Rodolphus: When Angels Perish

When Angels Perish

J. Rodolphus

When Angels Perish

short fiction by Rodolphus

e passed from darkness into the halo of a streetlamp, his breath appearing about his face in the white-yellow light, pluming behind him, white fledgling wings. He marched with head bent forward, hands xx

hands buried in deep pockets, his jaw set, hard, eyes staring into nothingness, hard, taking no heed of road, regarding not sidewalk nor building nor chance passerby. He crossed the thin boundary of white-yellow light and again passed into darkness.

A day when the man was a boy, he remembers standing by the display case, heart consumed by lust for the gorgeous little tom-tom drum, glancing between the object of his desire and then at the tall man standing next to him — should I ask, or no? — a silly tourist trinket only, but this lust was understandable as the boy is only eight years old. The drum glistened with amazing shiny-blue rock things, and there were all manner of authentic Native American artistry depicting incredible acts of derring-do. The tall man busily fingered through a display box of dark cigars. A little girl stood on the other side of the tall man, and she waved her two-piece selection of hard candy, excited over two pieces of candy like only a six-year-old can be.

The wonderful shop, maybe the closest place I have ever been to heaven, bulged with gorgeous and silly tourist trinkets galore. My nostrils bubbled with the scent of carved woods, and the smells and stinks of green surrounding woods, and closer nose demands of millions of tangy hard pectin candies which made my mouth flood with juices.

The tall man was my father, the little girl next to him my little sister. My father, Papa, wore his dark hair unfashionably long, his moustache humungous all but hiding his upper lip with a dark triangle of fur suspending from his full lower lip, and as always he wore a long black duster coat. Ali, my sister, wore some kind of Robin Hood suit, green tights and all. And even though I was dressed as a cowboy for the day’s adventure — boots and hat and shiny six-gun — what I wanted more than anything else in the world was that nifty Indian tom-tom drum.

Sunday Adventure, Papa’s version of Sunday Drive, and on this quest we were up in the mountains — where, I can’t remember — but somewhere in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Every Sunday Papa woke us before even the sun was awake, and he was kind to our grumpy grumblings, helping us dress in our adventure garb chosen the day before, and then bundled us off in the Jeep to pick up The Tookus, Papa’s girlfriend. And we would have an adventure, beginning at dawn — a major hike, a picnic, swimming in a hot spring, peeking into a spooky cave — usually not ending until the darkest part of the night, when Papa would drop off The Tookus and bring us home, trudging sleepful Ali and I up the narrow stairs to his second-floor townhouse, then snugly into our twin beds.

I was just about to tug on Papa’s coat and inquire about the possibility of acquiring the Native American artifact on the other side of the glass from my pointing finger, when The Tookus scuttled into the room, her head down, her long dark hair hiding her face. She hurried to my father, and even though I was only eight years old, and even before I heard her whisper the word “twouble” — I knew there was trouble.

“Those bully boys with pumpkin heads?” Papa inquired, moustache bunching like bird wings above pursed curly lips. His eyebrows were humorous, even when there was trouble, and right now he looked as if he were going to laugh — moustache quirked, eyebrow raised, eyes sparkling — I had no idea how he could look so giggly-like, especially with that image rolling around behind my eyes (bully boys with pumpkin heads); I completely forgot why my index finger hovered outside the glass case inches away from the cheapo tom-tom toy, and at any instant I was positive I would begin to cry.

“Well, choose your candy,” Papa said, grinning, for the The Tookus, to which she methodically replied: “I can’th becauth thuguh ith a tewwible, tewwible toxic to my body,” but it was said with none of the usual fervor she employed when exercising her infirmaries.

“Hypochondriac,” Papa said and when The Tookus did not rise to the usual bait I knew she was unusually fwightened...

...Usually, when Papa called The Tookus a “Hypochondriac” my mind spun into its everyday intricate puzzlings, attempting to decipher exactly what a hypochondriac could be: a very fancy car specifically constructed to accommodate the portly bulk of an Asian hippopotamus recently escaped from prison? An especially gruesome monster that enjoyed sucking the blood from poor unsuspecting hippos? Hypochondriac. Whatever, I was always sure the word had something to do with large, exotic creatures, which was confusing in itself, as The Tookus was not large at all — perhaps a hair under five feet, only a little taller than my eight-year-old self — although she was certainly exotic (half Japanese, half Swedish, sexy lisp and all).

Now I didn’t attempt to puzzle out the tempting word.

Papa paid for the candy and dark cigars. The Tookus didn’t want anything. I had never seen anyone — kids even, let alone grown-ups — look so scared as The Tookus looked. Papa set a cigar between his teeth and then, eyes twinkling, he smiled for me and said: “ComeonWyatt!” Like that, just like that: one messy strung-together glop. ComeonWyatt.

My name is not/never was Wyatt (thank God) . . . but rather Melvin (okay, so perhaps Wyatt was nothing to sniff at). Lately Papa had taken to calling me Wyatt, as in Earp, partially due to my current interest in cowboys, partly because Wyatt is what a lot of people had taken to calling Papa — left-handed compliments or half-joking insults to Papa’s monstrous moustache (“It’s actually much more like a Custer moustache,” Papa would tell them angrily).

The tiny man behind the counter rolled his wide eyes toward the shop windows, his age-splotched hands fumbling at his shiny red bowtie.

I clutched the butt of my shiny Colt .45, but at my worldly age I didn’t derive even half an oodle of comfort from the toy shooter.

Papa marched from the gift shop, his boots banging the wood floor, although usually he would have allowed The Tookus first passage. The Tookus collected Ali and me, snatching a hand a piece and didn’t seem to mind the sticky mess already formed upon Ali’s palm.

We nearly did a lemmings parade into Papa’s back, who stood just outside the door with fists on hips, his duster spread like a cape from the broad yoke at his shoulders down to the engineer boots that seemed nearly as tall as me.

The bully boys with pumpkin heads.

They were a bit disappointing, actually, at least at first. I mean, their heads weren’t even orange. One bully boy was taller than Papa, and about Papa’s age, which at this time was probably in the neighborhood of thirty-two, but his weight was probably more on The Tookus side, while the other bully boy, obviously older with long white hair and beard, stood only as high as Papa’s shoulder, but he was round and huge and it would have taken two Papas to equal his weight.

“I think you need to speak to me,” Papa said.

Everything quiet. Birds did not sing. Echo the mountains did not. A woodchopper chopped not his stuff. All of us — the bully boys, Papa, The Tookus, Ali and me, the neato gift shop — all of us were caught in a glass fishbowl, isolated from the real world, the real world where sounds came at you from everywhere — people laugh dogs bark cars fart, a door slams — and kid sisters never ever never shut up, never, really. We floated in invisible fishbowl water, ears plugged, lungs drowning; however, the old bully boy seemingly navigated those fishbowl waters well.

He swam toward Papa across the gift-shop porch in big yellow construction boots, belly preceding him like the prow of a tugboat. His old white T-shirt was stained and needless to say hardly white, and a big hole in the front provided full view of a pretty pink nipple surrounded by gray porcine hairs.

A crevasse split the fat old man’s round forehead. Eyes no bigger than marbles squinted. He swung a hand as big as a frying pan to point a cracked and stained finger just two inches from Papa’s nose.

My Papa looked away from the old man to the young skinny one. In profile I saw Papa smile.

“You must be the brains of the operation,” Papa said, “can your daddy speak? Did he want to tell me something about my nose?”

“Uh,” the skinny one said. His eyes were too close together, possibly a genetic flaw — not a difficult stretch — and his lipless mouth slowly accomplished a heading-south goose formation. He sipped at a bottle of soda and maintained his idiot smirk. “You, uh, you — nuh. Uh-uh. Huh.” Thus said, the skinny one folded long tubular arms upon his chicken breast, the bottle sticking up out of his arms like an SOS-carrier bobbing at sea.

“Oh, well,” Papa said, nodding. “Thank you. And you two boys have a good day!” Papa’s body turned, slightly, as if he meant to walk between the men.

“Toby say he don’t like your woman not much not much that what Toby say,” the old man spoke, his voice startlingly loud, hurtfully high-pitched, and very fast. The voice of an ancient honking harridan.

“Wow,” Papa replied after a few moments, speaking around the cigar jutting from his teeth. “Toby really said that? Did you really just say that, Toby? I think that is amazing.”

The skinny one cocked his head and regarded Papa with crossed eyes.

The old man withdrew his finger into his hand but did not withdraw the hand. Now there was a round meaty thing the size of a boulder suspended two inches before Papa’s nose.

“Hell what the Hell is she is she a chink one of them chinks is she?” the old man popped out in his ninety-words-a-minute typewriter pace.

“I’m Japanethe,” The Tookus said. Her hand, still tightly holding mine, had been up until the time she spoke, shaking. The trembling ceased. She said: “I’m Japanethe.”

“Well, she is part Japanethe, but part Thwedith, also, for that matter,” Papa helpfully contributed.

“Uh. You. Num. Hmmm,” Toby whispered to the old man.

“She talk funny that chink she talk funny your woman talk funny that what Toby say about that,” the old man popped and his smiling face disturbingly looked like merry old Santa Claus.

“Toby, I was wondering what you do for a living,” Papa said, “you a rocket scientist or something like that?”

For just a moment, the eyes uncrossed.

“We don’t want twouble,” The Tookus said. Her hand, holding mine even tighter, was trembling again.

Ali was crying, I dimly perceived, and most surprisingly, she was doing it silently. Sticky candy ringed her mouth and hands, and her shoulders hitched and jerked. For the first time in my life that I could remember I felt bad for my little sister, I desired to protect her and comfort her. Only, of course, by this time I was crying just as hard as my little sister, and just as quietly.

Through my plugged nose I could smell that bad smell — the scent of imminent violence.

Papa slowly put a hand in the pocket of his duster. For the first time the white-haired old-man bully boy moved backward somewhat. His tiny round eyes darted, squinting, tracking Papa’s movements. Papa’s hand emerged and it was holding something. Papa’s thumb flicked and a flame appeared above his hand. The old man grinned.

Idiotically, I thought of Frankenstein’s monster, frantically waving his green hands as Igor tickled his face with a torch. These fishbowl monsters, however, seemed impervious to the threat of Papa’s flame.

The skinny bully boy sipped from his soda and I noticed the bottle was shaking, though I doubted the shaking was due to any fear the idiot was experiencing.

Papa smoked the flame for a few seconds until the end of his cigar glowed merry orange and tufts of perfect white-gray smoke shot between the bully boys.

The skinny idiot focused his crossed vision upon me. His greenish teeth flashed in a rictus. This scared me. I knew I was going to have some pretty terrible nightmares about those beady crossed eyes and those too-long, too-green skeletal teeth.

“Papa!” I cried. I wanted him to take us all away from this. Sunday Adventure had turned into Sunday Nightmare. It wasn’t fair. This wasn’t fun any more. I was worlds away from the little boy in a cowboy suit who only five minutes before was interested only in obtaining a cheap little tom-tom drum.

Papa half turned to look at me.

The skinny bully boy stepped in swinging the soda bottle. Papa’s head jerked sideways, his ear punching himself in the shoulder. There was the plinking noise of a Nazi bullet ricocheting off a Sherman tank.

I found myself looking at Papa’s smoking cigar, rolling on the porch, trailing sad smoke tendrils, the end still wet from being held in my Papa’s mouth. Now there was dirt all over that end, where just seconds before it had touched his lips. There was no way Papa was ever going to finish this cigar. And here he had just bought it, too. And Papa loved cigars, especially these hard-to-find dark cigars.

I wept harder, now not quite silently.

Papa’s head righted. His body had not moved. His boots were in the same place, not even shifted. Slowly, he turned to regard the skinny bully boy.

“Why did you hit me?” Papa said, calmly; however, he sounded humorous no more.

Toby the skinny bully boy, gripping the thick soda bottle by the neck, grinning his green skeletal grimace, snorted and backed away even though Papa had not moved. He kept backing away until he hit the steps that led up onto the gift shop porch — down these steps he now nearly tumbled.

“Mon Toby mon Toby let’s get him mon!” the old bully boy shouted, his grizzly-bear body hunching over and his paw-hands forming into claws.

“Get me,” Papa said in his calm conversational manner, placing his fists upon his hips. “Get me. Mon mon mon.”

Gone, the skinny bully boy. The old one, growling and hunched, waved his hands, inviting Papa to be got.

Red blood was drumming on the porch. It was coming from Papa. As his back was to me I did not know from whence the red blood spouted, but there was a lot of it, his red blood, and I was certain soon his body would be empty of it, his red blood. The red blood sounded exactly like I imagined my sweet little tom-tom would sound: tom tom tuh-tom TOM, six bits!

Then my fine and gentle Papa started for the old bully boy. He did it calmly, as he did everything, but he was deliberate and there was no doubt he meant to destroy the old troublemaker. Something wonderful happened. The senseless animal fury evaporated from the old bully boy’s face. He took a step back for each of Papa’s forward steps and something seeped into his face for every step he retreated. The fear The Tookus and Ali and I felt so palpably in the fishbowl world was now flooding the old fat troublemaking bully boy.

Soon the old man was scrambling away, stumbling over everything, and like a pissed-off choo-choo train Papa’s momentum stoked to full fire.

“Stop it!” cried the red bowtie-wearing old man from just inside the gift shop. Papa paused to acknowledge the shopkeeper. The gift-shop man shook his fist out the door. “The cops! I’ll call them! I swear I’ll call the cops on you this time Marcus Coonie!”

The old bully boy with pumpkin head turned and dashed the breadth of the porch and nimbly vaulted the waist-high railing (belly notwithstanding) and vanished into the woods where I was certain lived Bigfoot and the ogre from Bill Goat’s Gruff and other assorted creatures nefarious and mythical (mythical until today, anyhow).

Today a man he wanders a none-less mythical realm, this one populated with the very real ogres of anxiety and depression, strolling the streets at three in the morning, his After-Midnight Adventure, wearing a long black coat which looked at in the right way might appear a western duster, somewhat similar to Papa’s old coat. And in an inside pocket is a box of dark cigars.

Wasn’t there a Biblical curse about sins of the father passed to the sons?

Sinner or saint, your choice, Papa was an original. He did things his way, unlike you, Melvin, who does things his way.

There was a gap in his moustache after that day, the man remembers, no matter how full he wore his facial hair. The scar was deep, a hard worm upon his lip, but, if he had listened to The Tookus, it may have been minimal marring.

“You need to get thithes!” “I don’t need stitches.” “You’ll have a thcar!” “Well, it’ll be my scar, won’t it?” They argued the whole trip down from the mountains, The Tookus driving, Papa in the passenger seat with his head back, his nose near the ceiling, a wad of rags pressed to his torn upper lip.

“Don’t ever take your eyes off a bully, because that’s the only time they can hurt you,” he said to the ceiling, and I listened with my ears flexed forward. I assumed he was talking to me — why in the world would he want to give such advice to The Tookus or little Ali? “What happened to me was my fault. Almost as if I took that bottle and hit myself in the mouth. I can’t believe I was so unfocused.”

As a man reliving for a short while treasured memories of his childhood he passed from darkness into the halo of another streetlamp. He lit a cigar and the smoke plumed about him, commingling with the white wings of his breath. Somewhere in the cold darkness between streetlamps tears had sprung from his eyes to run freely upon his cheeks. And he crossed the thin boundary of white-yellow light and again passed into darkness.

“I don’t care if you’re being like him or being completely original,” his wife said just this evening. “Whichever it is to me is the same. I don’t like you the way you are, and I never would have liked him. Either you change or our relationship does.”

Had he been set up? Was he in fact copying his father? Attempting to follow the pathway of his father’s life? Papa, the Supreme Starving Artist, the Superlative Impoverished Poet, Thankless Thinker, Ignored Idealist, and So On, and Etc. During his lifetime Papa accumulated nearly three thousand rejections on his stories. Despite several openings, he never sold a painting. So. Had Papa’s gigantic force of personality set up the son for ongoing failures and semi-precious successes?

Like his father, his hair was prematurely gray. Like his father, in battles it was nearly impossible to surrender. Like his father, he tended to see the positive in the world, no matter how poor the circumstances of his life.

So. Like his father, he must fail.

He believed not. Because he was born to be a Renaissance Man. It was in his nature to create music, to express feelings in poetry, to storytell, capture and meld images in paint, and create, and create, and create — in fact, his commitment was so strong to succeed where his brilliant father had not, he fought off the temptation of marriage until his thirties, believing it to be one of the most impossible of his father’s impediments to success.

Now, nearing his fortieth birthday, his wife’s ultimatum: choose between Art and Matrimony. At least his wife was decent enough to give him the choice, unlike Papa’s experience. Could he surrender after more than a twenty-year war? Yes. Over twenty years, that’s me. Over twenty years I have struggled. I have fought and never surrendered and I am in much better shape than Papa at this age.

God, he thinks, Papa was not much older than me. What was he, only forty-two or -three years of age that final weekend in the hospital?

As a child verging on manhood at the close of his father’s story he sits by a hospital bed, his fingers caressing the sides of the heat-radiating paper cup of Italian-roast coffee purchased at a Starbucks a mile away from the hospital. A pristine white plastic lid seals the paper cup. The cup of coffee sits upon a tray-on-wheels. Next to the coffee upon the tray is a long dark cigar yet in its plastic wrapper.

“Keep fighting, Papa.”

The last time the dying man spoke was three weeks before, and those words had been nearly unintelligible. The day after those unintelligible words the son visited the father, his first visit in four years.

The man in the bed is nearly translucent. The hollows of his eyes are dark, nearly as dark as the large eyes themselves. Although his gray-white hair is clean, it erupts about his head unkempt and long and tousled like an albino lion’s mane. The mountain-man beard, yet mostly dark, creeps like a fungus down to the narrow breast — a chest at one time deep and wide and manly.

The young man has read two of his most recently published short stories and the man in the bed has remained carefully watching the ceiling, as if enrapt by the reading.

“Why in the world do you have a beard, Papa? That’s so unlike you. The moustache was eccentric, okay, but this beard. This beard, Papa. I don’t know.”

How unreal he looks, the man lying with open eyes upon the hospital bed. The son studies the man in the bed. The skin is so flawless. Nary a wrinkle — they could use you in those soap commercials. Gee Mr. Wolff, how do you keep your skin so young looking? So flawless? Well. Scrub your face morning noon and night with alcohol coffee and insulin and you too can look like you’re wearing a baby’s-butt-coat all over your body!

“Sorry about that, Papa. I inherited your sense of humor, among other things — things we won’t talk about.”

He studies the man in the bed. Speak. Damn you speak to me. You are my father. At least recognize me. Okay, I am here. Okay? I am here and I love you and I hate the time we have lost and if I could go back I would spend my entire life with you. You were always so hard. You are hard. Strong enough to bounce bottles off your face. When those hormones kicked into me it was really hard to tell you things, things that were true and I wanted to tell but were so damn difficult to tell to one so hard, so strong, so different, so alien, and it was far, far easier to tell you the things that a hard hormone-mixed-up teenager can tell. You knew I always loved you. How unreal you look lying there, you who were as strong as the wolf now as weak as the lamb. You knew I loved you more than anyone else ever in my life including my mother and everyone and my wife and my children and even my art yes even my art the thing that screwed up my life and screwed up yours equally but more because here you are now just like this staring at the ceiling ignoring the kid who loved you more than anyone.

He studied the man in the bed. He looked at the beard. He reached and touched the wavy mass of dark and white mixture. He combed his fingers through the man’s beard.

“This beard is just not right. I’m sorry. But it just don’t suit you.”

He glanced across the little room to the bathroom. Returned his eyes to the man in the bed with the beard.

“Wait here, Papa. I’ll be back.”

He returned to the hospital room half an hour later and put his few purchases in the little bathroom. He crossed back to the bed and paused studying the man. My father. Papa. The giant. He eased his arms beneath his father’s arms and gently raised him to a sitting position. His father’s head rested on his shoulder and he waited a few moments like that, almost hugging. Then he eased his father off the bed and held him up in his arms almost as if his father was a child. So easy, so light. He walked across the little room to the bathroom and it was no trouble at all.

“Too bad they can’t squeeze medium-rare steak into a bottle, Papa.”

When his father was sitting propped on the toilet the son ripped open the package of little scissors and set into clipping his father’s beard, allowing the locks and tufts of hair to fall down the hospital gown and onto the floor, and when he trimmed as much as possible he wet his father’s face with a hospital washcloth, shook the can of shaving cream, applied a mass of the white foam and rubbed it in deep all the length of his father’s long throat and high up just beneath his father’s eyes. He opened the package of disposable razors and carefully applied a blade to his father’s cheek.

“Remember when I was about six years old? I got into your shaving stuff and put cuts all over my face? You thought I fell into a lawnmower!”

He gently eased the razor over his father’s cheeks, clearing a long white path. When the cheeks were clear he dropped the razor to the floor and took another and began clearing the beard from his father’s throat.

“Look at you. All this hair. The Hair Club for Men probably has three or four hit men on the look-out for you!”

He dropped the razor and took another and worked on his father’s chin. The quiet rasping of the razor sounded like a heater in an old house on a very cold day. He toweled off his father’s face.

“There. Not even a nick. I’m better at shaving than you ever were.”

He ripped open the package of moustache wax, wet the tiny brush-comb in the sink and applied some wax to his father’s moustache. He combed the huge moustache around his father’s lips.

He studied him. Moved his hands over the smooth new white skin. Soft, soft was the skin, but too tight over the skull beneath. He went to his knees before his father and held his father’s face in his hands. He felt his father’s smooth white throat. He felt his father’s big nose and softly caressed the flared nostrils. He straightened his father’s dark eyebrows.

His father’s eyes stared out of his head at some other world.

“I love you, Papa.”

And holding his father’s cheeks, he kissed his father upon the lips.

“Okay, let’s see what we look like.”

He lifted his father and held him from behind up before the mirror.

He watches their faces, studies their features, recognizes their similarities, and again remarks to himself how unreal the man he holds appears. How light within my arms. The height of a giant man, the weight of a child. And as he studies them in the mirror, suddenly the man in fore, the man with the newly shaved skin, blinks, he flutters his eyelashes and his brows lift in a comical look of surprise, and as the son watches the father’s dark eyes focus, first looking in the mirror at the young man holding him, and then narrower, sight fixed upon his own reflection, his eyebrows crunching together in an exaggerated look of disgust.

“Bleh-yuk. I look like Wyatt Earp,” the father croaks.

“Papa.”

He kisses his father upon the back of the neck.

“You remind me of my son, Melvin.”

“It is Melvin, Papa. I’m here.”

The father sighs, his head lolls forward, and a rich string of elastic drool stretches from his lips. The son watches. He tracks the stringy progress, first in the mirror, and then by stretching his neck to watch over his father’s slumped shoulder. The string nearly reaches the floor before it snaps and blobs upon the bathroom tile.

“Papa,” he whispers.

The speech, his father’s few words, perhaps he had imagined them. His mind definitely was keyed for such apparitions. And the pain of his inability to reach this exotic creature his father is nearly maddening.

He carries the staring man and returns him to his blankets.

“I got you the coffee you like, Italian roast,” he whispers, tears streaming down his face. “And a cigar. Just under six inches. Dark, all tobacco.”

His father turns his head. The dark eyes in the dark hollows regard the young man. His father sits up in bed, adjusts the pillow behind his back, and stabs a finger at the cup of coffee.

“You bring that for me?”

The young man stifles a sob, nods his head, and smiles.

His father takes the cup of coffee, pops off the lid with his thumb and allows it to fall to the floor, and sips. “Yes, this is good Italian roast. Love it. I’m surprised you remember.”

The young man cannot speak, only watch the man before him, his father.

“Ooh. Is that cigar there for me? Really! Hope I don’t set off any alarms.”

He unwraps the plastic, nips off a bit of the cigar end with his front teeth, and proceeds to lick the length of the dark cigar.

“Don’t suppose you have a lighter, or matches?”

The young man offers his lighter. Soon smoke signals waft toward the ceiling.

“You smoking cigars these days?”

The young man, wiping his eyes with the back of his arm, nods.

“Oh boy. Bad habit. Bad example, that’s me. But still, better cigars than cigarettes or that wacky-toe-backy. Don’t smoke them, now Melvin, just because I do. It’s one thing to do something because you like it, another altogether if you do something because you think you should, or because you think somebody might think differently of you. Think about why you do something. Then do them only for you.

“This is a good cigar, Melvin. From Jamaica? Dominican Republic? Whatever, I never tried a Cuban cigar, which is supposed to be the best. I always dreamed when I finally got successful that’s all I would smoke, Cubans.

“Hey, Melvin? That’s one thing about me that’s still intact. My dreams. They’re going out with me as shiny as when I was seventeen years old.

“Dreams are your guardian angels, Melvin. If you keep your angel with you, you’ll always be safe. You’ll always be happy. That’s the secret of life, Melvin, believe in angels, smile for them every day. You want a puff?”

He passes the cigar to the young man, his son. The young man puffs a few perfect smoke rings ceilingward.

He looks into his father’s eyes. In life, handsome and powerful and strong and arrogant, his father was something unique and friendly to look upon. Now he had achieved something of otherworldly beauty, a painful, ethereal elegance. His features are too sharp, too alien and too tight — all jutting bones and smooth silken skin.

His Papa is beautiful. Beautiful, not meant for this ugly world.

“You’re my angel,” he whispers because he cannot trust his voice to even function. He passes the cigar to his father.

“Some of us are sent here to suffer, struggle, and fight,” his father the angel says. “Our endeavors go unnoticed, our brilliance is overlooked, but that is not a negative thing. Our reward is the ability to suffer, the strength for struggle, and might of fight. With the sheer power of our attempts, we will intrigue a creative few, a knowing few who will succeed. We will inspire. We will be the heroes, the some of us who are sent here to suffer, struggle, and fight.

“And you will remember us.”

“I will remember you,” he attempts to say but his throat is drowned and his eyes are all but blind.

“Oh!” a woman says in the doorway. “Well, it’s no surprise.”

She enters the room and begins drawing the sheet.

“No,” he manages to say. He says it again, with more force, and she drops the sheet and regards him with sad plastic eyes.

“Well,” she says with obvious reluctance. “You have a few minutes. I’ll be back.”

He gathers his strength. Scrubs his eyes. Yawns. Leans toward the dead man’s bed. Pats the cold hand residing there.

“I will remember you. You have inspired me. You have intrigued me. You were the best example. You are my hero. You gave me your angel.”

He touches, a final time, the smooth skin of his father’s too-tight cheek. Then he bends and places a kiss where his fingers touched. And, finally, he places the smallest of whisper-kisses upon his father’s lips.

He downed the cold coffee as he rode the elevator down, in nearly a solitary breath. Outside, upon the rain-slick streets, he unwrapped the long dark cigar and ignited it.

Watch the smoke trail heavenward. See? There it goes!

A night when the man’s life threatened to diverge from the pathway of his angel, he passed from darkness into the light of the streetlamp just outside his own yard. Home, he had arrived. A solitary silhouette moved upon the curtain, his wife, perhaps worried, perhaps angry — certainly she waited for him, for him and the offering of his decision.

He smiled sadly. Just hours ago, when he slipped through the gate, closing it quietly behind him, he had thought his angel dead, or very near that dark place. Not dead, no, his angel was very much alive. Alive and floating with him, floating in him. Floating as him. He is sorry: for the consequences of his life decisions, for the pain instigated by his dreams — but he must remain true to his hero.

He entered his yard and allowed the gate to bang shut behind him. With heavy, resolute steps he entered his house. She stood there, as he knew she must, and he opened his mouth to present her his sad gift, the terrible resolution of his life even though he knew something precious must die when he spoke. But she lifted her hand, her palm enticingly up, fingers splayed, refusing his speech.

“Don’t say anything,” she said. “I was angry. You were angry. I know how important he is to you. How important your genius is. I could never ask you to release your life. I could never desire you to disbelieve in angels.”

His lips parted, met, and then his eyes blinded with tears.

“Don’t say you’re sorry,” she said. “And I won’t. Sometimes I am going to coast, and you’re going to have to carry me, and the other way around sometimes too. Our angels can fly together, you know?”

He seized her and pressed her body as if he must make them one.

“Let’s take the kids for a drive tomorrow,” he whispered into her hair. “Let’s go on a Sunday Adventure, why don’t we?”

HOME AnimalHeart Storyteller's Last Stand Contest Darkly Saying Good-bye to Papa My Father, The Killer

Contest Darkly

The Dread Cowboy

My Father: The Killer

Perhaps the World

Saying Goodbye to Papa

When Angels Perish

Rodolphus Dark Fiction