Story-A-Day #41: Angels

ANGELS

Angels, cherubs, deities and gods frolic in the pillowy castle in the clouds. That is what she was always told. That somewhere up in those clouds, was a magnificent kingdom where they righteous went to rest in the lux aeterna.

She always wondered about angels. They were apparently everywhere and yet in her long, lonely life she had never seen any proof that they existed. You could find plenty of representations of them throughout the world, from church statuary to mall trinkets to endless lines of greeting cards, but never had she experienced the warm glow that our heavenly guardians were meant to bestow.

Angles should bring happiness, peace and joy. Her life had been almost solely absent of each. Her parents had been vicious drunks dealing who dealt with plenty of demons. Not once were they graced by angelic beauty. Her middle years had not been much better as she struggled to raise herself alone from the age of 15.

A succession of lousy relationships and equally lousy jobs had filled her heart with granite and buried her soul in despair. At 50, she had tried half heartedly to end it all, the irony being that with only half a heart that worked, she could not fully commit to the process.

She was resigned to her life of bitter loneliness and now she was paying for her defeatist resignation. Her chair was stuck in the loose snow of the half cleared sidewalks. She nudged the stick forward again and the whir of tires spinning uselessly filled the air. With a sigh, she released the stick. Another twenty minutes in this temperature and her 83-year-old lungs would give out. That was the bright side. The not so bright side was the indignity that would come when her systems released themselves upon death and someone stumbled upon her frozen wastes.

Of course, she wouldn’t be around to deal with the shame, so maybe it wasn’t so bad after all. She folded her slender hands in her lap and tilted her head back towards the skies. There was no God up there, no angels looking out for her. There was no heavenly reward awaiting her at the end. The end was just that, an undignified conclusion to a life that was barely lived.

“Are you all right miss?” the young voice whispered in her ear.

“Soon enough she replied.”

“Are you stuck? Can I help?”

She opened her eyes and found an inquisitive young man in a snowsuit peering at her. He smiled, a warm crinkling of his freckled face. It was the last thing she expected, and to her surprise, she found herself smiling back.