Alice lacked a calling. Without a grand passion to center her life around, she fluctuated between indecision and regret, her resume jumping from this to that without any discernable focus, her relationships landing in the same category of wrong to begin with, worse later on.

At thirty, alone and unemployed, she lined up her hopes the way she’d arranged her dolls when she was a child, kissed their amorphous cheeks and begged them to move her to a greener, less populated area that provided love and recognition for women like her. The hopes snickered and slapped what would have been their thighs if they’d had them.

Deep in a rut amid the grays of Manhattan, Alice pounced on the first job that promised changes of scenery if not the happy revision she sought. Clothed in a too tight, synthetic, Kelly-green uniform, its cost borne by her, she reported to Gate 314 A at the Port Authority Bus Terminal to begin work as a tour guide.

The driver was a barrel-chested immigrant from a part of Eastern Europe that had been conquered so many times its beleaguered inhabitants spoke a mish mash of languages. He’d left at twenty for a stable life in a nation which after gently decimating the people they found there, became a hospitable melting pot with solid-gold handles, or so he’d read in a faded Voice of America pamphlet as a boy. Upon arrival he’d absorbed the truth with a shrug borne of cynicism and now waited behind the wheel for Alice to take attendance.

Appalled by the passengers, nine white-haired women with eerily similar features, their braids wrapped around their heads and held in place by children’s barrettes, their yellow ankle length smocks identical to each other, and by the slouching younger man who’d pulled his wide brimmed hat so far over his face it verged on toppling, she wanted to quit on the spot. Her impulse was voided by the contract she’d signed but in an act of defiance her mind shut down and her ears ceased to function. When the man climbed onto the bus, she did register the staggering stench generally associated with solo hikers who in their arrogance trek to remote areas of a forest and catch their foot in a bear trap.

The bus had a microphone. She used it to share the only sentence she remembered from the script she’d misplaced. “In the coming days we’ll see a variety of flowers.”

The man didn’t stir. The others displayed an excess of attentiveness until for no apparent reason they drew figure eights in the air.

♡

To get from the Port Authority to the Lincoln Tunnel, which would deliver them to the Garden State, the driver piloted the bus through a maze of narrow streets darkened by the shadows of mammoth buildings. The lights in the tunnel gave off a yellow cast. A plaque noted that they were a hundred feet below the surface of the water.

They emerged on the Jersey side to a wide swath of sky. Alice had barely glanced at the itinerary before losing it. “Where are we going,” she asked the driver.

He’d come to expect her level of incompetence. Americans were lax whereas his childhood had molded him into a vigilant bruiser.

“Lunch in one hour in middle of woods,” he bellowed to everyone on board.

The women began to sing in the same key church choirs use when, with nothing to go on, they believe they’re duplicating the voices of angels. Alice inserted her earbuds at the first middle C.

“We thought we knew but knew not.

We saw but not what was there.

We asked and were answered with gibberish.

And then the Truth

burnt its teachings into his skin.

Praise him, praise the living, breathing,

scripture he is.

Praise our hallowed ascension.

The heavenly hour is near.”

Alongside Route 17, houses had larger and larger yards. Soon the land was fully wooded.

“First stop,” the driver said. He swung the bus to the left, caromed down a long dirt lane and parked in a wetland beside a sparse growth of trees. “No toilet. Picnic area, period.” He led the way to a redwood table. Two planks were nailed to it as benches.

Alice opened the cooler and removed the provisions, twelve prepackaged “Tiny Tot’” meals, their “sell by” dates referencing the previous year, and twelve bulging cans of a bankrupted brand of soda. There were no utensils or handwipes.

In her desperation, she’d accepted the job without reading reviews of previous forays. Now she wondered if the company had promoted this trip as an intentionally slipshod experience designed to foster growth or if she and the passengers had been duped.

“Eat in shifts,” the driver said. “Hungriest first. Others squat behind big trees. Use leaves. Bury under other leaves. We stay one hour.” He hurried off to relieve himself.

If she’d been one of the paying guests, she would have stamped her foot and demanded a refund, insisting she be driven back to her apartment immediately. “Not to the Port Authority,” she’d have screamed, “to my door.” This level of aggression never worked, but it was in her blood and couldn’t be extinguished. In contrast, the nine women exhibited such sheepish obedience she was sure they’d been brainwashed. “Where’s the man who rode with us?” she asked, suddenly, fearfully aware of his absence.

“How can we know? Only later will we become omnipresent,” one of the women said.

Alice cursed under her breath. For seventy dollars a day she was obliged to shepherd a bunch of carbon copy fanatics who, however docile they seemed, might in a bow to their instability, rip off their clothes and dance an orgiastic polka.

“I have to find him.”

“No need to, deary. His godly shield is impenetrable.”

A virulent form of self-pity ravaged whatever little was left of her compassion. “I’m sick of your nonsense. I have to bring all of you back intact or…” What could the company do? Ban her from a profession she’d grown to despise before the driver had started the engine?

 The woman’s barrettes featured pink plastic bunnies. “Now don’t you worry,” she said. “He loves us too much to stray.”

She’d zig-zag her way to the bus, call him like she would a dog. Come. Come! And if he’d been stupid enough to venture out with his hat over his eyes and had tripped and fatally hit his head, if anyone deserved to be punished, it was the swindler who’d hired her over the phone in under a minute. “Tell me his name again,” she said to hide her earlier bout of obstinate deafness.

“When the eight-winged Angel Jugudiel darkened our whereabouts, while we trembled in our kitchens and stood as though blinded, our soup boiling over, he laid his many hands on our salvation and said, ‘Your name will no longer be Richard Tremblay, but Hezekiah.’”

♡

She found him on the highway attempting to hitch a ride. He was bone-thin and dressed the way he was, in tight, grimy black, she was sure he was a country singer long on the skids.

“Where’s a guy with balls enough to stop for a leper?” he shouted at the empty road.

His odor had dissipated. “Hezekiah?”

He swept his hat back to see who was speaking.

 She gasped. Feral cats had attacked his face and between the many bloody scratches, rows of blue symbols either glowed or shined from his sweat.

“The name’s Richie Trem. And stop staring.”

She’d passed her limit of shocks of one day. “I’m not,” she snapped. “You put me in a very bad position. I was about to call the police.”

He straddled the dividing lines and raised a gloved thumb. “Shelve your panic. I’m not one of the missing dead. I’m fine or will be once I’m out of here.”

Her sense of responsibility, scant though it was, insisted she convince him to stay. “Once we work out a few minor kinks, I promise you’ll have the time of your life.”

“Since you’re talking guarantees, I guarantee this trip will be hell. We’re not your typical sightseers. This is supposed to be our farewell tour. Four days of visiting gardens to surreptitiously pick flowers to use as specimens, then on Sunday we go to Halcyon Farms. We form a circle. Angels swoop down to carry us to a distant planet where we’ll enjoy a love-filled, death-free, monied existence.” He picked up a stone and hurled it. “Have you ever heard such a shitload of crap?”

Alice spent her days on crowded sidewalks while jackhammers shattered the pavement. On too many Mondays she rode an elevator to an HR office, where she was compelled to enhance her history only to be ordered back to HR days later to sign her dismissal papers. All she wanted was steady employment and a man in her life, yet Richie/Hezekiah had the gall to bad-mouth unimaginable perfection. “If only it were true,” she said with such longing, she nearly wept. “I’d even befriend those oddballs you’re fleeing.”

“Don’t call them that. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Where the f’ are the cars? This is a four-lane highway.”

“Why did you come with us? I didn’t see anyone hold a gun to your head.”

“I had my reasons, OK. Where I live in Leicester, Indiana, or as it’s more commonly called Catastrophe City. Roofs cave in. Bridges collapse. A man chops wood. The axe head flies off the handle and bisects his intestines. When I was twelve my father threw his clothes into a garbage bag, peppered my mother with a last round of insults and left.”

“Oh.”

“And my two younger brothers were hit by a truck.”

“How awful. I’m so sorry.”

“Exactly, and afterwards we lived under thickening layers of grief until a week ago when my family announced that they’d finally saved enough money to go Halcyon Farms.”

“Your family?”

“Those so-called oddities are my mother and aunts.”

“The way they dress, the children’s barrettes, the identical smocks?”

“For your information they’re three sets of triplets. Nine baby girls in three years. My grandmother dressed them alike to celebrate her exceptional, calcium leaching achievement and when she lay dying at the age of forty-seven, toothless with bones as fragile as a newly hatched bird’s, she asked her daughters to continue the tradition.”

“Is life just a string of heartaches? Is hope a joke? I know it’s farfetched, but maybe they’re right and the angels will come.”

“Get real, will you? On the bus when they sang, ‘Praise our hallowed ascension. The heavenly hour is near.’ I wanted to scream, ‘You fools, our feet are nailed to the ground.’ Instead, I ran so that when they fail to liftoff, they can blame me rather than their delusions.”

She studied his face. “What did you do to yourself? Tattoos don’t glow. You weren’t attacked. You scratched yourself.”

“So what if I pick at my skin? I was struck by lightning, OK? The electricity opens your capillaries and creates patterns that look like feathery branches. The marks usually fade. Mine didn’t. But I got hit pretty bad. I had seizures. My heart stopped. For months I was barely conscious, and pretty much paralyzed. My mother and aunts were afraid I’d die. They told each other that an angel had descended inside the hairy bolt. While they nursed me, to dampen their fear, they obsessed about the splendors on the jewel-like sphere, plates without chips, firm mattresses, an end to death.”

“Those aren’t feathery branches.”

“Yes, they are. They’re called Lichtenberg figures. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg first studied them in the eighteenth century. Google him.”

“Capillaries don’t start and stop and have vertical lines. They’re words from an ancient alphabet. The question is which.”

“If they’re words, they say, ‘Go to hell, butthole.’”

“Have you shown the markings to anyone who might know?” Alice had studied Comparative Linguistics at Columbia University until she reached a point where she couldn’t keep the languages straight and was forced to quit school and flounder. “Let me take a photo and send it around.”

“No.”

“Can I touch them?”

“I don’t let anyone near me.” Still, he held out his arm.

His skin gave off a heat that penetrated her fingers, gilded her organs, and gave the air in her lungs a fruity consistency that rose to her mouth in delectable ripples. As it did, she, who’d only known rejection, felt wanted.

“Wow. That was better than drugs. What happens when you touch them?”

“Nothing.”

“And your mother and aunts?”

“I keep my distance. I’m charred inside. My blood vessels burned like copper wires. Carcinogens flow through me. It’s likely I’m radioactive. Another reason to scram before I really get sick.”

The bus pulled up behind them. The driver opened the door. “Lunch over. One hour to Tvistok.”

His mother and aunts pressed their noses to the glass.

“Don’t break their hearts. I’ll help you console them if the angels don’t show.”

♡

They sat in the back of the bus. He stared out of the window as though he was on route to the gallows instead of to a lake rimmed by daisies. “I’m covered with it.”

“Let me see.”

He twisted around and opened his shirt. His chest bore further bloody scratches and pinkish areas where he’d tried to scrape off his skin. The writing was darker, the letters more widely spaced.

She leaned closer. As if he were a crestfallen child or a longtime lover, she kissed his chest with a tenderness that came from him and entrapped her.

The driver pulled into the parking lot of Shorewood Gardens. “Lake is short walk.”

“We’ll wait here,” Alice told him. She photographed the text with her phone and enlarged the image. “It’s Aramaic,” she said, relieved to have entered her only arena of semi-competence.

“I tell you they’re Lichtenberg figures.”

She downloaded an Aramaic to English dictionary. At Columbia, a professor had staged weekly contests. Whoever translated a designated section of the Shwe Upanishad or The Zohar or The Pyramid Texts first won his recommendation to graduate school. That exhausting, irreverent exercise in codebreaking (there’d been no time to discern the spiritual meanings), helped her translate the words on his neck.

To you all is privation. You slink through your days unaware of the gifts I bestow, the splendorous stumbling blocks, the teachings you skirt. You want life to follow a script in which wanting and getting stroll hand and hand, in which wishes are granted in the instant they hatch in your mind. You want life to be easy. You’d like to spend your days floating from one end of a pool to the other on an inflated raft. If I agreed to your plan, in your soul-numbing boredom you’d pursue ever more dangerous thrills until your parachute failed to open or your bungee cord ripped. Life on earth is purposely difficult. I sent you to here for a myriad of reasons. Your life’s work is to discover them and change accordingly.

I create worlds in the blink of an eye, places of torture and ecstasy, dry places, sodden places, places surrounded by so many suns they turn to ash while they’re born.

Where do I send those who mock me? To lands that eclipse their notion of hell. But you who run from the truth as if it were a six-headed beast with needle-sharp tusks, you I shall send trembling into the heart of belief.

“This text is astonishing,” Alice said. “Look.”

He climbed over her and ran down the aisle. She chased after him.

“Leave me alone,” he screamed. “It’s hard enough dealing with my mother and aunts’ insanities without adding yours.”

She understood. He clung to his false diagnosis the way she clung to hurtful men no matter the evidence. He needed time to adjust to his aberrant, possibly mystical alteration. “I’m sorry I hounded you. I won’t do it again. Forgive me?”

“No.”

“I hate you,” she thought, wild to kiss every word on his body.

♡

Dinner, a paper sleeve filled with ersatz French fries, was at a roadside diner. Alice and Richie sat at opposite ends of the table.

Without knowing whether she’d been propelled by passion, a lifetime of loneliness or an esoteric force, she left her body, entered his and discovered that instead of charred organs, he was filled with radiant flowers. In barely audible voices they whispered her name.

A waiter dropped a tray of food. Startled, she found herself back in her body. His mother and aunts were taking tiny bites and chewing with closed eyes to better savor the grease. Stuck at this intolerable meal Alice let herself believe that an eight-winged Angel had transformed Richie Trem into a higher being.

The driver deposited the group at Q-T’s Bungalows. The cabins, with their concave beds, water-stained ceilings and rusted bathrooms were barely a yard from the road and separated by gravel. This made it harder for Alice to tiptoe through the semi-darkness to visit Richie. She was both grateful and shaken when the sounds of howling dogs masked her footsteps.

Still flummoxed by the fact that she was a part of an unimaginable happenstance, she photographed his bare feet on the sly and then perched on the edge of the bed. “What were you like before you were hit?”

“A smart-aleck who rode his seven-hundred-pound bike along the edges of cliffs.”

“Did you work?”

“Had to and wanted to. I was a mechanic, boilers, refrigerators, farm machinery. I don’t have the strength now.”

“You will.”

“I doubt it. What about you? Where are you from?”

“Manhattan. My parents each had a couple of failed marriages before they met. They decided they were too old, too busy lawyering to have more children. To their continuing annoyance despite their use of every protection, I managed to be born.” The massive sadness she tried to evade lumbered into her consciousness and howled at the top of its lungs. Alice gathered her courage and asked if he’d mind if she lay next to him.

He slid over. The drooping mattress pushed them closer. He switched off the lamp. To Alice, the glowing words on his body looked like a major city seen at night from a jet.

The texts on his feet said:

You deride angels claiming they’re misguided fictions borne of empty hopes. You’re right in one respect. Porcelain figurines with static wings can’t halt annihilation. But know this: before I created man and his unceasing demands, I created untold angels to do my bidding.

There’s glory in surrender if it’s to Benevolence. Angels don’t strive to outwit, outrun, or dominate. Their only desire is to be of service. They ferry the dead to their next destination. The rest of their duties cannot be divulged.

If I gave you the chance, would you grow wings, grateful to engage in holy labor or are you so wedded to your own decisions that you can’t even part with your remote control?

♡

Alice crept back to her cabin in the blue light of dawn. She was the first person at breakfast, the first to cut open a tiny box of cereal and add milk.

Richie arrived last, sat alone, and scarfed down the remaining batch of what roughly passed for scrambled eggs.

Even as a young child, the driver had dug graves and butchered cattle. Now without waiting to be asked he took on, as he put it to his wife when she phoned, “That lazy-ass woman’s job.”

“Fairy Trail, one hour stop,” he said. A pink cement path snaked its way around concrete mushrooms and plaster gnomes who engaged in family friendly activities such as flipping pancakes and competing at miniature golf. Richie’s mother informed the driver that actual gnomes hid from society because they were offended by the corny versions of their noble selves. “On our new planet gnomes will be taller than I am. When asked to line up in size places they’ll stand at the back.”

The writing, the scratches, the scars that covered Richie, his kindness and rage, the exquisite otherworldly experiences she’d had led Alice to love him more than she’d ever loved any other man. Misery begets misery, she thought as she hurtled toward heartbreak without the ability to swerve. “Who did you date in Leister before the lightning struck?”

“Girls with big breasts and pouty lips.”

“If you’d seen me?”

He stared at the ground.

She translated the words on his left arm.

Condemned are those who hoard their love. Unlock the vault where you store yours before bitter forces blow it apart and whatever is left of you flies hither and thither.

In this give and take world where takers far outnumber those in need, love must be circulated, or violence and devastation ensue.

The driver drove for an hour before he distributed rubber gloves.

“Next we visit flowers from hell.”

Richie’s mother and aunts shuddered. “Must we?”

“Yes. Crucial part of itinerary. Don’t touch. Don’t smell.”

The entrance to the Deathly Garden was an enormous stone carving of a devil’s head. Visitors walked through his leering mouth taking care to avoid his sharp teeth.

“A garden where beauty kills is a charming place to bid death adieu,” Richie’s mother said. She and he stood in the shade of a flowering Oleander bush, every part of which was lethal. “How old do you think I’ll be on the glittering sphere? I was grand at twenty. Your father called me Catnip. He’d bite me. I’d mew. I hope to be her again.” Richie broke off a branch. He dug his nail into it and exposed a vivid green poison sap. She snatched the stick from his hand and hurled it as far as she could.

♡

On their second night away, Alice barged into Richie’s room forgetting, in her eagerness to see him, that she wasn’t his type.

She stood in the doorway, galled that she hadn’t been given a body worth flaunting.

The night before they’d slept in their clothes, two troubled strangers seeking companionship. This time, without asking, he stripped in front of her.

“Take off your clothes. I can’t promise much but I need to feel someone’s...”

“It’s OK,” she said.

She lay on her back with her legs tight around him. He entered her. Once again, the flowers inside him whispered her name.

♡

At Furry Acres, a cut-rate zoo, mangy llamas wandered around a scruffy enclosure. Inside the greenhouse tropical birds boomeranged off the glass.

Alice opened her phone and translated the text on his back.

Is love a judgment, a reward or a trick flame that extinguishes itself when you come near? Escape the prison you built to protect yourself and discover the truth.

“Rainbow Garden,” the driver announced.

Built on a hill to suggest a rainbow’s curve and covered with artificial turf dyed in different colors, with sprinklers shooting water skyward to no result, it nevertheless had a steep entrance fee.

“Admire from parking lot,” the driver said. Practiced at sleeping in ditches and dozing while standing, he stretched out on the rough gravel with a newspaper over his face. The sisters took turns climbing on one another, teetering, slipping, starting again in the hope they could peer over the fence at a garden where every flower and leaf was evanescent.

Richie and Alice found a shaded area.

“In two days, I’ll witness the worst of what I set in motion when I let my little brothers die.”

“What are you saying?”

“My brothers were miniature demons, chain-smokers, liars, thieves and still they were children with remnants of innocence. After my father drove off, my mother lay on the floor crying. I was at the kitchen window. I saw them climb on their newly stolen bikes and I thought here’s my chance to escape. I stuffed what I could into my backpack and ran to my own beat-up bike. Up ahead my brothers were pedaling like maniacs. I yelled at them to turn around. ‘He’s an asshole,’ I shouted. ‘He doesn’t deserve your love.’ But they thought he did. He’d wrestled with them, thrown them in the air while they’d laughed their heads off.

“I spotted a monster-sized truck. The driver must have been sitting twelve feet off the ground. The sun was low in the sky. The glare was blinding. I screamed at him to stop.”

Alice reached for his hand. He jerked it away.

“They flew up. They came down. He rode over them and kept going. I sped toward the roadkill they’d become. The sky was a thick, fiery white. It seemed to be spinning and breathing. I tried to climb up into it, ignite, and be done with myself. I was the big brother. I should have lassoed them while they were still in the driveway.”

“You had a rope and could do that?”

“No. Does it matter? Afterwards I begged to be punished. When I was struck by lightning, I thought, finally. Then my mother and aunts conjured up an eight-winged angel and unleashed the terrible sorrow that will overtake them once they realize they’re stuck in the muck like everyone else.”

♡

Dinner at the motel was anything that could be filched from the continental breakfast the housekeeper had left out for the following morning.

The cellophane wrapped Danishes Alice and Richie pocketed had the longevity people crave for themselves.

In bed he held her in his arms and wrapped his feet around hers. Despite being held so tightly, her body’s boundaries expanded. She became airy and endless. Afraid to dissolve, she opened her eyes.

She asked if anyone had seen the lightning strike.

He jerked out from under her. “What are you getting at?”

“Tell me exactly what happened.”

“I told you.”

“Tell me again.”

“F’ you.”

“Please. It’s important.”

He answered in a singsong that underlined his fury. “I was on my break behind the garage. The guys inside heard what they thought was a massive explosion. They rushed out and found me convulsing on a patch of charred grass. Are you satisfied?”

“Haven’t you ever wondered if you were felled by something else? What if you were visited by God?” The words felt strange in her mouth. She’d grown up accepting her parents’ belief that the world was a random entity filled with meaningless occurrences that nevertheless had to be triumphed over.

Richie glared at her. “I feel about God the way I feel about angels. But if he does exist, he’s the king of the sadists for creating fathers who push their sons’ heads into the toilet before with their flies open, they drag them choking and gagging into the basement. How could a sane God dispatch death to our world? If that monster used me as writing paper, I’ll soak in boiling water until my skin peels off.”

He threw on his clothes. “I have to get out of here.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No. Go back to your room.”

♡

Their next excursion would be to the rural county of Stockton in southwest New Jersey.

“Eat big breakfast,” the driver said, as though his charges hadn’t eaten it the night before, going as far as to pick the crumbs from the doilies and lick the last drops off the tiny, fluted containers of half and half.

Stockton Maze had been conceived by a millionaire at the start of the Great Depression. Born poor, walloped by hardships, he’d talked his way into sweeping scraps at a zipper factory and labored there, outsmarting those around him until the place was his. To make good use of his fortune he orchestrated the maze for “spoiled, weak-minded idlers.”

“I want those sots to get terribly lost,” he told the landscape architect. “I want them to see Death stride toward them and know their money won’t help. I want them to keep trying to dodge him until they can barely creep on their bloodied knees. Then we’ll see who’s the greater man, the one who’s self-made or the profligate fed from a silver spoon.”

Seen from above the maze looked like a complicated tread on a highly engineered running shoe. On the ground, narrow dirt paths were flanked by ten-foot-tall bushes which were impossible to see through or penetrate.

The driver volunteered to lead the group. “Is picnic,” he said. “In army I crawl between corpses while enemy shoot.”

Richie refused to join the procession. After a night spent attempting to massacre the darkness, he looked diminished but as riled as before.

“That’s all-right sweetie,” his mother said. “Your shield will protect you.”

Despite his protests, Alice stayed at his side.

“I’m leaving the first thing tomorrow,” he said. “I bought ten roundtrip tickets back in Leicester. If my mother and aunts refuse to go home, and they will, why side with reality over a magic, I’ll turn in their tickets and pocket the money.”

“What will they do if they’re stranded?”

“I don’t care anymore. My mother and aunts flitted around town like children starring in a third-grade recital. People called them the Wackos, called me one too. Boys continuously beat me to a pulp. Did I mention that we all live together? Guys my age are married with children. But I’m stuck watching my mother and aunts as though they were toddlers. If they need money let them turn tricks.”

“You can’t mean that.”

“Like father, like son. It’s just taken me longer to abscond with what’s left of my life.”

Hives reddened Alice’s neck.

“That’s it? You’re deserting us?”

 They heard tremulous singing in the distance.

“Praise him, praise the living, breathing,

scripture he is.”

Along with weeping.

“They’re lost,” Alice said. “We’re coming,” she shouted.

The path narrowed. Boughs jutted, pricking their shoulders. They covered their faces as they squeezed through brief openings in the branches that took them to smaller and smaller spaces until they stood inches apart, their backs against bushes twice their height.

Alice took out her phone. “Maybe someone posted a map. Shit. There’s a Stockton Maze and a Stockton Scrublands that has swings and a rose garden. We’re in the wrong place. People have died here.”

“I should have stopped my mother and aunts from leaving home.” Tears dampened Richie’s scabs and inscriptions.

And me, Alice thought. What about me? “Richie, whether we live or die, you are going to read this.”

You yearn to be unencumbered, yet you rant about the method I chose to free you.

I watched you primp and preen. All was vanity, yet benevolence hid inside your rooster’s strut.

The truth is you are neither good nor bad, flesh nor firmament. You are the light of my heart, the heir to my bliss. 

I cannot manipulate your thoughts or interfere with your freewill. Yet there is a way for you to be helped.

Look to the woman who knows your golden aspects. Let her press her lips against yours and force her love into your lungs as she’d force air into the lungs of an unconscious man dragged from the sea. For, yea you did drown, submerged as you were in the deadly waters of hate and guilt.

They heard a guttural roar. The bushes curled like fiddle ferns, and they saw eleven golden angels, their wings outstretched and motionless, descended from the heavens in a military formation.

As the sound grew louder, the angels dove like birds of prey toward those they’d come for. Richie’s mother and aunts rose, nestled against their carriers like young children tucked into their parents’ arms.

Enormous hands plucked Richie from where he stood. Alice rose so quickly she could barely breathe. With great effort she asked her escort if Jugudiel had branded Richie at God’s request. The angel’s face mirrored the Statue of Liberty’s and like that statue, its mouth couldn’t open. As she lost consciousness, she prayed that the improbable promise of endless love was about to be realized.

♡

August 7, 2025