there’s a seraph who sleeps in the pews of the city’s churches because it’s the only place she feels comfortable stretching out her wings, feathers nearly blocking out the stained glass windows. At night, the prayers embedded in the stonework whisper to her, a litany of please and help and need, as inexorable and unceasing as the rattle of the subway beneath her.
and there’s an angel of the third sphere who plays pickup basketball with a young prophet—a young man who walks through metal detectors each morning to get to a high school where only fifty percent will graduate, but loves calculus and singing in church every Sunday. “Your jump shot’s insane, man,” the saint-to-be laughs, clapping the angel on the back, right between the wings. And the angel, who can see how the light catches on the young man’s halo, laughs too.
and there are ophanim sitting on the girders of half-built skyscrapers, unafraid of falling; passing sandwiches and thermoses of campbell’s soup between them, speaking in tongues about the traffic on I-90 and last night’s Bears game.
and Israfel sneaks away from celestial choir practice to attend concerts in the park, but he usually ends up absently sketching equations modeling the wavelengths into the grass. There’s an adjunct mathematics professor who sometimes attends, and afterwards they discuss hyperharmonic series in the gathering dusk.
angels in the public libraries, reading children’s books and touching the illustrations with just their fingertips, like beholding a sacred text.
angels moving along the cracks in the pavement and between the alleyways; going without fear into the worst neighborhoods, because they have walked in the valley of death and fear no evil—not even the mastery of it that humanity demonstrates through abject poverty, ignorance, social immobility.
angels glaring at potholes and rolling their eyes at delays (the work of the Deceiver, no doubt) and running to catch a subway that goes not even a hairsbreadth of the speed their wings could carry them.
angels looking up at the statues made in their image, grey forms on grey pedestals with granite wings, and snickering to themselves. (The artist missed a few hundred eyes, they think; mouths and limbs and grace and song and fire and flight—)
but then they gaze up at the brutalist skyscrapers with windows reflecting the flame-colored sunset and low-hanging exhaust, spindly radio towers forming a winking blue halo if you crane your neck just so. And the angels think maybe the humans caught a glimpse of the divine after all.
and there’s an angel of the third sphere who plays pickup basketball with a young prophet—a young man who walks through metal detectors each morning to get to a high school where only fifty percent will graduate, but loves calculus and singing in church every Sunday. “Your jump shot’s insane, man,” the saint-to-be laughs, clapping the angel on the back, right between the wings. And the angel, who can see how the light catches on the young man’s halo, laughs too.
and there are ophanim sitting on the girders of half-built skyscrapers, unafraid of falling; passing sandwiches and thermoses of campbell’s soup between them, speaking in tongues about the traffic on I-90 and last night’s Bears game.
and Israfel sneaks away from celestial choir practice to attend concerts in the park, but he usually ends up absently sketching equations modeling the wavelengths into the grass. There’s an adjunct mathematics professor who sometimes attends, and afterwards they discuss hyperharmonic series in the gathering dusk.
angels in the public libraries, reading children’s books and touching the illustrations with just their fingertips, like beholding a sacred text.
angels moving along the cracks in the pavement and between the alleyways; going without fear into the worst neighborhoods, because they have walked in the valley of death and fear no evil—not even the mastery of it that humanity demonstrates through abject poverty, ignorance, social immobility.
angels glaring at potholes and rolling their eyes at delays (the work of the Deceiver, no doubt) and running to catch a subway that goes not even a hairsbreadth of the speed their wings could carry them.
angels looking up at the statues made in their image, grey forms on grey pedestals with granite wings, and snickering to themselves. (The artist missed a few hundred eyes, they think; mouths and limbs and grace and song and fire and flight—)
but then they gaze up at the brutalist skyscrapers with windows reflecting the flame-colored sunset and low-hanging exhaust, spindly radio towers forming a winking blue halo if you crane your neck just so. And the angels think maybe the humans caught a glimpse of the divine after all.
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