I.
One day, Gabriel goes to Jacob-called-Israel, carrying a message from the Lord. Jacob is busy in the fields, but Leah is there—she smiles at him with tender eyes, and makes him welcome in the shade of Jacob’s tent. I will find you meat and drink,she says, giving her infant daughter to Gabriel’s arms easily, the gesture practiced as habit. Rest a while here. We shall send Jacob to you when he comes.
She leaves Gabriel there, child heavy in his arms.
Dinah—for that is the child’s name—has large, dark eyes, and grasps at his halo like it is a plaything. Once or twice, she pulls it over Gabriel’s ears and into her mouth, gumming at the edge and whimpering when it cuts her lips. You are a strange little thing, Gabriel tells her, touching a finger to the soft shell of her ear. She is all softness, even the dusting of dark hair across her pate.
It is nearly sundown by the time Jacob comes, and Dinah has fallen asleep against Gabriel’s chest. He returns her to Leah’s arms then, so that he and Jacob might conference with one another.
His own arms seem emptier, after.
It seems only a little while later he is walking in Shechem, when he passes a woman—no different than any other woman in the street, except that her eyes are large and dark, full of an inherited tenderness, and there is a place where her mouth tucks in, as though it were cut by the sharp, celestial edge.
Dinah, Gabriel says, faltering. He almost does not recognize her, this woman who is flint and sun and nothing of softness. It had not seemed so long by the reckoning of angels, but—he can see ruin in her wake now, grief and strength in her visage.
She stops. Do you know me? Dinah asks.
I—no. No, I do not know you, Gabriel says, for angels do not lie.
II.
Humanity spends a lot of time looking up. When asked, they gesture to their hearts, as though that were an explanation.
III.
What are they doing? Raphael asks, cocking her head.
They are probably copulating, Gabriel answers wryly, dragging the whetstone along the edge of his sword. Or fighting. Humans are generally engaged in one or the other.
…what is the honey for?
Gabriel smiles to himself. Some mysteries are better left to Our Father.
IV.
I am afraid, Miriam confides in him one night. Her thin hands are shaking, even as she presses them to the swollen curve of her belly. I am—I am so afraid, Gabriel, I—
But the next morning, she rises up. She lifts her face to the dawn, and continues along the road to Bethlehem.
V.
He is the Lord’s Messenger, the Word given wings—he deals in Truth, and its transliteration into all human languages. Still, he is delighted when one of his charges teaches him the word leapfrog.
VI.
What are they doing? Uriel asks, frowning as one human embraces the other, weeping and clutching at one another’s clothes.
They are grieving, Gabriel says quietly. He takes Uriel’s wrist, and tugs gently. Come away, brother. Come away. They are grieving.
VII.
Gabriel clings to his shofar until the early 20th century, when Buddy Bolden’s mocking finally gets under his skin. That’s when Gabriel buys a silver trumpet from a pawn shop—it plays like a tin can, but he loves it, polishes out the dings and keeps the downstairs neighbors up, practicing at all hours.
He’s terrible—he can play with mathematic perfection, but he can’t make the air shiver the way that Bechet and Morton can. You got no soul, Gabe, the men he plays with say, hitting closer to the mark than they think. It drives him sick with jealousy, but there’s nothing to do about it except sit in smoky jazz clubs and collect stacks of records, playing his terrible silver trumpet in the antechambers of Heaven.
VIII.
Ice cream. Humanity has made a great many of their own miracles, but none so unexpected, so purposeless, so perfectly human.
IX.
For a species terrified of death, there are an awful lot of them who rush into burning buildings, who shield children with their bodies, who march, who shout, who put themselves between death and one another, who dare.
It makes him think of Miriam on that dark road, whispering, I am so afraid, and then rising with the dawn.
X.
They keep telling stories. Limited alphabets and narrow worldviews and finite grasps of the divine, and yet.
And yet.
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