by Erica Crouch
“Don’t say that. Things are different now,” he says. “You are good. You are made of more lightness than darkness, or you wouldn’t have survived.”
“For every moment I have spent with you, I am thankful. I only wish we had more time.” I step back and let go of his hand. “It may not be enough, but I love you.”
“We can’t all lose today,” Kala says, her fists balled at her sides. “It’s not right! Fuck!” She runs her hand through her hair as she paces away, wipes at the stain on her cheek. “At least one of us deserves a happy ending.”
“We don’t deserve anything,” I say. “Everyone else does. The others are the priority. They fought for change, and they should see it. You two are the ones who can make it happen. I know it.”
Michael is different than he was before. He led Heaven once, millennia ago. The angels will be thrilled to have him back in a position of power—especially when they hear his new ideas. His new insights from his second chance at life. From fighting with the rebels of New Genesis.
“You have to be here,” I tell Michael.
He shakes his head.
God watches the exchange silently.
“I can stay on Earth,” I say, nodding as if I believe it will actually be okay. “With the others—the dark guardians. I’m sure I’ll be able to find them. Just because I’m not here doesn’t mean I have to be in Hell.” Because I can’t go back to Hell. It would be the death of me in so many ways. And I doubt Lilith would welcome me back with open arms. “It’s not goodbye.”
“Sounds like it,” Kala exhales, annoyed.
Michael shakes his head again, but he stays rooted to his spot.
“I understand,” I say to Azael. Not Azael.
“I don’t,” Kala says.
But it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t have to understand, and neither does Michael. Because I know that this is right, and never again will I be given such a chance to redeem myself. To put others before myself and make up for all the wrong I’ve done. The decision has been made. It was made ages ago, before I was even an idea.
I look at Michael and take in every inch of him. I want to remember everything.
It’s rare in life to find someone who understands you. Someone who will ignite something so thrillingly perfect inside you—a fire that blazes so bright that it can never be extinguished. But there’s a truth I never wanted to acknowledge before. A terrible, awful truth.
Love isn’t always enough to keep people together. Someone you love is not always whom you will spend the rest of your life with. It doesn’t always work out like that. Happy endings are rare, despite what fiction would have us believe.
It doesn’t have to end badly, but it does have to end. We don’t live in a vacuum; there are others to consider. They need Michael, they need Kala, they needed Ana—and her absence will be felt greatly by all. But they don’t need me. Not anymore.
I start to leave and Michael runs forward. He grabs my hand and pulls me back to him. He takes forever memorizing my face. My eyes, my nose, my lips. With fingers rough from war, he traces my jaw, tips my face up to meet his. He’s quiet, somber as he looks deep inside me and realizes that any argument he could make is pointless. This is the way it has to be, and there’s nothing he could say to convince me to fight this. To try to find a way to stay someplace I don’t belong.
“They need you,” I say. My throat is tight, trying to strangle the words before I speak them. I swallow and push past my own fear of being alone. “You have to be here. Make it right. Make everything we did count.”
He closes his eyes, takes a breath, and kisses me goodbye.
“I love you,” he says after we part. “Every day, I will love you. Every day of forever. And I will wait. I will fix this. It’s not my Heaven if I don’t have you.”
“I love you,” I say back. “Every day. Every hour. I love you, and I will never forget us.”
It’s the most painful thing in the world to move away from him. It’s more agonizing than the burn of Heaven’s fire, than the endless void of death, than any torture I’ve ever experienced. Kala looks so annoyed that it’s almost comical, but she doesn’t try to stop me. She knows it has to be like this, too. We don’t get to choose our endings.
“Don’t get in too much trouble,” is all she says.
“Same to you,” I answer, smiling.
“Pen?” God steps forward. He takes my hand in His—not His. Azael’s hand, a copy of my dead brother. He closes His eyes and smiles.
I feel a warmth spread from His fingertips to mine. It fills my veins, spreading throughout my body. My heart accepts the warmth and beats stronger, steadier. The last of the ice in me thaws.
“Love,” He says, “saves even the most forgotten soul.”
He steps back, and Michael wavers on his feet. Kala lets out a breath, her mouth fallen open.
“Well, fuck me,” Kala says.
“What?” I ask, looking behind me, down at my arms. Have I caught fire again?
“Your eyes,” she says, her eyebrows raised.
“Green,” Michael says.
My chest tightens, and I raise my hand to my face.
“Pale green,” he says. “Just like you said they were…”
After rushing across the space that divides us, he crashes into me and takes me in his arms again, and I feel small. I feel so much smaller now, so temporary. A beautiful brevity.
Human. I know it before I can even pin the word down. I’m human. Everything seems like so much more. The intensity of it all is overwhelming, and I have to fight to stay on my feet and not collapse under the responsibility I’ve been given.
God watches me, and I don’t understand anything anymore. I thought I did, but now…
“A second chance,” He explains. “To live a life you’ve earned.”
One finite life to live, to make truly count. An infinite number of choices before me. And for the first time, freedom.
As I begin to cry, Michael kisses me again and the world opens up. Possibilities—so many possibilities. I have never known free will, never been unshackled from my duty as an angel and then as a soldier in Hell. But now, I can be anyone or do anything.
Human. He’s set me free.
“Every day of forever,” Michael says, kissing me on my forehead.
The throne room flares bright with white light and I’m blinded for a minute. When my vision clears and the ringing in my ears silences, I’m back on Earth. A dog barks, and my heart beats in my throat. A nervous excitement sends pinpricks throughout my entire body.
I’m alive, and I’ve never experienced anything even close to this. It’s indescribable. All the poems I’ve ever read make sense, and I finally understand everything I was missing out on. With Michael, I thought I knew the greatest happiness. I thought I was all I could be. I was so very wrong.
Opening my arms wide, I tip my face up to the stormy clouds above. It’s just starting to snow again, a light flurry. It looks different to me now. It’s somehow even more perfect than before. With tears still tracking down my cheeks, I spin beneath the dark sky, close my eyes, and let out a shout of absolute deliverance. I trip over my feet—a new clumsiness I haven’t experienced before—and land on my back, sprawled out on the pavement under the sky, which seems to go on forever. It’s hard to imagine there’s anything beyond it.
I’m alone, and I’m heartbroken, but I have a new beginning. A new genesis. I close my eyes. For the first time ever…
I’m free!
A small voice stops me. “Uhh, hi.”
I open my eyes and look at the sky. Empty. Sitting up on my elbows, I look around me. The kid from the compound is on a sidewalk. I’m lying in the middle of the road. He looks confused, and I laugh. The sound feels new to me. Everything does.
“Pen, right?” he asks.
“Yeah. Asher,” I say, nodding, smiling, and getting to my feet just as a shaggy, blond dog comes bounding toward me. “And the dog.”
“Eli,” he says.
“I named him Eli.”
The shaggy dog jumps up on my legs, leaving muddy paw prints on my jeans. Eli. The name suits him. He circles my feet and wags his tail like crazy.
“You look different,” Asher says.
“I am.”
There’s a crack in the sky and we look up. We watch as the sky changes. Clouds are chased away by a fierce wind that nearly knocks me over. Asher and Eli come close to my side, huddled against me. We’re still for a moment, and then it happens. What everyone has been waiting for for weeks. The sun breaks out from the thick, dark, and oily clouds that have been holding it captive for far too long.
There are so many ways to die, but there are also so many ways to live. In the unfiltered light of a dawning sun, I make a promise—to Michael, to Kala…to Ana and Zo and everyone who ever helped me, to everyone I ever failed to help. I vow to live in every tomorrow I’m lucky enough to see. I swear to it. I’ll live it for those who can’t, and I’ll live it remembering Michael. I will make my new life count, one hour at a time, for as long as I have.
Warmth breaks across the Earth as a new day rises, bright with the promise of a better tomorrow.
5 Years Later
OUR HOUSE IS A SPECTACULAR mess. Asher keeps trying to clean it up. I think he’s obsessed with teaching me organization. I have little interest.
He rearranges my books on shelves he has nailed to the wall, but I like them better on the floor. His cleaning reminds me a lot of Azael, of what he used to always try to do to my stuff in Hell: tidy it up. The fact that his eyes shift to violet when he stomps around, picking up after me and cursing under his breath, only confirms the feeling. I don’t point it out to Asher; I don’t want to scare him. But I know Azael hasn’t left me.
Most of the time, I let Asher—Azael, sometimes—clean and organize. I think it helps distract him from remembering everything. But every night, I move all of my books back to where they were stacked before. Under the dining room table, in piles next to the TV, on the counters in the kitchen, balanced against the railing on the stairs. It gives him something to do. Plus, I like seeing my brother every now and then. I’m glad to know he still exists somewhere, somehow.
Spring is cool and rainy, and I watch the garden of wild flowers take over our backyard with each passing day. There are dozens of white flowers that glow like the moon at night, and they smell like Heaven. Not metaphorically speaking. They smell exactly like the strain of flowers that grew in Heaven’s White Garden. They fight against the leftover winter chill and bloom, stubborn in the unseasonable weather. I half believe the seeds fell to Earth one day and I got lucky. I wonder if it wasn’t an accident that they ended up in my backyard, that they grow right outside my bedroom window.
Asher is good company. Most of the time. He still has those fits of brooding teenager-ness that I have discovered are better worked out by himself. But he’s grown into his ears and is still trying to grow into those long limbs of his. He’s going to be very tall. The day he realized he had passed me in height, he wouldn’t let it go. For hours, he had me stand next to him in the mirror as he pointed it out again and again. Very little of that eleven-year-old I met in the midst of the apocalypse remains.
He wakes me in the morning with a stack of pancakes and a messy candle on top. Eli runs in behind him, knocking over a stack of paper when he jumps up on my bed and licks my face, his tail wagging.
“I get it, I get it. I’m awake.”
“Happy birthday!” Asher says, presenting me with the pancakes.
Every year. Every year on this day, he gives me a different kind of cake. Sometimes, it’s expired or dusty; other times, he lucks out with something fresh. Ice cream cake, cupcake, cheesecake. I almost killed him for making me eat that fruitcake last year. I know that it’s tradition for humans to celebrate birthdays, but I don’t have one. Not really. I tried to explain it to him, but he insists. He’s marked the day on the calendar, a rough estimation of when I came back to Earth as a human.
After he sings that damn birthday song—during which I have no idea what to do with my hands or face—I blow the candle out and take the plate, pulling the pancakes apart. I toss him a few, and he sits on my bed, eating them, careful not to leave crumbs. Like I would care.
The news blares loudly on the television out in the living room. We can hear it from here. There’s some report on about the weather. They’re expecting more snow, and a lot of it. Unusual for this time of year.
Asher straightens up. Whenever there are reports of heavy ice or snowstorms, we both get a little nervous. Last year’s harsh winter had us checking every newspaper and website for signs that the war was starting up again. We scoured for claims of people spotting angels or demons. There are always at least a dozen articles like that a year. The humans have done their best to move on from the war, but some refuse to forget. They’re loud in their remembering.
Governments attempted to explain the “Great Freeze” away as a freak side effect from global warming. A mini ice age. No one, though, tried to explain the angels away. The darkness. They pretended it didn’t happen, because it’s easier that way. Eventually, people started playing along. It’s easier that way for them, too.
Humans love denial. Finally being one myself, I think I understand why.
After losing one-third of the Earth’s population during the Great Freeze, humanity is starting to rebuild. One-third, dead. The statistic sticks out in my mind. What an interesting sense of humor fate has that the same percentage of angels fell when Lucifer was thrown to Hell.
Now, there are only little traces left of the war that once devoured the planet. What people are having a hard time cleaning up are the memories, the nightmares. Those will last for a very long time.
“Snow?” I ask. “Again?”
Asher shrugs and shoves a floppy pancake in his mouth. “I guess.”
It’s a bit late in the season for snow, but we don’t talk about it.
“School today?” I ask.
He nods but looks tired.
“You should go. You can’t keep missing classes.”
“Right, because school was so important to you,” he says, rolling his eyes. He tears off a piece of pancake and gives it to Eli, who swallows it whole. “I don’t believe in formal education.”
“Okay, then you could read every book in the house,” I say. “Like I did. Over the past several millennia.”
“I don’t think you’d like school. They teach evolution there.”
“They should. It’s accurate,” I say.
“But you told me you were in Eden.”
I nod. “That’s true.”
“Then how can evolution and Eden be right? It’s either creationism or we came from monkeys.”
“This is why you need to go to school,” I tell him. “Eden was a controlled experiment. Man evolved. Adam was created. He didn’t have a wife, remember? Wouldn’t have been able to populate the Earth by himself.”
“Fine,” he says with an exaggerated sigh. “I’ll go, okay?”
“Thanks,” I say as he shoves off the bed. The mattress bounces.
“Newspaper’s in, by the way,” he adds, popping out of the room and returning with the folded paper. He throws it to me and I start reading.
I take a pen from my bedside table, circling reports that could hint at genuine sightings, but there isn’t much. Things are dying down again. The demons are back in Hell with Lilith—except for those who fought with New Genesis. Kala’s “dark guardians,” she called them. They’re still somewhere on Earth, but they’re lying low. And the angels are back in Heaven. With Michael. I drop my pen and lower the paper to my lap.
Has he forgotten about me yet? Is he having trouble cleaning up the mess after the war? Are the angels learning—listening? I wonder a lot of things about him.
When Asher moved in with me—when we decided that it was better for us to have a friend since we were both completely alone in this world now—he brought pictures of his parents an
d his little sister who he said died well before the war. He had them all in silver frames, which he put on his dresser or on the fireplace mantel. I had nothing of Michael, so I tried to draw him. But I’m atrocious at art, so I had to settle for writing everything down instead. I didn’t want to forget.
Poems are taped in the hallways, from floor to ceiling. Poems of Michael, abstract and literal. Poems of Azael and Kala and Ana and Eli. The demon, not the dog. Though there are a few of the dog, too. I read the poems whenever I walk by them. I pick a few down to take to bed with me at night to revise and rewrite. To tuck them under my pillow and wish for a dream.
I have a job now. Of sorts. One that doesn’t involve my needing to know everything I know about daggers and death. I publish my poems in tiny books and sell them to local bookstores. Or I have Asher go in and sell them. I don’t want people to know who’s writing the poems. I just want them to read them. It doesn’t bring us in much money, but we don’t need a lot. Just enough for food, for heat during the long winters. Cable. We got the house for free. It was a land grab after the Earth thawed out. Squatter’s rights took up a whole new meaning.
Asher crashes around upstairs, hopping into his clothes and shoes.
“Don’t forget a jacket!” I yell up. “It’s cold!”
“Got it, Mom,” he calls back. And it’s sarcastic but in a nice way. A way that makes me smile. Asher takes care of me and I take care of him. The kid’s all right. He’s more than all right.
There’s a hesitant knock at the door, and after a pause, the doorbell rings, buzzing weirdly, like the button’s being held. Asher thunders down the stairs, jumping over the last few. Eli barks like mad, scratching at the door. I stumble out of my room, grabbing a sweatshirt to throw over my pajamas.
“For you!” Asher calls. “I’m off.”
“Don’t ditch any classes.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he says, his voice already outside.
“I’ll know!” I shout at his back.
My fingers trail over the poems in the hallway, and I find my glasses on the dirty coffee table. I round the corner, and standing in the door—taking up the entire space of the frame, his shoulders wide in the narrow opening—is a ghost. It has to be.