Fallen Angel (4 page)
Authors: Willa Cline
Can't wait to hear about this book!
Love,
Sarah
She turned away from the computer to put the book away, then opened it up again. She wasn't sure what she wanted to look up, so just flipped idly through it. Angels were showing up with odd frequency in her life lately. Maybe it was just the case of thinking about something, and, being more sensitive to it, beginning to see it everywhere. The dream was certainly odd--she didn't see anything about angels with black wings in the book, or the kind of gruff, stern angels that she had seen in her dream. They almost seemed like they should be smoking cigars. Angels with cigars. That one made her laugh. "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar . . ."
Thoughtfully, she put the book back on the shelf.
She didn't notice the feather on the windowsill.
* * *
She was flipping through the angel book again when Jason stuck his head around the door. "I thought I'd run down to Joe's for a sandwich if that's okay. Can you watch the front for a few minutes?"
She glanced at her watch--1:30. "Sure, no problem. I didn't realize it was lunch time."
"Want me to bring you something?"
"Do you mind?"
"Nope."
She reached into her bag for her wallet, then remembered it was still in her pocket from the second grocery store trip. But her journal was in the bag, and when her hand touched it, she pulled it out. It was a medium-sized hardback book covered in patterned Chinese silk; on the cover, a young woman hurried across a humpbacked bridge to reach a young man who waited on the other side. The silk was in colors of red and turquoise and gold, and the spine was turquoise leather, with a red silk cord to mark the pages. She opened the journal to the marked page--the next blank page, about halfway through the book--and ran her hand down the smooth paper.
Each page was faintly lined, and printed with a shadowy image of the same bridge that appeared on the front of the book. She reached for a pen from the mug on her desk, and bent over the book, thinking about her dream.
Jason cleared his throat. "Sarah?"
"Hm?"
"Lunch?"
She looked up, and slowly her eyes came back into focus. "Sorry," she said, and reached into her pocket for her wallet. She opened it and peered in. "I've only got three dollars," she said. "I had to write a check for the cat food. I forgot to go by the bank this morning . . . will that be enough?"
"Well, probably, but you know, you could take a few bucks out of the cash register. It is your store, after all." He grinned at her. "Is there something bugging you? You seem . . . I don't know. A little flakier than usual." He smiled again to let her know he was just teasing.
"No, everything's okay. You know that guy I told you about that showed up here so late last night? I saw him in the grocery store this morning."
"And?"
"He was buying orange juice."
"Yeah?"
"And still wearing the overcoat."
"Ah. Want me to beat him up for you?"
She looked up sharply, then realized that he was still teasing. She heaved a dramatic sigh. "No one takes me seriously. Go get your sandwich." She shooed him away. "Go. Go."
* * *
She gathered her journal and pen and carried them out into the main part of the store, and sat behind the counter on the stool, then got up again and went over to the corner where they kept the coffee urn, and a smaller one with plain hot water, and made herself a cup of tea with one of the new teabags she had bought that morning. She used her favorite mug, a tea-with-milk-colored one with a string of Indian elephants around the bottom, trunk-to-tail, trunk-to-tail. She had bought it for herself at a specialty teashop on one of her book buying trips out of town.
Settled once again behind the counter, she opened the journal to the page marked by the red silk ribbon, and picked up the pen. She wrote the date at the top of the page, then paused. "
A very vivid dream
," she wrote.
I was an observer, not a participant. I was watching a group of what appeared in some ways to be old men sitting around a table, but they had wings, so I knew they were angels.
But they weren't the usual kind of angels, i.e., they weren't cute and sweet, they were almost frightening. Or perhaps, not frightening, but obviously strong and powerful. Well, maybe a little bit frightening. They were huge--I don't know what I base this on, because there really wasn't anything to compare them to, but I had the impression that they were huge--and their wings, unlike angel wings are generally portrayed, were black. Huge, black, glossy wings . . . well cared for, in most cases, like the shiny black coat of a well-fed cat, but dusty and dull in the case of a couple of them. Sere.
They were talking, discussing something, but I couldn't understand what they were saying. It was sort of like having the television on in the other room, loud enough that you can hear that it's on, but so low that you can't understand the words. But even though I couldn't understand the words, I picked up an impression that they were angry, worried about something. They were discussing what to do about whatever it was that was worrying them.
There was one (angel?) who, while still sitting at the table, seemed to be setting himself apart from the rest of the group. He was playing with a penknife, plunging it over and over again into the table, until one of the other beings clamped a huge paw over his and made him stop, looking at him quite sternly. He didn't speak, but the censure was obvious in his eyes. He (the one with the knife) sort of figuratively rolled his eyes and looked away.
Someone cleared their throat, and Sarah reluctantly pulled herself away from the world that was being recreated in her journal. She looked up to see a small white haired woman standing in front of the counter.
"I'm sorry, dear," the elderly woman said. "I didn't mean to interrupt you, but I'd like to buy this book." She held out a volume of short stories by Florida writers, no doubt picked up from the "Local Interest" table.
Sarah smiled and closed the journal. "I'm
so
sorry. I sort of lost track there for a moment."
"You were concentrating very hard," the woman agreed. "What are you writing?"
"Oh, just writing down a dream I had last night," Sarah said. "About angels. Or at least I
think
they were angels . . ." she trailed off.
"Angels! How lovely! That reminds me--do you have any Christmas cards? I might as well get them while I'm out."
Sarah guided her to a table where stacks of boxed Christmas cards were arranged, and left her picking up one after the other. She would study them, then put them back down, as she tried to decide between Christmas trees, Santa and the elves, or angels. She eventually decided, As Sarah knew she would, on the angels.
At least she didn't get the cherubs
, Sarah thought, as she rang up the short story book and the box of cards--fairly plain white cards with a print of Abbott Handerson Thayer's "Angel" painting on the front. A very ordinary-looking angel: Thayer's eleven-year-old daughter Mary, Sarah knew. But who was to say that angels
weren't
ordinary looking? Surely they weren't all little chubby-cheeked, gilt-winged cherubs. Sarah was sick of
those
angels already, and it was only November. But Thayer's angel looked like the kind of angel you could sit down and have a normal conversation with.
A few minutes later, she waited on a teenage girl looking for a Christmas gift for her boyfriend. Sarah helped her pick out a volume of Rilke poetry, which seemed sort of deep for a teenager until Sarah remembered her own teenage, angst-filled years and realized it was perfect. As she pulled the book from the shelf to hand it to the girl, she opened it to the Second Elegy:
Every angel is terrifying. And yet, alas,
I invoke you, almost deadly birds of the soul,
knowing about you.
2
Deadly birds of the soul.
She slipped one of the store's bookmarks into the page and told the girl to wish her boyfriend "Happy Birthday" for her. The girl assured her she would, and thanked her for helping her with the book. "He'll love it," she said, and Sarah thought, but did not say, "He'll love it because he loves you."
6.
She scrambled an egg for her dinner that night, and set a place for herself at the kitchen table, using her grandmother's old dishes. It sometimes seemed like everything she had was old--the table had belonged to her great-grandmother, and the dishes had been her grandmother's. The chair in the living room was one that her mother had given her for her first apartment, as was the wooden table that sat beside it. She had bought a few things over the years, mostly small things like bookshelves and rugs, but most of her things she'd had for a long time. She was comforted by that, although she sometimes thought she should get rid of them and just go out and buy everything new--new furniture, new clothes, new dishes . . . She had the money, after all.
But every time, she shook the thought off. She didn't need new clothes, her clothes were perfectly fine. She didn't work in an office anymore, and here in Florida it didn't matter as much anyway. She hadn't worn stockings once since she'd been here, and every time she cleaned out her closet she flirted with the idea of giving away all her old suits and shoes. Maybe she'd do that, finally, this year. Maybe for Christmas she'd clean out the closet and give everything to the poor. Although what the poor would want with her old pumps and business suits, she couldn't imagine.
She read while she ate her tea and toast and the egg--a cozy murder mystery set in a needlework shop--then washed the dishes and put them in the drainer to dry. She carried her book into the living room and settled into an overstuffed chair, but didn't turn on the lamp. She sat in the dark until Dinah came looking for her and, meowing, jumped into her lap. She looked up, questioning, and bumped her head into Sarah's chin.
"I know, sweetie. I know." Sarah said. "Let's go write a letter."
She carried the cat into the bedroom, but when Sarah sat down at the computer, Dinah jumped down and ran back into the living room. "Okay, be that way," Sarah said, and pressed the power button. While she waited for the computer to power on, she walked around the room and lit candles on her dresser, on the bedside table, and on her little altar. As she walked past it she touched her finger to her lips, then to the photograph in the tiny frame.
She sat back down at the computer, opened up a web browser, typed in the address, and sat with her hands poised over the keys while the page loaded. She typed:
Dear Gaby . .
* * *
The Dead Letter Office
The Post Office promises to deliver mail rain or shine, through snow or sleet or dead of night . . .
Ever want to write a letter that you don't want to reach its destination?
A letter to an old boyfriend or girlfriend, an old boss, someone you have a crush on. Tying up loose ends, healing old wounds, pouring out your heart. Not that you necessarily want to actually tell that person.
Or maybe it's someone who isn't reachable by normal means--someone who has passed on, or a public personality with no published address. Or even an imaginary person, or someone whose existence you aren't sure about. Maybe you never knew your father, or your mother. Maybe you'd still like to talk to them.
You think you'd feel better if you could just write the letter, and you've been writing it in your head for months, or years. Now you can mail that special letter from the Dead Letter Office, and feel the relief of letting it go.
All mail received at The Dead Letter Office is immediately destroyed without reading. No record is made of any information about you. We have no way of knowing who you are, nor do we care. We are merely providing a much needed service.
Sarah had read the text at the web site a dozen times or more over the past year since she discovered it. She sometimes clicked through the site's pages while she was thinking of what to write, trying to put her thoughts into words that could be translated to the screen, then sent off to be, as the website put it in the FAQ, "broken apart into its component molecules and scattered into the air."