1.

     Once and for all the rumor that angels are secretly living in another dimension must be crushed.  They are neighbors.  It is not their fault if you have not recognized them, if you stare right through them as if they were not there when you pass them on the sidewalk.  Their gardens are just as colorful and optimistically tended as yours.  Their children’s shoelaces come untied as easily.  Their noses run.  Their relatives visit.  Their cellars smell of mold and sweat and the games no one talks about.  Their imaginations wander just as far.

     A green branch enters another angel’s dream.  Thomas wakes and Harold is holding it in his teeth.  The angel’s youth has arrived, ready to romp in the raw sunlight.  A dog is helpful.  As long as the feathers remain hidden.  As long as abandon continues to grow.

     One of the angels steps forward from the shadows and throws a stone through your window.  He is the one, of course, who looks most like you and the other boys protect him from you.

     When you pick up the stone, it fits perfectly in the palm of your hand.

     But the window is already broken.  Is there another window waiting?

     Where is the house you used to live in?

     Or was it the tomboy, the one that seems to have it in for you, the one who taunts you with misplaced energy?

     You deny her.  Loudly.

     Smiling.

     A smell like children swimming in the ocean.

2.

     What language does an angel speak?  It depends on who is listening.  If the angel’s eyes have lost the glow we grant them in our dreams, they must learn to speak our way, or remain imprisoned in our sleep, dismissed as “merely passing time” until we awaken.

     Do we say “earth” or do we say “heaven” when we wish to speak of waiting?

     First the sound of a man, then the man.

     First the angel, then, slowly, the senses attack themselves.  Do they belong to the angel or does the angel simply use ours for that moment and move on?  It’s a little sad to think of enough unused sensation that it could form another life.

     Or should we be grateful, like parents?

     Oh yes, we do have names.  That one there by the door to the cemetery is called Soon-To-Be-One-of-Those-People and his friend with the shovel is A-Gardener-of-Lost-Souls and they are going to visit the grave of The-One-Who-Has-Left-Us, which is next to the grave of The-One-Who-has-Left-Them, someone they heard about but don’t really know.  Outsiders would think, as they always do, that these people of the earth are all alike.  If there were any outsiders.  But they are, of course, each one of them, unique, and that is why so many of them can be dreaming at one time without disappearing.

3.

     One of the escaped pigs opens his umbrella and the wind catches it.  He is pulled out into the street and a truck runs over him.  Yes, it does.  Can we all understand how sad this is?  Can we all comprehend how often this happens?  Our children do.

     Some of our children have goldfish or gerbils named Ben or Sarah Lee.  Some of them do not.  But they all dream about what happens when only the body remains.  For this, death is not always necessary.  Thomas is.

     The chairman of the chair society proposes a chair dedicated to the dead pig’s honor and the vote is unanimous.  A plaque is attached to the empty chair, but the chair society cannot decide what would be inscribed upon it.  Irony is seldom wasted on the young.

     Sour cream cupcakes have been very popular here since the invention of the muzzle-loading rifle.

     One of our children is an expert on the history of great torturers and explains their devices and family life in luminous detail at social events and teas.  The expert is fourteen and she reminds many of her elders of their own childhoods.  Her competition for the position of Superior Retainer in the Field of the History of Famous Torturers and Their Devices (she hates being called the “Torture Expert”) was previously a seventeen-year-old boy who now collects moths and lives quietly with his grandmother, who is deaf.  His parents were killed in an automobile accident, which decapitated his father.  He is very fond of sugar.

     The courthouse resides on the street of lost wind.  The jail flies south every winter, but returns, empty, each spring.  None of the officials have ever been caught.  The statues in the Cemetery of Open Virtues face west every evening and east every morning.

     The mother of forgetfulness and the governor of animal-shaped clouds pass by in the windows of a long-distance bus.

     When too many plans have been made to capture it, the rain escapes under the river.

4.

     One of the young men felt as if his love were drinking him up.

     She kissed him and he felt his spent passion thick on her tongue.  Its taste surprised him, sweet and sour at once, as their short life together had been.  But for a moment he was inside her again, a glimpse of her mixed pleasure at having drawn evidence of life from the foreignness of his male body.  And he thought to himself, “So that’s what it’s like to be a woman.”  But, of course, he was only partly right, and because he could not stay there, his relaxed body began dreaming.  He was asleep before she noticed the change in his breathing.

     Sometimes men give themselves up to their need for women and try to restrain its power over them by acknowledging only the physical, a lie they need in order to enjoy again and again the passage through submission, instead of a life contained in it.

     This is what she was thinking as he melted inside of her and slid out like an exhausted wet mouse.

     No, nothing about an angel between them.  Not yet.

     Then he woke and licked the sleep from the corner of her eye.

     Two right tennis shoes two miles apart, there, on the highway, leaving town.

     And we bundled up everything we ever had in our arms, gripping ourselves like priests or idiots, joyful in the wealth of existence, generous in our misunderstandings, incapable of holding out on the moment.

     Some of these people think the mountains belong to them.  They think the sky is theirs too.  And the sun too because otherwise they might have to wake up to a dream in which they discover an angel is living in their place, dreaming the mountains closer, kissing the sky home.

5.

     A daughter with a box of clouds in her closet wrote:

     The insects and rains quickly destroyed his books.  He had written three novels and eight books of poems, which had quite literally been devoured.  A kerosene lamp burned on into the damp night.  Several wild hogs began rooting in the underbrush.

     One of the sons has been ignored for years, but a shy young woman on the other side of the river, the one with a farm girl’s body and wild hair, who would have been a tomboy if she weren’t so shy, has watched him pacing and talking to the trees.  She longs to tell him of her dream, which is his future.

     These people believe in such stories.

     Perhaps you can imagine, as they do in this country, that your death is that moment when, walking across the dream’s ocean, you suddenly realize it can’t be done.

     Here the people do not talk to themselves.  They know it is only an attempt to talk to God.  And so, instead, they say to each other unexpected and wondrous things.

     Very few of these people do not understand the earth’s hunger.

     Once, when someone got sad and then sadder and ate sorrow instead of breakfast and spit out his shadow and went out into the world as someone else, these people didn’t know what to do with him.  So they left him alone and many years later, after he made many people think about death and about who they really were, he found himself sitting on a bench in the park and took himself home to his wife, who had married another man, who had died, and she recognized him by the odor of his fingertips when he touched her face.

     The same man, while cleaning the window wells of his aging house, found a rare species of salamander named after a forgotten biologist.  He decided not to disturb it.  He decided not to speak to it.

     Once, several art students were painting the river when a sudden thaw separated the fragments of the frozen world they had claimed with their easels from the one they were painting.  The instructor smiled from the riverbank as the students scrambled across the ice to safety.  He continued painting exactly what he saw and exclaimed when he finished, “Realism is dead!”  Many years later, in the museum, one of the tour guides was fired for calling the painting “lifelike.”

     Once not long ago, a “Cubist Festival” was held during spring thaw, when the river ice broke.  The art tourists gathered to paint the thawing ice in hundreds of shades of white and transparent colors.  Some of the local residents gathered to paint the art tourists.  And some of the unexpected elements of the weather painted the entire scene white while the crows gathered to scavenge food scraps overlooked by the surprised painters and to provide shadows to replace the ones that had been eaten by the river.

6.

     At night, some of these people invite the moon into their bedrooms and accept the consequences.

     So someone said, “Listen to me,” and they all grew quiet.  They waited a very long time and they learned a great deal, but no one could fully explain what it was that they had heard.  That was how one of the angels began speaking with her eyes shut.

     Yes, these people have horses and the little old ladies who live in them are saved such troublesome tortures as porch sitting, card games and ice cream socials by prancing around the meadows and jumping in the air and pulling milk wagons driven by little old men who comb them and curry them and select the most tender carrots for their aging teeth and the brightest flowers for their bonnets.

     And if the younger men are still talking to trees, well, the horses can still remember what it was like to rub themselves against the rough outer ears that bark sprouts when the truth about the future is seeping out all over.

     Here nothing is horrible despite appearances.  But many things are misunderstood.  Many things.

     And more horses, more horses.  Horses big enough to hold operas in.  Horses joyful enough to cheer up the city council.  Horses alive enough to contain all the sadness of three children drowned last year in the reservoir.  Horses strong enough to support the weight of hundreds of lovers’ mistakes.

7.

     It’s time.  The children speak one at a time now and the thread moves from one to the other and the needle is hard to see but growing easier to use.  All day they weave and weave and then in the afternoon they take their blankets home and continue weaving.  Yes, it is a hard life in the cold world, but the entire village is speaking excitedly about the world outside at play under a blanket of snow woven by a giant and the world at rest inside wrapped in the comfort of their own dreams.

     No, not God.  Better.  Something without the limits of our imaginations.

8.

     Some late visitors have come across places where these people left small pieces of glass etched with stone and they have not been able to understand the markings.  Perhaps they are lost markers of exchange, valuable in a former time.  Perhaps they are broken shards of some vessel used in a ceremony.  Perhaps they are messages meant for the finder who now cannot read them.  Or discarded trinkets.  Or useless children’s entertainments.  Or markers on the road to enlightenment.

     Or simply mistakes.

     Or miracles.

     Which are misunderstandings corrected by angels.  Who are lost animals found after their first death by their own bodies, which, like ours, are made of earth and certain elusive questions which drive lives to madness, pain, knowledge and joy.

     A visitor asks about marriage and an elder who has been standing by the river, wailing, picks up a pebble and with great difficulty, and the help of other stones, breaks it.  He places the two pieces in the visitor’s hand, closes the visitor’s fingers around them and waits for a very long time.

     The visitor grows impatient and throws the broken pebble at a crow flying over the river.  The crow’s shadow in the shallows swallows both pieces of the pebble and the visitor leaves.

     The elder continues to wait.

     The river waits and moves on at the same time, always moving but never gone.

     Towards dusk the elder’s breath can be seen in the cold air.  The crow flies through the cloud of breath.  A game?  A moment’s warmth on the cold air?  A gesture to the patient man on the shore?

     A young man talking to trees may not understand the significance of broken stones until long after his body has changed him and the books he could write have left him behind.

     A young woman may forget, for a while, her box of clouds, choosing to touch her new box of buttons instead, first with the shadows at her fingertips, then with the fingertips Thomas gave her with his eyes closed, speaking about the pleasure he wanted to pass on, the cool river of smooth bits of other’s lives cascading over the palms and the grateful overlooked knuckles and the down on the back of her hands.

     And now the same young woman gazing at a stone button, trying to imagine the life of someone wearing a garment with this button missing, shared now, because of the way the young woman caresses it while an old satisfaction enters a more ancient hand worrying the tiny hole where the thread once was.

     A young crow may visit the river and swallow a pebble, though it may not always be easy to see how he lives inside the stone.

9.

     Never discuss fate with a mirror.  We know that its honesty is backwards.  But then so are many of our ideas about heaven.  Some of the people here do not rely on mirrors, but they have dreams and they have friends and they have lovers and they have seasons and they have water and they have crows.  With these they understand more about what to change and what to accept.  Sometimes they call the missing parts “angels” in order to see themselves in these parts they do not yet understand.

     Once, a naked boy ran past the barn where a farmer’s children were milking the cows in the evening and stopped suddenly on the lawn, to remember, beneath the paper lanterns strung along the clothesline and over the gate to the kitchen door.  A dog barked and he disappeared into the forest.  A grasshopper clicked and whirred into the air.  It sat on the corner of the orange canopy for a long time before leaping with a soft rattle into the breeze that carried it past the white picket fence into the wheat field.

     It’s a gift so you give it away.

     For a moment, we lost the sky.  The thread broke.  Its generous wind melted.

     Three friends with drooping beards parade towards the horizon before kneeling at the bridge, in the dark loam where the marsh crawls up to the road, lookouts planting their eyes like little trees, acorns anchoring new taproots into the widening earth and reaching toward the errant clouds.

     “We are not wise enough,” said one.

     “We have not raveled far enough,” said another.

     “We have not reached far enough inside,” said the third.

     Because they believed people had to sacrifice.

     Because they had not given away their borrowed smiles.

     “Breathe clouds and listen,” angels have said for centuries.  The old ones can see the path of the rain while it’s still rising, before it’s missed and called home.  The young ones are still learning how to hold the smell of the ocean, older even than anything that has been said of it, between their wings.

     Three women stroke the beards of three seekers, building yet another horizon in the warmth.  Three women each share the same dream with a different man, for each man gave his promise like a large basket.

     The three women filled the promise with offerings and the ancient beast of their own hearts blessed them.

     This too has been said for centuries.

     Mostly by bearded men.

     Who may have been in need of assistance in untying their smiles.

10.

     One of the angels tells a joke and has a great idea after the punch line.  It leads the angel to the moon by way of the abandoned hotel and the steady throb of the slaughterhouse windmill.  The angel was seen carefully selecting bones near the mortuary.  The angel invented a musical instrument that chops wood, but almost no one knows this.  Now the angel lives on a houseboat in the swamp so overgrown with moss it is seldom recognized as a habitation.  People say a hermit with a very long white beard lives in the swamp, but no one believes it, except in dreams.

     Then nothing happens and it takes a long time.

     Then the darker side of life arrives like a gift.  Long after the laughter.  Long after the neighbors have made up their mind.

     Long after the light crawled inside the sweat pouring from our skin.

     Such beauty, such patience, such acceptance.

     Why can’t we stay here?

     A clutch of worry perched on your shoulders like a basket of severed heads on the way to the market.

     As if sunset were the only road.

     As if the road were the only dream.

11.

     And so a man appears.  He could be a boot after a long journey.  The dumb trunk of his stumbling heart sunk deep in a story someone tells about him.  Then someone else.  Then someone else.  Until it isn’t him anymore.  Until the life he has shared has fallen away and he is nobody, he is abandoned pickup trucks, he is fishing with no bait, he is out to get even without every getting out.

     And she thought she loved him.

     She loved him she thought.

     She thought.  Then she still loved him.

     Wearing a speckled dress the color of quails’ eggs.

     The future was hers until they spoke.

     But you can’t really leave until you don’t need to.

     How much beauty is left now?

     And she knelt with him in the risky wisdom of shadows.

     How much is left now?

12.

     Begin again by the fireplace.  Casual, draped in a graceful sprawl against the mantel corner, staring into the place where the fire is telling her it has something to give her.  Then move to the dark wood of the railing and on, touching, stroking the velvet drapes, sliding comfortably down into the divan, eyes glowing like tunnels.  Behind their patient certainty someone will meet us later, warm strong, waking from the cave.

     A little round one, furry and featureless, sitting in the corner like a soft rock.  It would be warm if she could touch it, but she can’t.  It would scurry back out of sight, further into the recesses of the cave, and right now she would like to just watch it, imagining what it would feel like.

     February 18, 1954.  A small town in northern Nebraska.  A shoebox addressed to Margaret Chandler arrives at a large farmhouse near the edge of town.  Margaret’s nineteen-year-old son has just returned from cleaning the house of Angela Mann, Margaret’s neighbor and closest friend.  He holds the box knowing something important is inside.  No one has ever sent anything like it to this farmhouse in Nebraska.  The boy’s mother is hanging laundry on the clothesline.  He can see her out the window, as he stands there, suspended in his passing life as if this moment were not part of the rest.  He thinks about Angela.  She has never before been absent when he arrived to clean her house.  Nor has he understood why she pays him to clean the house when it is already so clean.  And for a moment it is Angela hanging clothes outside the window and his mother has become a pleasant and mysterious neighbor.  Thomas places the shoebox on his mother’s large quilt-covered bed and waits.  He does not know what he is waiting for.

     From the chandler’s house at the edge of town you can follow the subtle bend of the opening the deer have made into the wheat field, follow the path they use to forage along the edge of the gravel road and, when the dog is sick or too tired to notice them, into the Mann’s garden.  You can imagine space ships setting down in the field, leaving enigmatic signs, accounting for missing animals or perhaps a lost human.  Or you can watch the sun going down at the end of the long flat empty passage from one farm town to another just like it.

     A cock pheasant stands guard, head perked and alert on his long thin neck, his proud bright iridescent plumage a bit arrogant to those who have not witnessed his patience while three mottled brown hens, effectively camouflaged even in motion, eat the smaller gravel by the edge of the road, the amazing muscle in their craw strong enough with the gravel’s help to break the grain they’ve been quietly consuming as the afternoon heat begins to rise and dissipate.  When he is sure no motion is out of place, he will take his share.

     Or you can imagine you are an angel just descended to earth, watching the life in the farmhouses with envy, wondering why the birds don’t see you, wishing they would because there is nothing you want more than to become human.

     Next to the house at the edge of town, there is another field, then another house, a different shade of gray or brown or red but just as much a part of the landscape as the next field and the next house painted in yet another quickly fading earthtint.  It’s as if, like the pheasant hens, the houses wanted to camouflage themselves, perhaps to keep he landscape safe for more of their kind.

     And the people come and go in long slow warnings of rising dust from the squarely placed grid of gravel.  Unless it rains and the sudden loud surge of welcome claps the earth faster than it can accept the award, the way the satisfying applause of hooves at feeding time spills out of the corral and carries down to the farmhouse to mingle with the smell of a fruit pie, an oddly comforting confusion.  But if you are lucky enough to arrive as the suddenly clean smell of the cleared air opens into the evening, there is no welcome more indiscriminant.  You could be a murderer, a dying saint, a devout misanthrope, or an angel, and you would sit down with a calm smile at the same table and begin eating.

     Or it could be winter, with time stopped between the swirling, breath-consuming pulse of a storm passing like some gigantic animal and your appearance out of the infinite emptiness of white might be received as a kind of miracle, something no one mentions but everyone thinks about because that’s the way miracles should be received.  But do not wait.  As soon as that great wet animal has passed, the trail of every creature after becomes visible, ordinary and revealing.  And as the knowledge the tracks reveal grows, a crust of pretense forms and you must learn to live beneath it or risk your every move revealed at a greater and greater distance to the attentive ears of anyone willing to stay quiet and motionless in one place long enough to set aside their expectations in favor of whatever might offer itself.

13.

     Or perhaps you are lost, the relatives from the old line of your immigrant family disappearing into the fields as you daydream about the sparrows, uncertain which way to turn, unsure you would even recognize those strangers from the past if they answered the door at the next farmhouse.

     But they do not answer the door because you do not knock.  The sounds from the open window (it’s still afternoon and hot and every window in the county is open) draw a grin from your down turned and lonely lips as you pause on the porch, deciding not to interrupt, imagining a passionate affair because you yourself desire one.

     And if I told you the woman was married and yes, lonely, and the man was also married and lived, when he was (rarely) home at the next farmhouse up the road, you would be ready to believe me.  That is the way it feels after weeks of rainless heat in northern Nebraska.  Perhaps that is the way it feels when anything anywhere has gone too long without change.

     But perhaps you find it hard to imagine this farmhouse could be the home of your relatives.  They are not the ones whose lives make things happen.  They are not the ones with these secrets.  You are.  And you are not yet ready to share them.  You may have to walk a bit farther, but your family, when you find them, will be waiting there to make you feel you could be accepted if you wanted it.  But of course you do not.  You want to know you have a choice, but you want to show them you have already made it.  You will show them you have become what you wanted to be.  You will not wonder what’s next in the life you have chosen.  You have already done that enough on the way to this change to know what’s possible in that world you are convinced you have chosen.  But this world, this other world . . .  In this one you have not imagined what anyone would long for except leaving.  But Thomas’ father has.  And that is what he is doing inside this house in 1935 before he has even understood the possibility of Thomas.

     Once, standing at the window, Thomas’ father tried to see himself on the other side.  There was a woman, his wife Angela, sitting in a red stuffed chair.  He tried to imagine what he might look like from the back like this, from outside, framed by the window, with light from a failing fire leaking out around him.

     There had been gestures between them, but the gestures had long since fallen away, not without touching a few worn truths, but quickly growing careful, memories replacing revivals.

     Before long his intentions of surfacing stalled.  He felt impulses to struggle but, like a drowning swimmer, couldn’t tell which direction would lead him to the surface and failed to choose any direction at all.  Soon the impulses were little more than quiet yearnings till it was too late, till they had already floated away, shadows falling from his raised fingers, his body’s gesture unacknowledged by his heart.

14.

     This is when you notice that the house seems to be growing smaller while the boy continues to hold the box, like a too obvious special effect in a horror movie.  And the young man can’t seem to believe this could be his father in the box.  But it’s so easy to feel the words coming closer, aging him as he reads the letters, and then a past has sprung up behind him and he turns and the old way of seeing his life is gone.  Here in this house he can’t seem to believe his few friends, who have been telling him for years no one should be so alone.  The walls have been so kind to him.  The floor mumbles softly at his step.  Even the ceiling’s private contributions have fallen with a modest benevolent ease on his sweatered shoulders.  But now it is different, more insistent . . . the walls want to marry, the ceiling is too tired, and the floor has gathered up so many invitations from its investments in dust . . .  What will become of him when the house has grown too small to curtain his future?

     But for all the boy’s sudden knowledge of this man who built a world around himself, he has not till this moment noticed an important detail.  The part of him which sees himself in this man has no need for such a detail.  But there it is, intruding upon his knowledge, a pair of green plaid suspenders beneath the letters in the shoebox.

     Perhaps the sadness of Thomas the elder started when he realized he did not know what to do.  He did not understand that if Angela told him, no matter how perceptive and right it might be, it would not be his and it would be wrong.  His instincts were too tender, too uncertain, perhaps too unformed, to act upon.  He did not know it could be otherwise, that action could be right even when it was flawed.  He did not yet understand imperfection.  But his Angela did and she loved him for it even when she knew it was keeping them apart.

     And Margaret, his lover, a woman much like his wife, also understood imperfection and loved despite or because of it.  But she did not tell Thomas’ father or her husband the whole story of the wonderful mistake that grew inside her and she could not stop herself from thinking of it as perfect when it came out.

More Fiction