnating, the highest path for the soul’s evolution, and the same items coming from seven billion other human beings.” He stops as Brooke starts to swoon from information overload. “But true happiness can be the ultimate elixir.”

  “But Dick signed up to do something good, really.”

  “Well, yes, but he’s forgotten his mission—almost all of them do when they come here—and he’s gotten lost in his character. He’s become a greedy, self-centered, narrow-minded man. What comes to him is the direct effect of that cause. It can change in an in-stant. The whole future can change in an instant of awakening. He could make amends, he could forgive himself, and he could awaken to the whole shadow play, the whole scenario.”

  Brooke adjusts the dial on a monitor and watches Dick sleeping peacefully. “But he seems like he’s doing just fine.”

  “He’s not very advanced. It’ll all take a while to catch up with him. Now if Jack did something like this, he’d have instant karma, delivered by himself. The more advanced the being, the faster the repercussions come when he or she fumbles the ball.”

  “It’s all very complicated.”

  “Don’t make yourself crazy. The bottom line is life is good. And humans can catch on in infinite ways. Just might take them a while to get there.”

  “Hmmmmm.”

  “For Jack’s own path, it’s not up to Dick to apologize; it’s up to Jack to get over it. And he did.”

  “Hmmmmm.”

  “You can’t flunk Earth. You can’t lose this ball game. You get to go back over and over ’til you get it right.”

  “You keep saying you! Not me!”

  “No, no, I mean humans, of course.”

  Chapter 6

  Brooke and Blake study a snapshot of a page from Jack’s journal on a monitor while the sleeping-and-dreaming Jack is shown on the upper-left monitor. Delightful dream blips pop and fade around his head, mostly involving a tall, beautiful, joy-filled woman:

  She disappears into a forest, then reappears on a beach. She disappears into the ocean amidst a pod of dolphins, then reappears on a tiny island, but then she dives into the waves. She passes by him in her car, then disappears down the freeway. She dashes across a sun-dappled meadow, then disappears into the shadows at the far edge of the field. He calls to her and is overjoyed to see her reappear from the shadows.

  “Alright,” Blake says to his protégé. “He’s clearly convinced he’s going to meet her any moment after his release. You take on this part of this ball game. Go ahead, hit it right on out of the ballpark.”

  “So,” Brooke announces to the rest of the group, “he’s getting out of prison soon and he wants a wife. Not just any wife—he has a list of forty things the
re.”

  “Forty!” Sapphire frowns. “No one ever makes a list of forty qualities in a mate. That’d be impossible.”

  “Nothing’s impossible,” Blake reminds her.

  “Possible for us, maybe,” Sapphire groans. “We’re angels.” She points to the sleeping Jack as bits of his dreams continue to show up on the monitor. “This one’s another story.”

  “The qualities on the list are about one-third physical, one-third emotional and intellectual, and one-third spiritual,” Brooke continues. “And he’s crystal, crystal clear about it all. Plus, he’s willing to wait for the whole enchilada, even until the next lifetime if he has to. But his work and healing show he’s ready for her now. So now the question is, how are we going to find someone who fits all those things?”

  Christopher reads each quality on the list aloud and types it into his computer. “Long hair. Beautiful. Intelligent. At peace with her world. Conscious. Has done her work. Not too fussy, is he?” Christopher starts to enter the next requisite attribute but stops. “Six feet tall. Is he over six feet tall? I guess he is, now that he’s standing up straight.” He finishes entering the information on his laptop and presses the return key.

  As the new information appears on the screen, Blake studies it carefully. “Well,” he says, “it looks like there’s a woman in Idaho who matches every one of these things. Only one problem.”

  “What’s that?” Brooke asks.

  “She’s married.”

  “Married! That’s obviously not going to work.” Brooke pauses for a moment. “Well, how married?”

  Blake studies the screen. “Hmmmm, a tiny, tiny spark of love is still there, but the two are no longer a suitable team. They’re not on each other’s ballpark, I mean wavelength, and not interested in the same game anymore. At all.”

  “Where are her angels?” Brooke asks. “Let’s talk to them.”