The Old Woman and the Angel

    She looked up and saw the wheel of the sky revolving above her snow-white head; Jacob’s angels climbing and descending their celestial ladder. She saw curtains of red, green, gold and pink flicker in a sensual dance across the firmament, streaked by the light of shooting stars. 

    “The heavens are telling the glory of God,” she murmured to no one in particular. One of Jacob’s angels detached itself from the starry rungs and appeared beside her, its hand on hers. 

    “Come with us,” it urged. “Join in the cosmic dance. Lift your voice and praise the Lord.” 

     “But I don’t believe in God,” protested the old woman. “I don’t believe in praising what I don’t believe in.” 

     The angel smiled indulgently. “What do you believe in?” it asked, wrapping a wing around her frail shoulders to warm her against the cool night air. 

     “I believe in love,” she said simply. “I know the rapture of love that fills your soul to overflowing; and I know the depths of despair when love is gone, leaving only the empty abyss of loss. Yet, it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” 

     The angel was silent for a long moment before speaking, “I know love, for I love the Lord. But I do not know this sorrow of which you speak.” 

     “I hope you never do,” the old woman said quietly. “Now get back to work. Your fellow angels are feeling your absence in the conga line.” 

     The angel kissed her wrinkled cheek and rejoined the ladder. She stared after it one last time, filling her eyes with stars, then closed them and sank into darkness.

Lost Hours

 Every spring, Matilda set the clock forward an hour, only to reverse the process in the fall just as she started noticing the days shortening, making them even that much shorter. She idly wondered where the time went, that hour that got cut out between 2 and 3 a.m. and then added back again later in the year. When she had been a child, her father had explained Daylight Saving thus: Finding his blanket was too short to cover his toes, the owner thereof cut a section from the top and sewed it on the bottom, so that the length remained the same, but the distribution of material changed. That was all very fine and well when it came to explaining DST and our return from it. It did not explain where that single hour went for the six or so months until it was returned to its rightful place.

Tonight was the time change, springing forward, and Matilda was determined to find out. She made herself a pot of tea and got comfortable in the armchair with a book, a mystery thriller, so that she wouldn't be tempted to close her eyes and doze off, and set a timer to go off just before 2 a.m. when that hour would be cleanly snipped from the agenda and her computer clock would flip to 3 a.m. automatically.

In the middle of a riveting car chase scene, the microwave timer beeped, and Matilda looked up. Two minutes left to Standard time and then DST would kick in. She laid down the book and waited, watching the seconds lapse on the virtual clock on her laptop monitor. At precisely 1:59:00, a small animated icon of an elf or gnome or some other mythical creature crawled out of the edge of her monitor and traipsed across her screen. Perhaps it was a brownie or a hob. Matilda was sadly ignorant of the denizens of fairyland, in spite of having read her share of fairy tales as a child.

The small creature carried a net and a jar, and wore a tool belt with a knife, hammer, pliers, and other tools of a carpenter's trade. Intrigued, Matilda watched as it positioned itself next to the clock counting up, readying itself for the moment 2 a.m. would normally strike. It readied itself with its knife in one hand, net in the other, and at precisely 1:59:59, swiftly cut 2 a.m. free, catching it deftly with the net, and then sliding it into the jar and corking it firmly. 

The little creature then examined the new time to make sure it was a seamless join before returning its tools to their rightful places and reversing steps toward the edge of the monitor from where it had emerged, carrying the jar in a sack pulled out of a back pocket. Just about to disappear at the edge of the screen, it looked outward and saw Matilda staring at it, wide eyed and open mouthed. It stopped to wave and smile, then vanished. Matilda let her breath out in a whoosh! She must remember to reenact this vigil in the fall. She needed to know just how the little time collector returned the hour exactly to its place. 

In a warehouse somewhere, there are shelves of jars, each containing an hour sliced and preserved from all those time zones that observe DST, being carefully curated, until they are to be put back with no indication that they'd ever gone missing in the first place.

Words

 “Traditionally we begin every new session with words,” said the group leader.

“Words?” asked one of the members.  “What have we been using up till now?”

Words.  We have been using words, units of language, to capture ideas and pith them in display cases, pins stuck with surgical care fixing them where they can be seen and admired.  Words, taken separately and enjoyed for their iridescent casings, frilly antennae, delicate wings, glowing with a luminosity of their own, pulsating with an inner beat, words for their own sake, as jewels, as poetry.  

But we take those words and, like jewels and bits of precious metals and shining beads, thread them on a string, join them together so they are not individuals awaiting our scrutiny and admiration, but a colony, a line of ants toiling together with purpose, performing the task of story telling, of description, of making a garment out of threads.  

We cannot tell a story without words.  They are not always audible; they may be a string of images, like pearls, forming in our minds when we watch a ballet, or listen to a piece of music.  We give the abstract meaning through words, labels to first-encountered objects, to new experiences.  We talk about those experiences, make them into our own stories through the use of words.

The young mother revisits the details of her child’s birth.  It is a tale she never tires of telling, for someday her child will want to know his origins, and she will be ready with his story.

It is language, words, the joining together one after another of nouns, verbs, prepositions, conjunctions and participles which gives us the stuff of our lives, and when words begin to fail us, when we stop mid-sentence, unable to continue because the next bead to be strung has evaporated, or has been replaced by a black hole that creates an impassable lacuna in our train of thought, we start to panic; for we equate loss of words with the first signs of dementia, of decline which leads to the inevitable silence of death.

The story continues, is told from one generation to the next, and words are its vehicle.  Polonius asked Hamlet, “What are you reading?” and he, on the verge of madness, voicing a lament of the discontinuity of life ended too soon, the orphan forbidden to mourn, answered, “Words, words,” and slammed the book shut, for that story was over and done, as his own sentences unravelled into their disparate parts.

The Third-Floor Bedroom

I.

It all began when someone left the window open, not that that person was necessarily to blame. But the weather had been fine for the first time in months, sunny and dry, and the bedroom was musty and stale from being shut up all winter. As well, the occupant of that room regularly disobeyed the house rules and smoked in it, making sure no odours seeped out underneath the closed door. As a result, a stale tobacco reek permeated everything and a good airing out was certainly in order, especially as the weather was so fine.

Hilda never went into that particular bedroom unless it could not be avoided, and on this occasion she had an armful of laundry to deliver to the occupant who did not answer her gentle knock. After several moments’ uncertainty, Hilda turned the knob and pushed open the door, the reek hitting her like bus exhaust. She deposited her load of clean clothes on a chair and made her way through clutter and debris to the window. The curtains were drawn and the room was in darkness, so she pulled them open and illuminated a mess. Clothes lay scattered on the floor and other surfaces, a garbage can overflowed, and there were dustballs and ashes everywhere from the forbidden tobacco. Disgusted, Hilda unlocked the window latch, threw up the sash and let in a draught of warm spring air scented with lilies. Immediately the atmosphere of the room changed and Hilda felt that she could stop holding her breath.

Since she had delivered the laundry, she took a few moments to tidy, emptying the garbage can of its overflowing bag and making a mental note to bring up a fresh one when she returned to close the window. Pleased with her work, she closed the door behind her and went about her other domestic duties.

As it happened, the third floor bedroom’s occupant was away for several days, having business in another city. He had among his possessions a small, egg-shaped paperweight given to him by a friend of the family. It was carved from translucent alabaster and he liked to hold it in his palm, feeling its weight and the coolness of the smooth stone. Sometimes, if he held it up to a light source, it seemed as though a spot of gold gleamed at the rock’s centre, and surmised that it was a bit of a different coloured mineral caught in the matrix. The egg sat on a desk, weighing down a pile of papers, and sparkled in the sunlight coming through the open window. The speck of gold seemed to dance in its centre and give off a warm glow.

The afternoon waxed and then waned and the sun started its descent behind the woods that bordered the west-facing side of the house. Hilda forgot all about returning to change the garbage bag and close the window, only remembering later when it was already too late.

II.

It was all my fault, or at least that’s what I believe. I was the one who opened the window to air out the third-floor tenant’s room, which always smells like the uncleaned bowl of a pipe that has been used for burning the cheapest-quality tobacco. He knows the rules. Why he can’t go outside to smoke like the other tenants do I do not know, but there you have it.

It was a beautiful day and I opened the window and forgot to close it. That is definitely my fault. What happened next could have been avoided if I had not been so derelict in my duty.

After the sun set and darkness fell on that side of the yard, the glow bugs started to flicker, calling for mates. I’ve always loved that time of evening, watching the fireflies dance and signal to each other, and that night there seemed to be more than usual. They gathered among the trees where I could see them from the kitchen window as I did up the last of the dishes, and drifted upward out of view. Some were definitely fireflies, flashing seemingly random patterns, but others didn’t behave quite right. These were the ones that flitted upward while the others went about their buggy business.

It wasn’t until it started to rain that I remembered I’d left that window open, so I hastened up the stairs to the tenant’s room to close it. I knew he was out of town for at least another day, so I was very surprised when I saw light under his door and heard sounds coming from within. It was quite late and I was in my dressing gown and had no weapon of any sort with me and I was frightened. But I’m not called Hilda the Horror for nothing, even if in truth it’s merely for reminding the tenants to have their affairs in order for housekeeping purposes; so I screwed up my courage and opened the door to the third floor room.

I can barely describe what I saw. The lights were coming from glow bugs. They were almost like little people in shape but with wings, and they shone with light that just poured off them. Some were flitting about the room, but most of them were surrounding a paperweight the tenant kept on his desk, an egg carved from alabaster with a speck of some golden mineral at its core. I had noticed it earlier in the day when I’d delivered the clean laundry. The small glowing creatures were gathered around the egg, pulsating rhythmically in unison, and the golden speck was pulsating back! I could not move. It was just too unbelievable. As I watched, the glow bugs started pushing and pulling on the paperweight. It was too heavy for them and individually they were tiny, but together they managed to get it closer and closer to the very edge of the desk until, with a huge effort, they sent it crashing to the floor. I covered my mouth with my hand to stifle a scream.

III.

I do not know how long I lay cocooned in that cold alabaster egg. Flickering moments of awareness came to me through the ages, but nothing coherent. Perhaps a sudden jarring of my enclosure or great heat or cold would temporarily rouse me from that aeons-long slumber, but darkness would always return. When the sound of the faeries and their pulsating light finally entered my consciousness, I was truly awake for the first time in my existence.

I do not know how I came to be where I was—an egg has very little choice in these things. But when full awareness dawned, I saw that I was surrounded by flashing faerie folk. Their bodies pulsed rhythmically with light which I returned, trapped within solid rock. They were too small and weak to release me, so they rocked and pulled the egg to the edge of the ledge upon which I’d been resting and pushed me over, to fall loudly onto the hard floor beneath. The egg remained intact, but a hairline crack sprang into existence along the curve of the stone. The faeries tried to lift it up to let fall again, but the stone was too heavy and smooth for them to grasp with their tiny hands.

They were not alone, although they had not acknowledged the presence of the human woman standing at the chamber’s door, her hand over her mouth, an expression of amazement on her face. She strode into the room and the glowing faeries scattered, still pulsating but at a safe distance from the woman. She bent down and picked me up, her hand warming my egg. She peered at me, glowing, through the milky stone. Then she walked to the window, raised her arm and, with all her strength, threw my prison onto the brick walkway below. The alabaster shattered with the impact and I leapt free. Free! It was raining lightly as I unfurled my tiny wings and tentatively flapped them, then tested my strength and flew back up to the window and shelter. The woman was still there, staring at me, surrounded by faeries, some of whom were now perched on her head and shoulders. I hovered at her eye level and she tentatively reached out one hand, palm upward, inviting me to settle upon it.

IV.

The next morning the tenants arrived at table for breakfast to find there was none. Hilda the Horror could not be found. Telephone calls to friends and relatives yielded no news. She had simply fled without taking so much as her purse. Anyone who knew Hilda would agree that this was unheard of. But no one who really knew Hilda would have been surprised to learn that she’d run off with the faeries and the dragon she had helped birth the evening before. They were gone, perhaps to some magical place where she didn’t have to worry about tenants’ breakfasts or laundry or rule-breaking. The only clue was a smashed alabaster paperweight on the walkway outside and the curtains still flapping in the third floor bedroom’s window.

The Vessel

Karina looked in the mirror and wondered when she got old. It wasn’t yesterday. It wasn’t that morning. When, then? Yesterday she was walking the dog, briskly, feeling the morning sun on her face, a knitted hat keeping the tangle of her hair under control while it kept her ears warm. She had gone out to the Mortons’ dinner party with Ralph, feeling sleek and sexy in her black satin cocktail dress. This morning she had lain in a bath of mango-scented mousse and read a few chapters in a novel, and had not felt old. Even seeing her reflected nakedness in the big bathroom mirror had not convinced her otherwise.

But here in the Simon’s dressing room, squeezed into an outfit meant for a girl a third her age, she suddenly realized she had made a mistake. She wasn’t 25 anymore; she couldn’t pretend that she was. Her hair, naturally curly, looked like a witch’s thatch, the skin on her arms was loose, and her breasts sagged. Where was the flat stomach she had always prided herself on maintaining? An old woman stared back at her from the mirror, skin pouched under the eyes, jowls instead of a smooth jaw line, and her neck a mess of ropey wattles. Her eyes filled with tears and she changed back into her own clothes, sniffling.

“What’s the matter, Kar?” asked Ralph as she emerged from the dressing room. “Are you crying?”

Karina handed the clothes to the clerk and took her husband’s arm. “Let’s get out of here,” she said quietly. “I don’t belong in this place.”

“Want to get a coffee?” asked Ralph. Karina nodded and sniffled again.

Later in the coffee shop, over their lattes, she told her husband about her experience in the dressing room. “I don’t know if it was the light in there or if I’ve been deluding myself for years now,” she mused, “but I suddenly realized that my body has gotten old. I still feel good, but I look awful.”

“No you don’t,” soothed her husband. “You’re beautiful!”

Karina smiled. “You say that because you love me,” she said. “It’s sweet, but not realistic.”

Ralph sighed. “Don’t be so down on yourself,” he admonished. “All those flaws you think you saw: you’re the only one who sees them. You’re being overly critical of the vessel housing your spirit. It’s inevitable that our bodies are going to age. Human beings have built-in obsolescence. But no one really notices it. They’re seeing your soul shine through your eyes, hearing the love in your voice. Your body, how you choose to clothe it, isn't really important. It’s you we love, I love.”

Karina looked up from her coffee, eyes bright, and smiled.

Between the Cracks

     The edges of things are what fascinate him: the changing of seasons, waves lapping against the shore, the first glow of sunrise. As he lies on his pillow, before putting on the eyeglasses that will throw everything into sharp relief, he savours the blurriness around him, the softness that his sleep-filled, myopic eyes afford him in the morning. It is now that he can see the spaces between the molecules that make up reality, the passageways that should allow him into different worlds. Alas, he has never found the way through those openings. He can only gaze at them and wish in vain.

     Washed, shaved, dressed and bespectacled, Albert is every inch the unimaginative accountant. His world consists of ledgers filled with numbers and hard facts. There is no room for the unknown, the speculative. He wears dark suits with crisp white shirts, neatly knotted, unassuming ties, and his thinning hair is cut short. You would not notice Albert in a crowd; there is nothing remarkable about him. In a police lineup, you would most likely gloss over him.

     But for some reason after work that particular Thursday, after reviewing a difficult client’s complicated accounts and developing a headache that made his temples throb, Albert decided to stop at a bar on his way home. He’d never gone in before, but it looked dark and quiet inside, and he needed darkness and calm to settle the pounding in his head. He found a seat in a corner where he couldn’t see the television—mercifully with the sound off—advertising some product for premature, male-pattern baldness on an eternal infomercial. The bartender came over to get his order and he asked for a single-malt scotch with no ice. When it arrived, he sipped it slowly, appreciating the slow burn as it made its way down his esophagus.

     Albert fumbled through his pockets looking in vain for aspirin. He took off his glasses and rubbed the sides of his nose where they left imprints, trying to shake the headache. Someone appeared to have joined him in his booth, so he put his glasses back on, only to see an empty seat. ‘Strange,’ he thought, and took the glasses off again. Once more there seemed to be someone sitting opposite him, out of focus, but solid enough that he could not be mistaken.

     “Excuse me,” he said aloud, addressing his visitor, “do I know you?”

     The apparition reached across the table and tapped Albert’s spectacles. “Try them now,” he heard someone say.

     He put the glasses back on his nose and this time the person opposite him did not disappear. In fact, where the bar had been empty, it was suddenly crowded with people, the bartender obliviously wiping a glass out with a cloth. He hadn’t seen or heard anyone arrive. Where had these people come from? Why hadn’t he seen them before?

     Albert studied the person across from him. He saw a woman with long silvery hair, but her face was unlined and her eyes were bright and alert. She was dressed in what he took for rags and then realized were pelts of small animals, dozens of them, sewn together so that they overlapped with heads and paws hanging over the ones below. Those periwinkle blue eyes looked like they missed nothing. How had he missed her?

     “Hello, Albert,” she said in a voice like rustling leaves. “You probably wonder why I called you to this meeting.” Suddenly she burst out laughing, and Albert heard the tinkling of a glockenspiel, the clang of tubular bells and the peal of a carillon as all the strangers at the bar joined in her merriment. He could not hide his amazement. Either he was hallucinating because of the headache and the scotch, or he was just going crazy. The woman reached across the table and took his hand as the laughter ceased.

     “I’m sorry, Albert,” she said. “This must come as a bit of a shock to you, but you are gifted with the Sight. We’ve noticed you, we’ve heard your longing to travel through the cracks at the edges of things, but we haven’t been able to help until now. Your life is so regimented, you never let down your barriers, and it is just today that you have done something different enough that we could take advantage of your weakness. Thank you for taking off your glasses.”

     “How,” Albert stuttered, “how do you know what I was thinking?” He started to blush, wondering what other intimate thoughts this woman—whom he now realized was very beautiful—had read. She recognized his discomfort and smiled, making herself even more lovely.

     “Don’t worry, your secrets are safe with us,” she said. “Call me Olivia. These are my friends. Would you like to come with us? Would you like to travel through the spaces at the edges?”

     Albert looked around the bar, at the strangers who glittered in the dim light, shining with gems and iridescent feathers and silver and gold and he thought, ‘Why not? This is what I’ve always wanted, isn’t it?’ He considered going home to his cold and empty apartment, heating up a frozen meal in the microwave, reading his journals and going to bed as he always did at 10:30, alone, with only the prospect of more of the same the next day.

     “Just a moment,” he told Olivia, and signaled for the bartender. Albert paid for his scotch and gave the man a generous tip, then rose from his seat and said, “I’m ready.”

     Olivia took his arm and together, followed by the rest of the throng, they walked through the dusky twilight until they disappeared between the cracks.

Lost

The sky was reverberant with geese flying every which way in their V-shaped communities.

“They’re flying the wrong way,” Nicole said to Phyllis. “That’s not south.”

Phyllis looked up from her lattè and squinted at the chaos overhead. It was true, the geese were flapping and honking, but none of the Vs was headed south toward warmer climes.

“Maybe they’re lost,” she said.

Nicole didn’t think so, but she didn’t know why exactly. She’d read something about magnetic fields and wind directions and knew the geese were smarter than they looked, and that somehow they always ended up where they were supposed to. Phyllis glanced at her watch and drained the rest of her coffee quickly.

“Got to run, Duckie,” she said. “I’ll see you at Mother’s tonight.” Then she kissed her sister on both cheeks, gave her a quick hug, and hurried out of the café. Nicole sighed.

Ever since their mother had been admitted to the residence, the two sisters found they had less and less quality time to spend together. When they met, it was to grab a quick coffee and discuss the care and feeding of their mother, who was now incapable of either since her stroke. She missed just having girl talk. Now it was all business. Nicole thought of the eventuality of the old woman’s death and wondered if she would gain her sister back after she lost her mother. It wasn’t a pleasant thought. Instead she looked out the window and watched the geese arrow above, going everywhere but the right direction.

“Would you like something else?” asked the waitress.

“No thanks, I’m done here,” said Nicole. “I’ll pay at the cash.”

Leaving the café, she started rummaging around in her purse for the address of the bookbinder that she’d copied down from the phone book. She had a set of dictionaries that had been her grandfather’s, with a publication date sometime in the late 1880’s, and they needed to be rebound desperately. She’d written the address down hurriedly on a scrap of shopping list and shoved it in her bag, but now she couldn’t find it.

“I’ve got to clean this out,” she thought to herself, starting to get a little frantic. There were bills, receipts, concert tickets, kleenexes, a lipstick and several matchbooks, but the torn piece of yellow paper with pink lines was nowhere to be seen. “This is crazy,” she thought.

Another spate of geese honking made her look up and there, right in front of her, was the sign, Books Rebound. She let out a sigh of relief and headed across the street to the shop, only to be greeted by another sign in the window: Closed. “Well, that sucks,” she said to no one in particular. “What do I do now?”

Nicole stood still on the sidewalk and felt like a lost goose. The passersby milled about her, traffic made a constant roar, and the honking continued overhead. She didn’t know where to go or what to do. Her purpose of seeking out the bookbinder was lost, as was her sense of direction.

“I suppose I could go home,” she said, then realized she had spoken out loud and thought people might think her slightly daft. But she didn’t want to go home. There she would undoubtedly go to the next thing on her to-do list, right after “visit bookbinder”. In her mind’s eye she saw the list on the kitchen table, the bottom torn off where she had written down the address that she couldn’t find and now didn’t need. Just then her cellphone rang, and she grabbed it as a drowning man might lunge at a line thrown to him.

“Hello?” she answered. It was Phyllis. Hadn’t they just parted ways moments ago?

“Nicole, honey,” her sister’s voice said urgently, “come to the home. Now. They think Mom might be on her way out.”

Nicole snapped the phone shut, shoved it back into her overstuffed purse and found her car keys. Suddenly she had her purpose back, and her sense of direction. “But for how long,” she wondered as her eyes were drawn once more skyward. “For how long?”