I will not lie to anyone at this point, but I was a bit afraid, and I do not even know why. Part of me was convinced that what I knew about angels and the like was simply a given. Who knows really, but I knew I was going to find out about the fifth angel since that was obviously something that he wanted me to know about. The advantage of being a woman is the common sense, but the disadvantage is my innate need to simply want to sit around and be upset about it. The other factor being that I have been the father to my son all this time makes it so that I want to just fix things as well as worry about them. I would have no chain of reference though if it were not for my trusty internet connection, so I had decided to go into the den and look up the fifth angel.
I do not know what we used to do without computers and the internet. I know that I am going to get a lot of strange data from know-it-alls, but somewhere I am going to get some sort of answers that I can string together in all of this. I mouthed the first set of words that I found by simply searching fifth angel in Google, aside from the horribly tacky band that came up first, from a set of bible links “The fifth angel blew his trumpet; and I saw a star which had fallen from Heaven to the earth; and to him was given the key of the depths of the bottomless pit,” was the first reference I found. The next being the summary of Revelations 9 where the reference was taken, so I quietly said, “The Fifth Trumpet. The Fallen Star. The Destroying Locusts. The Five Months of Their Power. The Sixth Trumpet. The Four Angels at the Euphrates Loosed. The Myriads of the Horsemen. The Third Part of Men Killed. The Rest of Mankind Repent Not.” I cannot say I was feeling too good about what I was reading.
Further along I found the text from Revelations 16 and spoke those a bit louder to myself, “And the fifth messenger did pour out his vial upon the throne of the beast, and his kingdom did become darkened, and they were gnawing their tongues from the pain,” and I thought I was starting to understand a bit, as I read aloud the Revelation itself, “The heart of man is so desperately wicked, that the most severe miseries never will bring any to repent, without the special grace of God. Hell itself is filled with blasphemies; and those are ignorant of the history of human nature, of the Bible, and of their own hearts, who do not know that the more men suffer, and the more plainly they see the hand of God in their sufferings, the more furiously they often rage against him. Let sinners now seek repentance from Christ, and the grace of the Holy Spirit, or they will have the anguish and horror of an unhumbled, impenitent, and desperate heart; thus, adding to their guilt and misery through all eternity. Darkness is opposed to wisdom and knowledge and forebodes the confusion and folly of the idolaters and followers of the beast. It is opposed to pleasure and joy and signifies anguish and vexation of spirit.”
I remember all the fun and frivolity of bible class during the years that my parents thought we could all stay away from hell by going to church every Sunday. I was keen to know that I was reading from the book of Revelations and that meant that we were not dealing with the happy times in the bible. Quite frankly we were not dealing with the past either, so it was not much help to me. From what I had remembered about Revelations it was just all the horrible things that were going to happen in the future and what was going to happen after the harmful stuff. It had a happy conclusion after all the misery, but hellfire and brimstone were not my field of expertise either. This was all a prelude to the apocalypse, but it was also all I had to go on. Unless of course Lou was the lead singer for that terrible band who I had just hear in MP3 format.
My mind had already concluded at worst he was somehow the angel that cast out Satan, and the kingdom of darkness, and all those other things I never really believed in. The thought that Darius in turn could have been the Devil and the only thing keeping him from the ruination of the Earth or some other unknown chaos was filling my head until I jumped out of my seat because of some stray noise outside. It was just what I needed to enter my own hyper reality that I tend to get into at times, because I remembered a few things in all of this. The first being quite simply that if the Devil were on Earth there is not a thing, I can do about it, and the second being that if he were the devil then he would have destroyed the earth already. I do not have all the answers to Satan, but I had learned in my life that he was the big bad.
What did I know realistically though? The one point that Lou got across to me was that I don’t know a damn thing, and he did refer to Darius as an angel that was not constrained to “the law” and he is no more omnipotent than anything else that is omnipotent or something like that. I remember jumping clean out of my seat when I heard another noise outside like a stray cat. The pressure starting to give me a headache, and the only other things I can find on the fifth angel involve a stalker that preys on women by brutally raping and murdering them, so I will simply stick with what makes the least sense. My life is going in that direction these days anyway. The only thing left for me tonight is to simply get to bed. It has been a long day after all.
My sleep was not exactly restful, but I did get to sleep. Being a realist I was able to simply nod off as I always do in the knowledge like I always have that I do not know shit, and shit happens. My alarm had waked me up as it always does at the bright hour of 3am. Who in their right mind gets up at 3am to be at a diner by 4am to serve breakfast to the morning crew of a factory that does not exist anymore I will never know. My son was waiting for me downstairs when I came limping down the stairs dressed to go to the diner a half hour later. He gets up to see me off every day and then he has some wonderful 5am sports practices to get to. This sick cycle runs football part of the year, basketball for another part, and of course baseball the rest of the year. Kansas is getting as bad as Texas with all its sports, but it makes Jake happy and if I must be up and miserable for work by 4am I might as well hope my son is up for it too.
The cereal he was eating looked like nothing but concentrated sugar but let us be real; I never was up on all the things that the “scaredy moms” push on us on television and in magazines. None of it ever seemed to bother him either, as he is still a bit too skinny for my tastes. I bluntly said, “Stop hanging out on MySpace and reading porn in your room,” as I walked by and it sounded like he was going to choke on his cereal. The little bastard was going to hop on Myspace the second I left for work anyway and I just ruined his entire day I can only imagine.
He was practically stuttering when he exclaimed, “Mom, I don’t …” and I cut him off by holding up my hand and he knew to drop it. It is not actually unusual for me to catch him doing something that he should not and totally take him off guard so I could tell by his reaction that I had him good on this one. He just does not know where I got my info, and I can tell that he was a bit taken back, as if it never crossed his mind about getting caught though either. I was not exactly ready for what he said next either, “I didn’t give you crap for bringing guys over in the middle of the night,” and then he gave me a wicked smirk.
I did not actually know what to say on that one, it was none of his business and all, but I really wanted to know how he knew that Lou had been here. I timidly asked him, “How did you know that I had a friend over last night?” because from what I had been told he had been asleep, and I didn’t want his knowledge of reality to interfere with my lies to the contrary.
“I saw a piece of paper under the table that looked like you must have dropped it there, and when I reached over to get it I saw the footprints on the floor down there,” when he reached down to show them to me I saw the window behind him was totally smashed, and then glanced over to the wall really quickly to see that the glass had shot across the room and embedded into the wall from the force. My heart started pounding as I remembered the piece of paper that I had seen that saved me from the restaurant imploding on me. This was even more terrifying as the glass that had shot out of that windowpane was far too aggressive and targeted. That glass had shot out like daggers, and the piece of paper again had saved someone.
“Jake, honey, what happened to the window?” I asked him as he sat up and shrugged his shoulders staring right at the smashed window like he did not even notice it. I kept my composure to see what he was going to do next as I still held on to my belief that he doesn’t need to know anything, if he doesn’t have to, but what I saw was typical mind blowing stuff, as he started tapping at the glass that I didn’t see, and it simply reappeared as he started tapping on it. Behind me there were no signs of any glass having ever touched that wall as well. I simply said, “looked really dirty to me,” and left it at that, when he got up and went to the sink to drop his bowl off and grabbed the Windex from under the sink, and a hand full of paper towels.
Heaven forbids my overactive imagination spread so easily. I did not even think to ask Jake about the piece of paper that he had seen or even try to fathom what was on it. He did not offer either so apparently it was not meant for me. At least if it was meant for me, Jake did not know and that was about as good as anything. Jake started cleaning the window and I simply dropped it all despite my wonderment over having seen it smashed.
The walk to work was timid as I know now that no matter how I was able to see it all as clearly being “out of my control” to do or prevent anything. I guess now I can admit that I was secretly feeling self-important in all of this and was feeling increasingly like I had a guardian angel looking out after me and my son, but still timid all the same. Who knows where I fit into the whole calamity as it forms around me. Turning onto the street where the diner sat all alone in the vacant lot between the two biggest buildings in town, all three stories of them, I could see nobody waiting to get in this morning, which is a big plus actually. With most of the jobs gone you would assume that most of the discretionary spending that people have for breakfast would be gone as well. Step by step, I walked closer to the diner, until I was about to the lot, so I stopped for a moment to grasp my keys out of my purse.
BOOM!!!!! Was the noise quite plain as anything and then the sounds of glass spilling all over the place inside of the diner, but I did not exactly see it though as my shattered nerves had me on the ground as fast as the concussive noise hit my ears. It was quite different this time as all the people from the surrounding buildings came shuffling outside to see what it was, and I was not the only person to see it this time. I scrambled to my feet with the help of a gentleman who had run over to make sure that I was alright, and looked at my watch to see that it was 3:57 am and if I were to subtract a minute or two from that it would have been exactly 12 hours after I had seen this the first time from the inside, and my heart immediately started hammering like it wanted to start the panic attack again ... to be continued.
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