Silver Signs, part 1.

I saw an angel today, I think. He was slumped in an alley with bloody feathers all around him. A sword the size of a street sign and the color of magnesium sat across his lap. A half empty bottle of something foul was in one of his hands. He looked up at me with cracked lips and smiled.

“I want to go home,” he told me. I tossed him a wadded up ten, feeling guilty. It (for what I saw was certainly not human now) laughed harshly and spoke in a voice that at once soothed my soul and clawed at my mind. Its wings swelled and spread as it spoke, many pairs of then flapping and shining. I saw for an instant what it must have been before it became the broken man I saw before. Something in my mind fractured, screamed. It was a man again, smiling beatifically and a small bit mischievously. “Can you see the stars, child?” The voice clawed at the already broken parts and I nodded dimly. My world narrowed to a thing that may have been an angel (or the devil himself) and the bricks he leaned against. “Those of us who wait are waking. Things will not be well for a time, and I am sorry for this,” the light of mischief left his eyes and he looked to the ground. The pain and the salve left his voice and he laughed again, the crackling left of a man without even his sanity left. “Go home, kid,” the angel drank amber from his bottle. I watched him for a moment, horrified, before I made myself scarce.

Adhesive diodes stuck carefully behind my ears. Jolts from the radio pumped lights and sounds straight to my brain. I dialed in to something relaxing, went to bed in my clothes. The angel? The mirage, more likely, brought on by stress surely, had shaken me. I chuckled at how foolish I felt, and the radio’s noise followed me to sleep.

I was watching a woman, hovering somewhere above and behind her. She sits stoic, somewhere in some city, in the same night as I sleep in. I knew this in the floating, offhand way you know anything in a dream. Legs crossed, eyes wide, open, and watering from a dozen lit candles, she waits. An hour passes and the big clock strikes eleven. The room has grown hot. A bead of sweat runs from her temple and she can hear the city’s heartbeat. She still waits, unmoving. This will work, she knows. Part of me knows it as well. All such things work, with patience and belief. They always have. We know this as well. Her heartbeat pounds loud in my ears and hers. It merges with the city’s sounds. Something about the night tears, and a mind reaches through, ignites mine. It seems to have affected her too. She has slumped, her eyes are wider, and she’s panting.