You have a ring on your door bell, and laid on your stoop is a brown papered parcel, tied with damp twine. You bring the package inside, noticing that the sky is tinged a weird green. You smell burning hair.
You pull the ends of the twine, which is warm and wet and reminds you of manhandling spaghetti. Inside are dozens of magazines, “The Sherman Evening Post”, and as you move the issues, the covers invoke a strange feeling. The air around you is green now, and the last thing you see are the covers of these stories.
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Cherubim Crushed on I-10
by Samir Sirk Morató
The most unexpected consequence of modernization is how many angels die via jet engine. When I spot one splayed across the causeway on my way to work, I pull over, minding the rock barrier between road and bay. As the glowing, leaking figure shudders in the road, I fish for nitrile gloves in my center console. Pelicans and exhaust fumes ride the salty breeze around me.
It’s strange to know that the matrix of wires, cogs, and fuel that shoot me to work are similar to those that escort angels to suffering too, but there’s no time for pondering that: the causeway is thin, my gas low, my stomach churning with every lost second.
It’s best to do the right thing. The right thing for me, anyway. I step out. Gravel crunches beneath my soles. Jubilee Parkway looms above, a cathedral of concrete strung in crawling rosaries of cars, a testament to travel and traffic. Its shadows arc over us. The angel blabbers. It cries in a tintinnabulation of voices, its blood liquid light. Its passionfruit clumps of eyes spew sooty tears.
It’s like a parrot. How silly. The angel’s innards spill onto the pavement, Möbius strips of moonbeam and film cut from Eden’s negative. Oil stains its shredded wings. A fan blade crushed its faces. They resemble pulped jack-o-lanterns instead of cherubs now. The angel’s hands mill, echoing the gestures of a dying centipede. Its smashed lower body thrusts against the road, spine-grinding its ruined pelvis into sand, terribly sexless and sexual at once. It heaves from a lattice of deflating throats. Its halo spreads beneath it, a cracked yolk.
It’s diminishing. Reassured, I approach. The glare on my nametag scorches my eyes, so I cover it. Tears drench my face; terror batters my heart. It’s hard to breathe. I creep closer anyway.
In another world, I’d be kneeling, or running, but the newspaper article I read about angels last year keeps me grounded. Seraphic awe is normal. It’s the same overwhelming sensation you get while looking at canyons or waterfalls—an explosion of chemicals, of things unspeakable outside of equations somewhere—and it’s no reason to be afraid. Weakened angels are no different than hit deer or fancy dumpsters with lots of moving parts.
They’re just animals. Just things.
The angel moans, more agonized than Absalom’s father, when I grab a fistful of wrist and radiant hair. I drag it onto the berm. Stringy bermudagrass whips my ankles. The angel’s tears reek of ozone. Gravel rakes into its shredded body, its flesh made of prism beams and breaths more than meat, but the fact the gravel catches at all shows that it is meat. I toss the angel onto the barrier. It hits the concrete with an echoing slap.
The angel sobs in cacophonies. I don’t know what it’s saying. It’s the noise version of little alphabet beads coming free off five hundred broken strings. My girlfriend says that some researchers are recording angels while they die then plugging all the sounds into a randomizer so they can assemble God’s name. That’s not interesting to me. If they build apartment complexes in heaven’s zip code I’ll never get to rent one. Out in the bay, dolphins’ fins cut the surf. Mobile glitters at the end of the bridge like seven hundred giant, burnt out prayer candles.
The angel flickers. It reaches for me, jabbering, and exclaims when I boost it upwards. None of its fingers manage to hook my sleeves. Its tears burn my palms. I catch a shattered syllable, one that makes me remember some darker, warmer place than before. For a filament of time, I don’t care about work. Then the angel flops over the barrier. Algae splashes its Escher angles. Reality returns. My uniform stays spotless. I sigh, relieved. The angel looks like a big mesh of trash now. Just more litter floating in the bay.
As I climb into my car, gulls descend, changing from heavenly watchers to little black-hooded executioners. They paddle around the angel, suppressing its countless cries with theirs, covering its feathers with their clergy. I leave before they begin feasting. A late arrival—garroted by a plastic soda-ring—swoops overhead.
I picture all the poultry I’ll stock today: hundreds of knobbly, naked bodies, all shrouded in cellophane and pumped with preservatives, all fated for suburban dinners. Those chickens never knew conception meant their death. The bayside orgy of wings becomes a white dot in my rearview mirror, violent in its purity, vile in its clarity. At some point, the angel stops crying. I at least stop hearing it.
I feel bad for birds. Humans should treat them more kindly. They know not what we are, and not what we do.
***
The Thicket
by Christi Nogle
they’re still here. I haven’t driven them off the property, which is what it will take to get them gone. they’ve made a new firepit a hundred yards from the one where We used to commune each night. Not safe to be too close to Me now.
they still bring food. When I’m sleeping, onto the kitchen doorstep falls a basket full of early spinach and radishes from the garden, coffee and dark wine from town, raw honey and spring wildflowers from who knows where.
Not sure I need to eat anymore, though the ritual of it still comforts Me. Anytime I can get My thoughts together, I try to sleep, eat. Bathing’s too lofty a goal. I hunch at the kitchen sink and aim My mouth at the faucet, trying to rinse off the food spillage. I watch out the window, swiping at My face with filthy shirt cuffs. All coordination’s gone, but I try, even now.
I watch them huddle around the fire trying to get back what We had. If I came close, would they run? Would I hurt them, not meaning to?
#
It started as nothing. Two old friends at the backyard firepit reminiscing, bonding again. Three friends, four. . . until all of them were here. Every person I ever really felt something about, from all across the country, drawn by what? they said it was Me calling them, though I doubted My power to do anything like that. they said I’d been calling to their minds, that there must be something We were meant to do or find together.
they were keyed up. I was too, all antsy. Our Experience in the firelight brought a feeling of being at the cusp of an answer.
Something started coming closer, or We changed? I don’t know.
they began making Art with great facility, then. All was in service to the Experience itself, and the Experience strengthened them for such work. It sharpened their eyes, steadied their hands, brought a great flow and focus to their minds.
Told them things they could not know.
A glance at the rough wooden boards nailed beside the sink where I stand dripping water, and I remember their labor toward their Art. their bodies were stronger, too. The strongest of them, celeste, set to carving, first in wood and then in stone.
she had the others help her take the granite countertops out of the kitchen and set to carving figures in bas-relief, a continuous narration of the group’s Experience and History. In continuous narration, the same figure occurs in multiple time periods. This one looked something like a parade of indistinguishable extras with only Me recognizable, a little larger than the others so that it seemed My life story (or was I a god they worshipped, joining in the worship?).
What the story was, I could only guess. It looked violent. Prior to celeste’s sculpture, they accepted Me as a leader, but never apart from them like that. It scared Me.
their Art was documentary and also prophecy. When celeste had moved on to stonework, lane took over the woodworking tools, and it was lane who created the thing We all found most prophetic of all–a cosmological image carved from the root-ball of some massive tree. No one knew where it had come from, which added to its sacred power.
her central image was an outline of a woman’s face, only instead of eyes and nose and mouth, the center was only a chaos of twig-like roots natural to the piece of wood.
The Thicket, then, there at the center, and around that the Aura, and around that the Film. The Aura made up of human bodies, the Film an unbusied space with the merest suggestions of shapes. The names for these things came clear as soon as I studied what lane had carved.
They discussed stylizing the image to block-print and leather-work it onto items We would sell to keep our Experience going.
they were pretending they had not changed so much as they had.
their voices faded as I looked into this thing like it was a mirror. their voices changed to concern, fear, and then were gone. I saw the writhing Thicket before me. I was deep in the Aura, further than any of Us had gone. I heard the buzz of bees, then the sound came louder, like roaring fire. The noise of My own soul. I’d seen this moment in celeste’s narrative piece.
And it was nowhere near the end.
***
The Wishing Rocks
by Megan Kiekel Anderson
The scale here is wrong, like walking through a forest of giant sequoias, only the forest is a tangled web of spongy vines arcing up and down in bouncy ball trajectories. The strands twist in vibrant colors. They’d look like psychedelic licorice to me even if I wasn’t starving.
How long have I been slugging through this acid trip brought to life? I’ve curled up to sleep in the daylight several times.
I’m scared to eat anything. I found pulsing bulbous orbs that could be an alien version of fruit, but I couldn’t bring myself to crack one open. It would be bad if I got poisoned and died. It would be catastrophic if I ate something I assumed was vegetable-adjacent and started an intergalactic war.
Luckily, I was carrying groceries into the house when it happened. But they’ve run out.
#
A week before my departure from Earth, a girl named Bertha wished on a shooting star. Moments after the words escaped Bertha’s lips, a pony, technicolored and iridescent, slipped through the thinnest sliver of a portal.
The story may not have made headlines, but for the color of that horse. The adults would have rationalized, called the pony lost. A coincidence. Surely other wishes had been made on that same hunk of rock hurtling into Earth’s atmosphere, but they must have been of a more practical sort, with lesser portals. If it weren’t for Bertha’s imagination, the torrent of wishes may never have begun.
And I wouldn’t have found (half of) the solution to Earth’s biggest problem.
#
WE KNOW YOUR WISH.
The voice whispers from every direction.
“Hello?”
I spin around, looking in the undergrowth of the licorice vines for any movement. The only motion is from my own wind: the gentle swaying of the fuchsia mycelium-like structure at the base of the vines, which is fuzzy in the way of mold on forgotten leftovers in the back of the refrigerator.
“Who said that?”
WE HAVE NO NAME.
Madness would be a logical reaction to finding myself the first human on an alien planet, completely alone.
“Is it offensive if I ask what you are?”
WE ARE NOT OFFENDED.
“Pinky promise you’re not just voices in my head?”
WE DO NOT HAVE PINKIES.
“Sure. Right. I’d like to know more, like how I’m hearing your voice right now and how you understand me and where I am in the universe, exactly, but in the immediate present, I’m out of supplies. So if there’s water or food that won’t kill me here, I’d appreciate you helping me find it, because I’m not going to make it much longer, and the other stuff won’t matter then.”
THE PODS YOU INVESTIGATED HAVE SUSTENANCE.
“Thanks.”
I backtrack to the growth of pods. I pluck one and open it carefully. Inside, under acid-chartreuse liquid, swims flesh writhing in a tentacled mass.
It’s just a sports drink, I tell myself as I pour the juices down my throat. I was expecting it to be sour, but it’s sharp and bitter, liquid adrenaline flowering through my body.
Without the liquid, the fleshy tentacles still and crystalize. I break one off and put it timidly in my mouth. The taste is sweet, chewy, like overcooked seafood, under the crunch of the crystals.
“You just saved my life.”
THANK YOU FOR WISHING TO BE WITH US.
“Wishing to be with you?”
YES. WE HAVE TOLD YOU. WE KNOW YOUR WISH.
My wish, yes. We’d run out of time to leave our solar system. There’s no worm-hole travel sans spaghettification, no folding of space-time tesseract, no warp speed.
We’d failed. I’d failed.
So when I heard about the wishing star, of course I wished for my life’s work to be fulfilled. I wished to find a planet habitable for people on Earth.
As far as I can tell, that wish has been granted. The gravity and atmospheric pressure here are similar to Earth’s. I seem to be processing the orb fruit okay.
I’m starting to guess that the beings in my head had something to do with the appearance of the shooting star. And in the grand “be careful what you wish for” tradition, they are very literal. I’d wished to find this planet. I hadn’t wished to colonize it, or get others here, or set up a permanent pathway between the two worlds.
“How do I get back?”
YOU COULD WISH TO RETURN HOME ON THE NEXT WISHING ROCK, IF YOU SO CHOOSE.
“Wishing rock? You mean the shooting stars?”
ROCKS ARE NOT STARS.
“Well yes, I know.”
I sit in awkward silence with the conversation in my head.
“Do you know when the next wishing rock will be visible?”
YES.
“Could you tell me?”
YES.
Well this is aggravating.
“When will the next wishing rock be visible?”
AT NIGHT.
“How long until night here? In Earth hours, if you are able.”
1392 EARTH HOURS UNTIL THE NIGHT SKY IS VISIBLE.
Fifty-eight more Earth days worth of daylight.
“Can I get to the dark side of this planet sooner than that?”
UNLIKELY.
“Can I stay alive here that long?”
THE ORB MOTHERS ARE COMING. WE WILL DO OUR BEST TO ASSIST.
A non-straight answer from this entity can’t be good.
“Who are the orb mothers?”
YOU CONSUMED THEIR PROGENY.
I knew I shouldn’t have eaten those orbs. I can hear them in the distance; terrifying screeches, like nightmare pterodactyls.
Okay, all I have to do to give Earth an exit strategy is use what I have to fight these things off and stay alive here for two months. What do I have at my disposal? Reusable grocery bags and my car keys. Who knows, maybe someone will wish their way into becoming my deus ex machina.
I hook my keys onto a grocery bag, ready to swing.
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