all hail

Bread brain hotel head

Acrylic, water pastel, pencil

14x15″ panel

this is your new Messiah the glow cat

“Do you have that book?” a patron asks. You reply, “I’m sorry, could you be more specific?” “The book,” is the only answer you get. This happens with three more patrons today. “I’m sorry,” you say to them all, “I don’t know what book you’re talking about.” The book. The book. The Book. Should you know The Book? Should you have The Book?

An elderly couple comes in every morning for the newspaper. Nobody remembers a time that they didn’t. They have always been elderly. There’s a faint foul smell in the library when they’re in.

There is a branch on the system map that you’ve never heard anyone talk about. You’ve never seen books with their branch sticker come in and you’ve never sent books to them. You asked a co-worker about it once, but they just smiled and asked how much shelf reading you got done that day. You tried to find it once, but kept finding yourself in the same grocery store parking lot over and over.

You weed for hours. There are no fewer books on the shelves. You weed for days. There is still no room for the new books that have come in. You weed for months. You feel like you’ve withdrawn a lot of these books already. You know you threw this stained, tattered, moldy copy of Bleak House in recycling a while ago. You weed for years. You weed forever.

(You never weed books on witchcraft. In fact, you put ten brand new ones on the shelf yesterday. They have already disappeared.)

One day the elderly couple doesn’t come in. The library has a much fouler smell that usual during the time they’re regularly in.

You go through a box of donations and at the very bottom you find a copy of Ramona Quimby, Age 8. You loved that book as a child, and it looks like the same edition. You open it to check the publishing date and there is your name and childhood phone number written in purple crayola marker in your 8-year-old self’s handwriting. You did not grow up around here. Your family is not close.

You go through a box of donations and at the very bottom you find a book with a photo used as a bookmark. You take it out to let the patron know they left it in there next time they come in. The photo is of a child at the beach and you would swear that it was a picture of you, but you have no memory of that swimsuit and no memory of that beach. The patron does not return.

You go through a box of donations and at the very bottom you find a book written in a language you can’t identify. You pass it around to your coworkers, and none of them know either. You upload a picture of the cover to reverse google image search and there are no matches. You open the book to double check for copyright information and you don’t know how you missed it until now but there is your your name and childhood phone number written in purple crayola marker in your 8-year-old self’s handwriting.

Clouds: Leo, Pisces, Taurus, libra

Stars: Gemini, Aries, Cancer, Aquarius

(not a fallen angel, who chose to abandon their post and ally themselves with lucifer, or a corrupted human soul, which is a different animal altogether, but an angel who was called before the tribunal and found guilty. Dishonorable discharge. And maybe you wished you’d jumped, instead of being pushed, but the sentence is handed down anyway–)

…and then you’re just human. Sort of. Because the thing is, they can’t turn an angel into a human–you aren’t water, humanity isn’t wine. The best they can do is strip you of your wings and spirit and teeth and surety, and reassemble you smaller, blind, with poison in your joints. They best they can do is make you into a uncertain fleshy thing, hollow on the inside where a soul should go. Neither human nor angel and they were being merciful, you see. Better a thing than unmade.

but your body is new, fresh out of the box, and it doesn’t know how to be in the world any more than you do. You find yourself vomiting up food because your stomach doesn’t understand what digestion is; you wear sweaters in mid-July because your blood stubbornly refuses to go above room temperature. You have shadows like bruises beneath your eyes.

you smell wrong. When you pass, animals cower as before a storm.

(some nights, you dream–you were allowed to keep your memories, in stunning technicolor detail, but some of the parts that don’t fit in the human brain have gone blurry around the edges, metaphorical and soft-focus. You can’t remember the certain bits of string theory you need to get home, for example, or what ultraviolet looked like. When someone says, wings, you think of feathers and updrafts and that’s not right, it’s not right, but you can’t remember why)

you spent that first day in a church, trying to plead with your father to reverse the ruling. You have never known such profound silence as greeted you there, and it shakes you to your (new, runny) marrow. it will be a year before you dare to shout into the abyss again.

(no wonder humanity spent so much time looking up, looking out, looking at each other. How lonely, to be shut up all alone in your skull)

but you live in the world because there is no other choice. (that is very human too, you learn.) You tend the garden of an old woman, who makes you soup from a can and dry sandwiches, and rubs your back when you vomit them up again. She lets you wear her sweaters, smelling of lanolin and mothballs, and you are cold together, old together. You tell her, I used to be an angel, and she pats your hand.

how are you with hostas? she asks.

(it did not occur to you to lie to her. that was very angelic of you.)

You saw Sodom leveled to ash and salted earth, and she was there during the Harlem Riots of ‘64, which, she assures you, looked much the same. what’s the secret of life? she asks once, humor dancing in her dark eyes.