Oddlands Magazine: The Evolution of Angels by Lisa M. Bradley
An apple-scented breeze brushed Michael’s millions of saffron hairs. The motion created a barely perceptible blur in his distributed vision. He ruffled his emerald wings in bodily solidarity and watched the couple before him flinch. They did not see him as he was: their myopic ape eyes incapable of comprehending his scintillating, shaggy mass, they did not see the million faces embedded in each hair, nor the million mouths in chorus. Still, they shuddered.
Michael shook his head, disconcerted by their cowering obeisance, and considered the island. Were he they, he would be sorry to be leaving it too. He did not know what they had done to warrant expulsion, indeed, did not know what they could have done, alone among the myriad trees, green as Michael’s wings. Nor did Michael wonder. It was not his duty to wonder.
The man croaked like one of the squat beasts over which the couple had dominion. His hairless face reddened as he made the noise in his bare throat. Michael watched the lump there bob up and down.
The man finally said, “Will we never see this place again?”
“You will.” The couple quivered, and Michael lowered his voices, hushed the hosannas trumpeting from some of his mouths. “You will see it in dreams, in dim, lost memories. You will see it golden in the past, silver in the future. It would be easier for you if you did not.”
Michael lifted his sword and pointed to the sea. The couple turned; they looked at the water sparkling with sunset, then looked at one another. They were not afraid. The world had never been for them a frightful place. They walked a few feet into the ocean. The gold-flecked foam danced around their bare knees, shot blood-warm spray into their aprons of fig leaves. They continued walking, but the water never rose above their knees.
They looked over their shoulders, and Michael could see by the shifting focus of their ape eyes that the island was shrinking to them, fading, as if with distance. Michael knew the exact moment that paradise was lost; he saw it in the transition of their gaze, from straining to see to straining to remember.
“Did you see…?” the woman said, frowning.
“I think I did,” the man replied.
“What was it?”
“Another island, maybe. Farther out.”
“But where did it go?” she asked.
Confused, they turned their simple, single faces forward and saw their new island. But it did not seem new to them; they did not crouch to investigate its white sands, or stand back to appraise the ragged canopy of palm trees, comparing it to their previous home. They trudged up the beach with weary familiarity, and when they looked out to sea once more, Michael saw not a flicker of wonder on their sun-browned brows, only an abstract intensity, as if they thought they’d forgotten something important.
Something small but jagged stirred inside Michael. God is merciful, he thought.
A stiff wind rose from the north and kicked up sand that pierced Michael’s mane, needled his left eyes. Michael shook his wings out and ascended, but his heart sank.
II.
In the deepest chasm of the earth, Michael held the point of his sword to Semyaza’s throat. Leader of the rebellion, Semyaza stood quivering with adrenaline, his red-gold curls limp with rain, his single pair of eyes begging, blue as the swollen ocean that lapped at the cliff tops above.
On Michael’s right, Semyaza’s comrade, Azazel, squirmed in Gabriel’s clutches, sturdy blue-black legs kicking at the golden wheels that constituted Gabriel’s lower half. A thousand of Michael’s left eyes, scoured by sand long ago, saw nothing. A thousand more near his wings were swollen shut, injured in the current battle. Still, he saw the chaos around him, watched in horror as his host of angels beat back the fallen.
Michael shouted to be heard over the gales of wind and rain. “Stop fighting! We have no wish to harm you!” Still, screams ripped the air.
Gabriel’s reticulate wings snapped off sheets of rainwater. “Azazel,” she said, her four faces rigid with pain, “call off your followers or Semyaza will die.”
“He would rather die than let our children do so,” Azazel said, and he kicked the rim of Gabriel’s foremost wheel, bursting several of the crystalline eyes that glittered there.
“Fools.” Michael glared at Semyaza, who panted and dripped blood onto the muddy, gouged earth. “You don’t know what death is.”
Semyaza fell to his knees. Michael jerked back his sword not to harm him and winced at the searing pain in his abused wings.
“Please, I beg you,” Semyaza said. His apelike eyes held a disconcerting clarity, his celestial origin shining through. “Let us save our wives, our children.”
Michael frowned. “Do not beg me. Pray to He who made you.”
Azazel stopped struggling and laughed, terrible to hear amidst the thunder and shrieks. “He who now destroys us?”
“You will not be destroyed,” Michael said, shouting so all the fallen could hear him. Some of the wrestling warriors paused, panting, hopeful for truce. “You have taken on the likeness of man,” Michael continued, “and many of his failings, but the waters cannot harm you.”
Semyaza pounded a muddy fist against his chest. “But the flood will kill our wives and children. Is that not enough to destroy us?”
“They are only human,” Michael said, glowering through the rain.
“Only human?” Azazel’s black eyes glinted, bright and savage as the lightning that speared the sky. “Only human?”
The watchful warriors threw themselves into battle once more. Sea foam breached the cliff edges and cascaded down, smashing outcroppings and washing chunks of rocks into the chasm.
Semyaza squinted through the hail and shouted, “Humans are individual and irreplaceable, Michael. They can worship with devotion as complete as an angel’s.”
“But they do not,” Michael said. “And neither do you.”
Semyaza began to sob. “Michael, please. Our children are half angels.”
“There is no such thing,” Michael said, wishing he could close his eyes.
“Then what are they?”
Michael paused. Those fathered by the fallen were sometimes called “giants,” other times “nephilim.” Neither term meant much to Michael. Finally he said, “It is not my duty to know.”
In the end, though outnumbered, the fallen angels would not submit, and Michael and Gabriel’s soldiers had to bind every one to the chasm floor.
III.
Michael stood on a mountaintop.
A thousand of his leftmost eyes blinked uselessly. The ones radiating around his scuffed wings squinted through cloudy cataracts toward heaven. The ones lower on his back gazed with wonder at the starlike flowers dotting tufts of grass. All the others watched obediently.
Below, two humans struggled on a barren ledge. The old man sobbed; the young boy screamed; Michael’s mouths sang, “Holy, holy, holy” into the thin wind. The old man lifted the boy, bound but struggling, onto the rock altar. He shouted the words of offering. With quivering hand, he lifted the sacrificial knife. The sunlit-edge plunged toward the boy’s chest and, finally, Michael could speak.
“Abraham!” he said. And rocks rattled down the mountainside, for Michael had shouted.
The old man cried out and whirled around, the knife glaring sun into Michael’s many eyes.
“Abraham,” Michael said again, more calmly.
“Who speaks?” The old man whipped his head about, blinded by tears.
“Do not touch the boy,” Michael commanded. “Do not do anything to him. You have shown that you fear God. You do not withhold from him your son…your only son.” Michael could not help but think of Semyaza and his sons. Michael’s mouths whispered “Selah”; he collected himself. He pointed behind Abraham and said, “Behold, a ram for your burnt offering.”
Rubbing tears away impatiently, Abraham cast about again and saw, behind and above the altar, a yellow-eyed white ram. Loose rock skittered under the animal’s hooves as he leaped from an outcropping onto the crowded ledge. The ram nosed at the fingers of the boy who lay on the altar sniffling quietly, staring up at Michael with bloodshot brown eyes.
Abraham threw aside his knife and fell on the boy, weeping, “Isaac, Isaac, Isaac.” The boy flinched and began to cry again.
Michael stared at the ram’s curved horns. He thought about whirlpools and the chambered nautilus and the contours of Abraham’s ears. He thought about the flood, a wobbly ark, and the world repopulated…for this. Mostly though, he willed the ram to stay still until the sacrifice.
When Abraham prepared to kill the ram, Michael closed the eyes behind him to focus entirely on God’s bidding. When Abraham sliced the animal’s throat, he watched unblinking, stood stock still as the fan of bitter blood spattered his saffron hairs and burned a thousand eyes. When the animal hit the ground, Michael shuddered.
IV.
Jacob smashed a thousand of Michael’s faces. Stubby ape fingers grappling for purchase, he gouged out a thousand of Michael’s eyes. Michael’s wings cracked and tore and bled as he wrestled Jacob on the riverbank. Finally Michael touched the hollow of Jacob’s thigh.
Jacob screamed. He fell away. But after two jagged breaths, he turned back to Michael and fought some more.
“Let me go,” Michael panted. “Day breaks.”
“What are you, that you fear the sun?” Jacob shook him by handfuls of mottled hair. “I will not let you go. Not until you swear an oath that I may pass this river and join my family and we may travel unharmed through this land.”
Michael almost smiled with several mouths. It was a thorough demand. “What is your name?” he asked the crafty human.
“Jacob.” The man stopped shaking Michael but did not loosen his grip.
“No longer. From now on you shall be Israel,” Michael recited, “for you are powerful as a prince of God and of men, and you have prevailed.”
Israel’s hands faltered. His face wrinkled with suspicion. “What is your name?” he asked.
This time Michael did smile, but his lips cracked. “Why do you want to know my name?” he said through the blood.
And though it was but twilight and Michael was hard to see, Israel shuddered and pushed Michael away. Michael sighed.
“I give you leave,” he said, dropping his gaze. “You and your family will be safe. Now go, find the brother you twice cheated.”
Michael listened to the man splash across the river, his bed roll and water skin forgotten in his pained haste. Michael drooped, aching, into the bitter river and thought, “Will You be angry with us forever? Will You draw out Your anger to all generations?”
V.
Michael stood, invisible, just inside the dim stone mswr and watched the men drink. He had entered the tavern to watch them wallow, to remind himself of how much closer humans were to the animals than the angels. Instead, watching their worries slip away as they sat laughing and sucking hqt through wooden siphons, Michael began to wish he too could consume the hearty dark beer. But he had no idea what the thick sweet drink would do to him. And he had no money.
A breeze tickled his matted hair, carrying with it incense that stung a few hundred of his healthy eyes. There was a narrow corridor across from the mswr’s entrance, and Michael watched a man emerge from that deeper darkness. Fresh almond oil glistened over his fair body and shaved scalp. His joints seemed oiled as well; he walked more loosely, although with better coordination, than many of the men who had been drinking. He carried a miasma of scents: almonds, incense, roses, beer, and, somehow, the sea. When he walked into the light, Michael saw the red-gold braid coiled over his shoulder, his eyes blue as the ocean.
“Semyaza,” Michael cried. He took on a human form–tall, bronze-skinned man with a black braid and green eyes–and he blocked the man’s path.
Startled, the man looked up at Michael. “Do I know you?” he said, brow wrinkling over all-too-human eyes.
“It is I, Michael.”
The man shook his head. “You have shared too many libations to Menquet tonight,” he said. “I do not know you.” He attempted to pass on Michael’s right.
“Blasphemer,” Michael said, and shoved Semyaza against the wall. He ignored the gasps around them and ground Semyaza into a crudely drawn mural of the god Hathor deceived, drinking beer dyed red as blood. “How did you escape? What are you doing here?”
“Escape? What are you talking about? Let go,” Semyaza said, struggling. Paint flecked off the stone wall and stuck to his oiled scalp.
“Semyaza, how could you forget? I held you down while He killed your children.”
The man stopped fighting. “Children? I have no children,” he said, shaking his head. “And if I had, and you did as you say, then the only way I’d wish to remember you would be bleeding at my feet, begging for mercy.”
Michael stepped back. He looked carefully: it was Semyaza, he was certain, in spite of the apelike eyes, stupid circles within circles. “Come outside then,” Michael said, dragging Semyaza behind him, “and I will show myself as I truly am.”
In an alley smelling of dog piss, Michael presented his tattered, patinated wings, his millions of bilious hairs, thousands of his faces battered and bruised, thousands of eyes gouged and blind. Semyaza blinked and staggered against the wall of the mswr.
“I will not go back to my chains,” he said, still blinking. But his jaw jutted, stubborn.
“I am not here to force you,” Michael said. He reverted to his human form.
“Then why are you here?”
Michael considered telling him, but there was an evasive angle to Semyaza’s face. “I want to taste shechar,” he finally said.
“Then do so and leave me alone.”
“I have no money.”
Semyaza blinked again, his eyes less apelike now. He looked up and the evasiveness slid off his face, replaced by an incredulous smile. “Have I not fallen far enough? You wish me to help the chief of archangels, angel of righteousness, ‘he who is as God’ get drunk? And afterwards am I supposed to bring you a whore from the back room?”
Michael simply stood there, because he did not know how to shrug or blush.
“Michael, you are shameless,” Semyaza said with a weary laugh. When Michael showed no reaction, Semyaza sighed. “You do not recognize the insult. I suppose among the angels, to be shameless is to be virtuous, or as virtuous as the commonplace may be.”
“I do not wish to be among the angels,” Michael said, then amended, “not tonight. They look at me as if they smell blood on me. They despise all human effluvia, and I have been drenched in it.”
“Wine will only make things worse,” Semyaza said, gaze skirting Michael’s again.
“I have killed children. I helped Him kill your children. How can things be any worse?”
Semyaza nodded. “I no longer wish to be me, but much less would I want to be you. Come, I will get you your wine.”
Later, in the smoky light of Semyaza’s room, the two sat cross-legged on pillows on the earthen floor, passing the jug of wine between them. Semyaza leaned forward, his ocean eyes tinged with blood.
“He says He made them out of dirt,” he said, breath reeking of fermented dates and honey. “So why do they sweat the sea?”
“What do you mean?” Michael willed the room to stop reeling, his mouths to stop moaning, “Turn us, O God, and cause Your anger toward us to cease.”
Semyaza braced his hands against the floor and held Michael’s gaze with some effort. “Lick a woman’s throat in the lust of the night, and you taste salt. Lick her tears, her blood, and you lose yourself in a sea. It is the same with men. If He made them out of dirt, why do they taste of the sea?”
Michael moaned and brought the jug to his mouth. “I don’t know, Semyaza. I don’t want to know. That is why I drink.”
“Maybe,” Semyaza said, laboring to speak clearly, “He is not the Creator.”
“Maybe you wish to be vanquished to the same pit as Satan,” Michael warned. His drunken thoughts veered to Jacob, the betraying brother, but still he said, “Tell me, Semyaza. What does your blood taste like?”
Semyaza sat back, disgusted. “The same as yours,” he sneered. “And even after all this time, it still makes me sick.”
VI.
Moonlit, Michael stalked past a cluster of houses, blood slapped black on their side posts and lintels. The swampy scent coated the desert air, like rotting seaweed dragged inland. Stronger, the stench of roasted goat and lamb burned his eyes. He blinked, eyes watering, and leaned against a house for a moment to clear his sight. The people huddled inside screamed at the vibrations of the beams.
The next house was clean. Michael entered. He killed the infant in the cradle and a kitten sleeping alongside the hearth with her littermates. He went to the next house, also bare of blood, and killed a ten-year-old boy and his pretty five-year-old cousin. The next house belonged to a rich man, but it too was clean of blood, and Michael killed a goat, a lamb, a guard dog, one of each of the servants’ children, and the master’s firstborn too.
Michael continued until all the firstborn of Egypt, human and beast, noble and common, were dead. Half his mouths sang, “It is God’s will.” The other half cried, “God forgive me.” The cacophony was not enough to block out the screams when the Egyptians rose from their beds and found their dead. So Michael sat in the desert and drank his jugs of stolen shechar.
VII.
Michael sat hunched over the London Evening News in a tidy pub, wearing his human disguise. He relied on this form more and more, though he changed his hair and darkened or lightened his skin as convenient.
Beneath the glamour, Michael’s scanty wings glowed a gangrenous green, and his saffron hairs were scrofulous; a multitude of his eyes had dimmed, and his mouths were, more often than not, tongue-tied with liquor. He preferred them that way.
Michael reread the account of a British lieutenant-colonel at Mons, Belgium, and tried not to grunt his disgust. The British army had been retreating under heavy fire when the German shelling suddenly stopped. The Brits turned around to see five large, white-robed beings, their arms outstretched, standing between the enemy lines. Both armies had beaten a swift retreat.
Michael had killed one hundred and eighty-five thousand Assyrian soldiers single-handedly in one night. He had thrown screaming Goths from the ramparts of Gaul and could still hear the wet thuds of their heads hitting the ground. He had slaughtered Koreishites in Bedr and still smelled the blood of horses mingling with that of men. He had blinded Turks with the smoke of their own cannons at Lepanto, sustaining considerable damage to his own eyes. But when the time came to step into battle and bring peace, was he summoned? Why was it only war and holocaust for him?
Once, Gabriel had been cast out of heaven simply for not following an order to the letter. But, Michael thought, crumpling his newspaper, the orders Michael received were considerably less complex than Gabriel’s, so that couldn’t be the reason. He thought of asking Him outright, but that would do no good. Michael remembered the non-answer He’d given Job.
Whatever His reasons, Michael received more of the same bloody orders, and most of the time he was so drunk, his tongues could hardly curl themselves around the names: Auschwitz, Phnom Penh, Srebrenica, Musayyab, Kyrgyzstan.
VIII.
Michael liked rock music. Not the boppy, hip-wagging Elvis crap, but real rock, the stuff that made you feel like your head was grinding between a rock and a hard place. He liked the Guns N Roses screaming through the strip club, more than he liked looking at the naked chicks gyrating around their poles, almost as much as he liked tossing back scotch.
Only something was bothering him. Someone. A tall woman with blond hair and Asian eyes sat a couple of tables away, staring at him through the cigarette smoke. She wore a boxy black blazer and business slacks, as if she were at her accountant’s rather than a skinfest. Michael made a face at her but, rather than look away, she promptly stood up and strode over to him.
“Michael,” she said, eyes flashing, “I don’t have much time–”
“You’re blocking my view.” He craned to look around her, more to avoid her intense gaze than to see the woman humping the glossy stage behind her.
“Pay attention,” the woman snapped. “He doesn’t know I’m here–”
“Who?”
“–you need to stop this,” she said, talking over him. “You have new orders.”
“Look, bitch, I don’t know what you’re talking about. So just get the–”
She knelt in front of him. He scooted his chair back with a screech and almost leaped up before she put her cold, cold hands on his knees. Some of the other customers hooted. The bartender, a man with a long red braid, hollered, “None of that, not in here!” Neither Michael nor the woman paid any attention.
“He’ll cast you out, Michael. It’s lonely, so very lonely.” She peered up at him, her eyes dazzling in an eerie, penetrative way. Michael felt something flutter in his chest. How did she know his name?
“Don’t you remember me?” When Michael said nothing, she continued. “You must return. You must obey. If you don’t, there’s nothing more I can do for you. This is how angels die, Michael. Not in battle, as we once thought, but incrementally–”
Michael remembered, like a camera shifting into focus. “By doing the scut work of God.”
“You do remember,” Gabriel said, rising.
“Yeah, but I’m working on it,” he scowled. Now he saw her punctured reticulate wings, heard the rice-paper rattle of the cold, air-conditioned breeze through them. The eyes on the rims of her tarnished wheels, the ones that weren’t sticky black pits, glared at him. Michael glared back. “Get out of here,” he said, “or I’ll make this entire state look like the end of days. And I’ll let you explain to Him why.”
Gabriel’s four faces blanched. “I only wanted to help,” she said. But she left, quickly.
Usually when Michael got shitfaced, it took two bouncers to throw him into the street. That night it took four. He punched one man in the neck and screamed, “Where the fuck was my apple? When did I ever have a choice? You stupid apes don’t know how good you had it!”
IX.
Michael slogged his way up from depths of a bender. The night before was not a blur, it was a black hole.
He sat up, rubbing his eyes, and moaned at the pain around his shoulder blades. Probably from getting thrown into the street by bouncers. Bleary-eyed, he did not recognize his apartment for a full ten minutes. Then he squinted at the accusing red lines of his digital alarm clock and eventually understood it was twenty past ten. He’d lost his job for sure this time. Well, who cared? Who wanted to be hauling around cow carcasses and carts of guts anyway?
There was a bric-a-brac toppling sound behind him, then a crash of broken glass. He craned to look behind him; for some reason, he was very aware of this, this needing to turn to see. His cat froze in mid-stride, like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar, then leaped from the shelf where Michael lined up all the useless glass chucherÃas his mom got from the dollar store for his birthdays and Christmas.
“Gato sonso,” Michael muttered and threw a pillow after the cat. He rubbed his eyes some more, then got up and staggered to the shelf to assess the damage.
The glass angel lay broken on the floor, both its wings broken off. Michael stared down at it. He’d never even liked the dumb thing, but first his adam’s apple started bobbing, then his lower lip started trembling, and before he knew it, he was crying.
“God, I can’t take this anymore,” he sobbed.
And Michael sank to the floor–it seemed such a long way down–and sat among the shards.
