Old Writing 1: FEAR NOT (Patreon)

In the fifty-third sector of the Iridium-Burgundy zone, an angel was relaxing. Its one hundred and eight segments were curled around a plush spire, each of its one hundred and eight eyes scanning recent newsletters, reading messages from friends and acquaintances, and/or browsing social media feeds.

Its wings, infinite in length but with nonexistent depth, fluttered like streamers in the breeze that constantly flowed through its dwelling.

A baker’s dozen of its eyes focused on a message that had just popped up, sent by one of the creature’s uncountably infinite superiors. The angel begrudgingly uncurled itself, stretching out like an old house cat and making an exasperated noise by rubbing two of its sensory antennae together. There was, it mused to itself, always more work to be done.

On earth, in the town of Massasauga, Colorado, a human being was eating. There were, in fact, several humans eating at that exact moment in the town of Massasauga, Colorado, but only this particular human was eating his communion.

The place of worship was small, modern, sleek. Pews of plastic and faux leather gleamed dully in the fluorescent light. The meal was simple, cheap, and filling, though not terribly good, and his prayers had been heard not by a loving god, but by a bored, minimum-wage worker not terribly unlike himself.

The sermon was simple; consume and spend and buy and feed until you die under the weight of your own excess, to ignore the suffering and pain of everyone, even yourself, and the human, ever the contrarian, did just the opposite.

A cow had been slaughtered, prisoners had done backbreaking labor, and a bird had been ground into a fine paste in order for this most sacred of meals to be consumed, all at minimal cost and effort on the part of him. It was almost harmonious in its supreme awfulness, and yet he ate it anyways.

Did that make him any better than the monolithic corporation selling it?

The human finished his exceptionally palatable meal and left. The autumn wind was cold and crisp, the sunset dyeing the whole world honey-gold. Massasauga was small, remote, and surrounded on all sides by thick, dark forest.

The town was, like many, many small American towns, saturated with an almost tactile sense of decay; of the silent desire to return to a simpler, wealthier time as buildings and people crumbled imperceptibly slowly to dust. Like pill bugs under a log, there was nothing left to do in Massasauga other than to watch as it rotted away.

Biking through the thickly-wooded suburbs, the human’s eyes were drawn briefly to what looked like, at first, a pinprick of light in the evening sky.

Curious, he stopped to watch it as it grew brighter and larger, brighter than white, a color which had no name and no earthly equivalent. Brighter and hotter and hotter and brighter until something began to inch its way through.

The thing fell out of the sky like a stillborn god-serpent, magnificent rainbows of color spewing forth unceremoniously out of a hole in the sky the size of a postage stamp.

The human watched with fascinated revulsion as the angel spilled into the sky and out onto the forest floor, delicate wings and legs managing not to tear as its body unfurled into the evening, exposed and vulnerable as a baby bird.

The process continued for several minutes, until eventually the body gave way to tail, and tail eventually gave way to nothing. Like a great scoop of celestial frozen yogurt, the beast lay, battered but not broken, as the human approached.

FEAR NOT. a voice shouted into his mind. It was unmistakably a shout, but not one that contained any malice, more like the shout someone makes when they need someone faraway to hear them.

“I’m not afraid,” said the human matter-of-factly.

OH. the voice said.

The human slowly circled the long, winding creature that had fallen out of the sky with the grace of a worm writhing through damp soil. He resisted the urge to poke it with a stick. To his eyes, it resembled a huge, pale centipede more than anything else.

Across what he assumed was the back of the thing, rather unpleasantly-human eyes blinked or stared around him, and little jointed legs twitched uselessly.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Asked the human.

IT’S FUNNY YOU SHOULD SAY THAT, ACTUALLY. the voice said bemusedly. WHY CAN YOU PERCEIVE ME?

“Dunno,” said the human. “Am I not supposed to?”

SORT OF. Said the voice. I SHOULD FEEL LIKE THE SUN ON YOUR BACK AND THE SMELL OF SPRING RAINS AND THE TASTE OF YOUR FAVORITE FOOD, JUST LIKE YOUR PROGENITOR USED TO MAKE.

“You look like a big gross worm to me,” the human said.

YES. I SUPPOSE THAT IS ONE WAY TO DESCRIBE IT. The angel was for lack of a better term shrinking, curling up into itself and drying out, like roadkill on a dry desert highway.

The human frowned. This was, objectively, extremely weird. He didn’t feel afraid at all, though, and in fact he felt the opposite. He knew that this itself should have been concerning but couldn’t make himself feel anything less than pleasantly ambivalent.

“What are you doing?” asked the human. “Do you need help?” he asked, which was uncharacteristic of him to say.

I AM HATCHING. said the angel. I REQUIRE NO ASSISTANCE THAT YOU CAN OFFER. THANK YOU, THOUGH.

“Should I leave, then?” asked the human, who for whatever reason hoped the answer would be no.

NO. said the angel. UNLESS YOU WANT TO. IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE IN THE LONG RUN.

“M’kay,” said the human. He sat down and began fiddling with his phone.

The process took about ten minutes. The soft flesh of the angel collapsed into itself until it became a tightly-coiled knot of tough shell about the size of a coffin. Where the angel had touched the ground fresh grass grew, the sweet scent wafting in the cool evening breeze.

There was a cracking noise, like the snapping of a log, and another brilliant burst of light engulfed the clearing.

When the human‘s eyes recovered, the angel was gone except for hunks of dried carapace that had been launched in all directions. In its place stood a man.

He was naked except for, fittingly, a fig leaf, which clung to his waist and obscured just enough that the human didn’t feel the need to avert his eyes.

“Hello,” said the naked man as he bowed humbly. The human studied his face and found it difficult to focus on specific details. He had eyes, but their color and exact numbers eluded him. A mouth with teeth that may or may not have been the right shape smiled pleasantly.

“Hey,” said the person in the clearing who was definitively bilaterally symmetrical. “Is that it, then?” he continued as the other scanned the treeline.

“Approximately,” he said, and started walking in the exact direction of his destination with millimeter precision, only deviating when he needed to slip past a tree.

Then, the human was alone. He shrugged, stuck his phone back into his pocket, and biked home.

Two days later, the cashier at the gas station whose ownership changed so often they never referred to it by brand name was trying to guess how many candy bars he could embezzle without getting caught when the automatic doors opened and saw a familiarly unfamiliar face.

“Hey,” he managed. “I never caught your name.”

The angel hummed. “In the past I have been known by many names. My favorite has always been [the sound of distant frogsong and cicadas buzzing in a warm summer’s evening]. Roughly translated, it means ‘The Sound of Distant Frogsong and Cicadas Buzzing in a Warm Summer’s Evening.’”

The human blinked. “Can I call you Sid?”

“If you like,” Sid nodded. After a moment he added “What would you like me to call you?”

“Wallace,” Wallace supplied.

Sid ambled through the store for a few minutes, grabbing various foodstuffs and convenient devices. He studied a banana for at least a minute, and Wallace forced himself to stop staring before he saw exactly how long that lasted.

Eventually he brought his desired purchases to the counter, which Wallace rang up wordlessly.

“Cash or credit?” He asked automatically after fitting in a half-pint container of chocolate brownie ice cream into a bag with several other cold products.

Sid hummed. “Ah, right.” he reached into a pocket and pulled out a rough nugget of what looked like raw, unshaped gold. Although it wasn’t much bigger than a candy bar, it made a noticeable thud against the counter.

“What’s that?” Wallace asked. He already knew the answer.

“Gold. Chemical element atomic number 79. Exactly one pound. Keep the change.” Sid replied, picking up his several plastic bags of merchandise. He left without another word.

Wallace picked up the gold nugget and studied it. He was not an expert or even a novice at evaluating expensive materials, but it had to be worth a lot. He shrugged to himself and set it gently into his backpack. The rest of his workday was completely uneventful.