An Angel
I KNOW WHAT the angel of suicide looks like. I have seen her several times. She’s around.
She’s nothing like the pictures of angels you run across here and there, the ones in classical paintings, with their curls and beautiful eyelashes, or the ones on Christmas cards, all cute or white. Much is made, in these pictures, of the feet, which are always bare, I suppose to show that angels do not need shoes: walkers on nails and live coals all of them, aspirin hearts, dandelion-seed heads, air bodies.
Not so the angel of suicide, who is dense, heavy with antimatter, a dark star. But despite the differences, she does have something in common with those others. All angels are messengers, and so is she; which isn’t to say that all messages are good. The angels vary according to what they have to say: the angel of blindness for instance, the angel of lung cancer, the angel of seizures, the destroying angel. The latter is also a mushroom.
(Snow angels, you’ve seen them: the cold blank shape of yourself, the outline you once filled. They too are messengers, they come from the future. This is what you will be, they say; perhaps what you are: no more than the way light falls across a given space.)
Angels come in two kinds: the others, and those who fell. The angel of suicide is one of those who fell, down through the atmosphere to the earth’s surface. Or did she jump? With her you have to ask.
Anyway, it was a long fall. From the friction of the air, her face melted off like the skin of a meteor. That is why the angel of suicide is so smooth. She has no face to speak of. She has the face of a grey egg. Noncommittal; though the shine of the fall still lingers.
They said, the pack of them, I will not serve. The angel of suicide is one of those: a rebellious waitress. Rebellion, that’s what she has to offer, to you, when you see her beckoning to you from outside the window, fifty storeys up, or the edge of the bridge, or holding something out to you, some emblem of release, soft chemical, quick metal.
Wings, of course. You wouldn’t believe a thing she said if it weren’t for the wings.