Now of course the chaos flowed like ouzo at a Greek wedding. I tried to feign a certain level of terror for everyone to see, but realistically I wasn’t scared, I was rather angry, but not the type of angry that I get when Lou is around, more of a normal sort of angry that one feels when they think their own life had been jeopardized more than once. I felt like a pawn in a game of chess that was going on using my small town as a chess board. I started reeling around frantically to see everything I could because I could just feel something, and it was not anything I can explain now either. That certain feeling like I was being watched had completely enveloped me, and I had only managed to calm down when I heard my son’s voice yelling to me as he came running down the street. My mind immediately started worrying because I did not want him here in this chaos. More to the point there was no reason for him to be here anyway since he should have been at home waiting to go to practice in another forty minutes or so.
“Mom, thank God you’re ok!” was flying out of his mouth like a typical teenager in shock. Panic ensued all over him, but sadly it is still nice to have your son hug you and show you that he is concerned. He is at that age after all where I tend to be more of an embarrassment most of the time. My son was a little different though since I was at least cool. He was also a lot bigger than most of the guys his age, and even as he started noticing girls, he was smart enough to know that they like boys that are good to their mother. His hug on me started tightening up though as I was forced to shake free from him because he does not know his own strength. I also did not comprehend his level of fear either as he said to me is a very scared voice, “That’s the man mom.”
The sad part was I knew all along that this was the next part to all of this, and I did not want Jake here for the very reason he had just stated. I did not even turn to look at him I just told Jake that he needed to get back home, get ready for practice and the adults would deal with the damage here. He protested of course and I had to get a little snippy with him so that he would simply start his walk back towards the house, and I still wanted to know why he was here to begin with but I will have to ask him about that later when there is less chaos around. I then turned and faced the freak down the street that had seemed to start all the problems in my life, and I clenched my teeth in defiance to his very existence, despite his being Lou’s problem.
I was not exactly shocked to see Darius standing there leaning up against the wall of the Grant building with his arms crossed, and a very devilish pardon the pun, look on his face. My anger was rising in me quickly as I saw him staring at the two of us. Me standing there facing the freak and my son walking away from me. My maternal instincts were raging as well as I could realistically imagine that he could be staring at my son walking away from me instead of me. The fury washed over me and I had some sort of unknown rage building. It was like I was feeding off the rage that I had when I was in the presence of Lou. I looked over my shoulder and saw my son getting further away from me, and he looked over his shoulder but fearfully looked back ahead and walked faster when he saw the look I shot back at him. I looked back to the Grant building where Darius still stood. My eyes must have been searing as he stepped from wall to which he had been leaning, with a bit of a sway on him that dared me to walk towards him, or should I call him it?
If you remember the old saying, “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread?” Well, I was feeling particularly foolish. The anger in me was giving way to pain, and loathing. There was a part of me that could not get my own death out of my head and of course that sounds silly as I am writing this after the fact so let me just tell you that it was what I was thinking anyway. I could not get it out of my head that it was my place to die in all of this and because of that I was infuriated with the fact that that creature thought he was going to determine the time of my death. With my son completely out of harm’s way in my own mind anyway I was determined to take my fight straight to him, and I know you are asking why. There is only one answer to that, and it is simply, “I don’t know.” Darius was looking at me and had every intention of getting his hands on me and for what reason I do not know either. I know why they say anger is not your friend as I was seething.
I gave him what he wanted as I started walking strait towards him trying to recite the lines from Psalm 24 in my head as my own gait started picking up speed and direction, "Yea though I walk through the valley of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me." Despite my obvious lack of rod and staff, I felt bolder as I recited this over and over. Darius was speeding up his pace with every step I took, and for some odd reason I simply knew that nobody was paying attention to us as we drew nearer to each other. My mind was trying to fight my own quest to keep rereading that Psalm repeatedly as certain factoids tried to crawl into my subconscious. Omnipotent is a word that should have scared me as it kept crawling around, but my seething eyes were fixated on Darius as he was now close enough to cast a shadow on me, but I stopped and stood within arm’s reach of him. He stopped too and glared down at me. He had me dwarfed by almost two feet and at least a hundred and fifty pounds or does that translate. “What do you want?” I said very angrily at him, and he did not respond, forcing me to repeat myself louder, “WHAT DO YOU WANT?”
He never did respond, he just stood there glaring at me like he was going to do something horrible to me but has not figured it out yet. The fact that everyone scrambling around and talking to themselves around the diner has not noticed either of us in the least, despite practically tripping over us, should have broken my concentration, but did not. Realistically I still knew in the bottom of my soul that there was nothing that would keep this creature from killing me, if he wanted to and that was what kept him from feasting off my fear I imagine. All nearly-eight feet of him, I gather as I can gauge his height better at this distance. His hair normal, just a touch long but no more so than most people these days. Near fluorescent green eyes, staring down into mine, and I will remember that for the rest of my days as I did not have the where with all to break free of his stare yet. That chiseled almost Nordic face, like what I would have pictured Thor to have, had I had the time to analyze, but I did not think him to be really all that attractive as I could feel chaos coming from him. I then said very clearly and distinctly, “You really suck at this whole demented angel bullshit, because I am still here. How does that make you feel asshole?”
His entire body started trembling as his entire face turned into a snarl. At this point I was very afraid, but I couldn’t control myself anymore, as nothing but hatred for this creature and everything that he obviously stood for made me simply hate HIM, and my body feeling the type of deep hatred that I have since only felt for Lou, pounced forward in a ball of rage while his body then responded in kind. The second before our two bodies impacted, all I could feel was my mind filling with more doom and despair than any human being could handle. I watched my son die, his body being torn apart by millions of fishhooks, his head being torn from his body. The panic in me was rising as I watched my father being burned alive and screaming in the middle of a vast plain of nothingness. My mother with the most terrified look of complete horror on her face as she was drowning in crystal blue water. It appeared like I was watching all of this for an entire lifetime of my existence, and it was all slammed into my head in one second as all I saw was smoke surrounding me and the feeling of hitting the ground on my hands and knees.
Nothing.
The smoke dissipating around me I am looking down at what should have been pavement as we were facing off with each other in the middle of the street, but in fact dead grass was all that rest underneath my hands. My hair was blocking my view from everything else until I flipped my hair up and saw that it was later in the day, and I was in the park about the same distance as the diner from my house, but totally in the other direction. The sun being totally in the wrong direction prompted me to look at my watch 3:56 but obviously afternoon. I sat up on my knees and looked around to see who might be witnessing my seeming nervous breakdown. Absolutely nobody, in a clear afternoon, when everyone would be walking around this park or playing with their pets, and here I am about 10 feet from that bench I had dreamed of that nobody uses because it is in the most awkward location. It will have someone sitting on it in a minute as I crept myself up and went to sit on it and reflect on my impending insanity. I had no doubt in my mind now that acceptance of what was going on around me, was not the proper method of being. “Oh look, it’s my imaginary friend Lou coming to talk to me about the little people,” I said aloud as I saw Lou walking at me alone from across the field.
It was surreal like a bad Brad Pitt movie that all the girls do not care about the cheesiness because after all he is so damn cute. My fantasies are far better than that though as Lou is at least 10 times cuter than Brad Pitt on his best day, so I was enjoying my insanity by making these sorts of jokes in my head as he kept walking towards me. I was about to say something hilariously daffy as he got within about 10 feet of me, but he managed to beat me to it by starting the conversation himself, “Do you feel better about yourself now?”
“I feel like shit!” and again I watched him cringe at my foul mouth, but I really could care less, “What the hell is wrong with all of this, and why do I have to go through all of this crap?” as Lou sat down next to me, I could see him in that mode of rather wanting to just sit and shake his head at me, “Ok, so I guess I brought that on myself, but what is it with the time, and how everything just keeps jumping around on me?” which only prompted Lou to shrug his shoulders. “Some fucking help you are!” I blasted back at him not even looking at him to see the shudder.
As far as corny time travel stories go, I was not incredibly happy to be involved in one to begin with, but I was even more disheartened to have no answers to this one at all. I just jumped twelve hours in one direction or the other and I have no idea why. I am sitting here next to an angel that somehow became my tour guide to the whole ordeal, and he does not know either. I asked him if I had jumped in the future or in the past because I did figure it could have been either way. He shrugged and then showed me on his watch that the day was the same. I should have gotten a watch with the date on it, but then again, I never factored time travel into my watch buying decisions, go figure.
He leaned forward on the bench, and let out some sort of a sigh, “You’ve actually seen more in the last two days than most of the characters in the bible Anna, and thanks to the language gaps, most of what you all seem to know about this quite over blown too,” he cupped his hands together and then added, “I don’t actually know why you aren’t in line with the rest of the world, and I can now say that there are two beings in the whole chasm of reality that don’t follow by the rules, and in a way I am a bit scared of you as well,” he trailed off a bit and sat up, so I started thinking about that for a moment. He looked a little less calm than he had earlier, so I needed to take him seriously.
“So you mean to tell me that he can’t harm me, because I don’t follow the rules?” and then started hearing the chuckles coming from him over that one so I did add, “He is the bad guy in all of this, right?” and I don’t even know what made me think of that but it just came out. He continued to chuckle, and I could not wrap my mind around it all. First omnipotent beings who I was told had wings and played harps, then little old me being an enigma to them. How strange can life get?
“Good and bad are so subjective Anna, there is good and bad in everything, as I imagine you have figured out. To be amongst the Gods and the angels, and those that are unearthly isn’t exactly something that can be explained easily but nothing has ever been set in stone on what is good and what is bad,” he looked up like he always does when he appears to be searching for the correct words, “Darius can’t harm you because you were touched by God, and you were forsaken by the devil, and he doesn’t comprehend the ways to get around that yet. His own sense of omnipotence has not taken hold properly and it is still quite primal in nature due to his own infancy on a much higher plane.”
“Why did God touch me? I do not know anything about God having touched me or whatever and does he ...”
“She,” he interjected before I could go any further. I stared at him as if he had something strange hanging off his nose. He just sat there waiting for me to continue in what I had been saying and not even comprehending that he may have just overturned all theological knowledge in a mere mortal with one word. He looked off into the distance at either something he could see, and I could not, or he was trying to bug the crap out of me. I did not actually care either way.
I cleared my throat and then very calmly asked him to explain what he just said to me, “God is a woman and the angels are all men, that really bothers her sometimes too because the failed languages and all never translated that back to the way it should be,” he starts chuckling, “I always gave her a hard time about it, but she never found the time to get it all explained to you on a grand scale …”
It was my turn to cut him off as I thought of what I wanted to ask him, “I looked up the fifth angel and I thought I understood, until you told me that the Devil had forsaken me, because I had thought that Darius was the devil, and you were the angel that cast the curse upon his throne,” the shaking head that Lou was showing me changed my topic a bit, “Are you like Gabriel or one of the famous angels?”
The laughter that Lou showed me now was a bit unsettling, as he then looked at me with his amazingly beautiful face, and proceeded to talk, “There were three priests. Godly men all three of them with no ability to do wrong in any form. They happened to be so good that often people talked about their holiness, and the capacity of all men to be flawed didn’t seem to fit them no matter what anyone saw in them,” he nodded at me to ascertain that I was following him and of course I was, “So God finally calls them all back up to heaven and says ‘Boy’s you have all done great work in my eyes but I have a problem with your purity for all men are flawed and I call upon each of you to go back to Earth and commit one evil deed each. Upon being called back, I will absolve you of these sins personally, ok?’ which prompted all three of them to simply agree. This is God after all and who is going to argue with God hmmm?”
I could not for the life of me see where this was going but I sat there continuing to listen to his tale, “So a few days pass, and God calls the priests back up to heaven. She sits down with the first one and expects the admission of sin. The priest looks at God and says, ‘I’m not very good at this my Lord, but I found it in myself to rob a liquor store’ which was boring, but God accepted this deed. ‘Myself, my kid, the other guy, you are absolved. Go drink some holy water and be prepared to go back to Earth’ and that was that. The second one walked in with a big smile on his face, and God was expecting a much better tale, ‘I went to a brothel and I had sex with every woman there, figured I should get my money’s worth on sin after all’ which prompted God to laugh a bit ‘That’s a good one, by me, my kid, the other guy be absolved, go drink some holy water’ and second priest joined the first over by the tub and they were both drinking holy water. The third comes in practically ripping himself open laughing, God finds it a bit disturbing how much he is laughing and then says, ‘You urinated in the holy water didn’t you?’ which made the priest fall down laughing” and then he looked at me laughing himself. I on the other hand did not find it as funny as he did when he said, “Well Gabriel has absolutely no sense of humor so it could be worse,” ... to be continued.
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