Little Angels
The skies opened up and relinquished a torrent of tears filling the pregnant silence with the night’s ardent mourning, on the night that the angels retreated, returning to their celestial home never to return. Those left staring blankly into the firmament where a great thunderclap that jarred them to the bones and left them trembling with apprehension, wiped the rain from their eyes before returning likewise to their nightly routines. The winter nights were long and people of the province had taken to sleeping during the few hours of sunlight and carrying about their business in the evenings.
Evelyn Meyers returned to a blackened house that was like a kiss of death after the radiant light of truth receding on the horizon. She carried a small child on her hip who was still staring off into the distance where the last remnants of the illumination the angels had brought was fading, but her mother simply turned her back and reentered the chilly house. She was uncomfortable in her home now that the light was gone; she struck a match and lit a lamp while grumbling about how dim a lamp was when compared to the brilliancy of what had passed.
Her little daughter, Aurora, who was no more than three, pressed her head into her mother’s chest closing her eyes tight trying to solidify the grand scene of the angelic hosts rising back into Heaven in her memory, but Evelyn placed her down in her cradle for a nap and closed the door leaving her in darkness before her eyes had had time to adjust. In the darkness of a moonless night, the image of the glorious seraphs seemed imprinted on her eyelids, and she saw them even when she closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.
Evelyn busied herself drawing the shades on the windows and mending some drapes that needed patching, too busy to know that Aurora had drifted into a dream that was filled with light, where angels fluttered about her head calling out to her “Come with us! Isn’t the light warm on your skin? Breathe it in, drink it up!” The light in her dream grew more and more brilliant as the cold air chilled her earthly body to the bone; her spirit was drenched in the warm rays of Heaven.
Sighing to herself, Evelyn remembered the change that had come over the town in a few short nights after the angels had arrived. Some had cried “miraculous!” others had called them “demons!”, but she believed they were stars fallen from the sky to bring them light. The fact of the matter was that no one, not even wise Father Ross, had ever seen the like, nor had there been any documentation of angels descending from Heaven, causing the darkness of night to dissipate since Bible times. There had been shouts of joy as the people could work more diligently in the light of the angelic rays, nobody even heard the elegiac songs that they sang, which were so melancholy that the stars were blurred from tears in the eyes of the heavens. The people were deaf to the mournful tone and danced jubilantly about and whistled as they worked.
It was three days after the angels had descended that their joy turned sour and the townspeople could take no more; they had been unable to sleep in the daylight which was too luminous to be blocked by the thin shades in their homes, and the incessant chanting and singing of this celestial choir made the hours pass restlessly away. It was decided that Father Ross would be the one to solve their dilemma; accepting the charge, he climbed to the top of the tallest building and out on to the roof shouting “back to where you came from!” at the top of his lungs until he was hoarse, and with a final “Away! Begone!” he descended.
The angels heard the cries of the priest and the angered shouting of the mob that was gathering at the base of the building throwing stones at them and shooing them away and quietly returned to Heaven. In the ensuing silence, there was not a single person whose ears were not ringing and whose eyes were struggling to readjust to the darkness. They stumbled and tripped over each other as they turned to resume the routines that they had fixed for themselves; some cooking breakfast, others feeding the animals, and still other getting a start on opening shops and stores. Each of them had a slightly shorter temper than was their wont.
Evelyn put it out of her mind and resumed her nightly schedule without noticing a final angel lagging behind the others rise to Heaven through the tears of the sky. No one saw this little angel ascend, answering the invitation of the seraphs that had already departed, they were too engulfed in their tasks to look up and wonder what this last ray of light could be. The light faded softly away and the sun set on Aurora leaving all in a more bitter darkness than they realized.
