Interlude of the Angels
I can see the angels all in a line that ripples without end until the sight of it fades away into the desert along with the train tracks. The angels are beating their wings slowly, like a film in slow motion, a sonorous fanning that has gone on for a million billion years and will keep going on for just as long until the wind from their wings beats everything, absolutely everything down into a dust so fine that it vanishes altogether.
The angels don't beat their wings to stay aloft, they don't need to. Their very holiness keeps them afloat. They couldn't touch the earth even if they wanted to. Like magnets that repel each other, the angels are repelled by our unholy world and that keeps them aloft, hovering in the air above us.
The expression on their beatific faces as I go by on the train down the line of angels, is so benign it is sickening, as if they are saying to us: we know everything, it's all old news to us, we've seen your trip, your life and we're not going to tell you about it, you'll have to see it for yourself.
Their perfect innocence makes the arrogance of it all the worse.
Author Bio
George Everet Thompson has published fiction in Oyez Review, Bourbon Penn, Crab Fat, and Brilliant Flash Fiction as well as non-fiction in the Journal of Communications, the Caxtonian and the Chicago Artist's Coalition Newsletter and poetry in The Goodly Company.