Canticle for the Righteous Man
Saiel takes me out after the first snowfall, when the stars have opened themselves up very brightly. He squeezes my hand in his and smiles. It’s a quiet night and I am happy to be here with him, in the backyard of the house we bought together.
“It’ll be better this year,” he tells me, and I lean my head against his shoulder. I know, I tell him. Around him, I allow myself to have more hope that I might otherwise consider appropriate.
#
They say that when the angels fell, the sky was bright with the fire of their burning graces. There are still places where you can find the aftereffects of their broken-off feathers. Trees that grew too quickly. Animals that came back to life and never died. I have head a myth about a white swan who lives in a forest hung round with goatsbeard, who is a thousand years old and will whisper to you the secret of Creation if you ask.
These are nothing more than stories, but Saiel loves to tell them. He says that people like to think of themselves as touched by grace. According to him, we need to know that once we have met the divine it can never leave us.
The angels have not been here for a very long time.
When we moved into this house, the first thing he hung were the idols of his religion - the goose-feather he was given at his baptism, the white thread which represents the grace that lives inside all of us. He lit candles for the holy fire which protects us and pricked his finger to bleed on the hearth. I do not believe in these things but I believe in the faith that possesses him. I believe in the way his eyes glimmer in the firelight and the way he whispers into my ear the bastardized words from the Gospel of Chuck: this is for you, my love, I do this all for you.
Today he throws an arm around my shoulder and points to the sky. “To think,” he says, “that the Fallen Angel once moved himself from all that wonder and beauty to drag a sinner from the earth.
“Does it remind you of yourself?” I ask.
He kisses the crown of my head very gently. I have been told that I lack subtlety, but Saiel never seems to mind.
“He was covered in someone else’s blood,” he says, softly. “He had a knife in his hand and coldness in his heart and the angel still found him deserving of salvation.”
I don’t remind him that the angel was simply doing what it had been told. I know that’s not the point.
“It’s a beautiful story,” I tell him.
“But it’s not yours, I know.”
I shrug and lace our fingers together. “It doesn’t need to be.”
And really, it doesn’t. I am more than happy to follow him in this foreign faith. He was so unhappy when I met him - scared and angry and mistaking sacrifice for love. If this is what he needs, I am thankful for it. After everything, I have come to understand that faith is not necessarily undermined by inaccuracy.
The snow shines silver in the light of the moon. It arrived early this year. We will light the fire in our new home and lay down blankets and board games and enjoy the warmth. Maybe Saiel will teach me how to roast chestnuts. I will call my distant family and ready myself for the silence I am sure will follow, in case this is they day they decide to speak to me again. It is too cold not to take these fevered chances. We’re all broken things, aren’t we, shattered in strange places and glued back together by whatever hope that we can find.
There are many things that Saiel does not know about me. Maybe I should tell him, but I don’t. What we have built is simple, and he loves me the way he thinks I am.
Saiel kisses me again. He’s smiling at the stars.
#
A story they tell, a tender thing: after the Fallen Angel helped the Three lock the devil into his cage beneath the earth, it appeared in the Righteous Man’s ragged car and promised him a lifetime. More of the same. I think it must have been a bitter promise but the prophet tells it sweetly.
In the gospels, the Righteous Man tips his face full of grief towards the angel, but it is already gone.
Later, the angel came back and burned down the heavens so that the Righteous Man could find sanctuary. What the message in all of this is, I couldn’t say. It sounds horrible, but people find peace in this. I do not know why.
I asked Saiel about this once and he told me that people just want to know that they have not been forgotten.
#
I light my own candles while he is sleeping. I cut the meat of my palm and drip red onto the flame. It fizzles, bright and wanting. I paint my throat, my wrists, with small symbols in Ennochian, the language I hope my brothers and sisters will still hear, somewhere in their faraway hearts.
We are all of us wrong and shattered creatures, wounded animals shirking from the hands that will save us. I am scared to go home. I am scared there is no home left. I have not heard their voices for a long time.
Protect him, I whisper. Keep him safe. Please.
It is a prayer, I think. I am not certain. It has been so long since I was last answered.
The Righteous Man died. This I know. I carried him to the pyre and gave him the funeral he justly deserved. His brother had passed years ago - as they say, he was covered in blood until he was covered in his own blood. I was the only one there to mourn and I think I did a good job. I said solemn words above his dirt. I played the music he loved. Then I stood up and I left.
I know he would not have wanted me to remain there, as I wished to do, until Death came to reap the planet.
I miss him.
That is the plain truth, unvarnished by the prose of the prophet Chuck and all the many meanings his followers intertwine into our story so that our scrabbling in the dirt will have meaning. I do not begrudge them their embellishments, but it does obscure the simple thing. I miss him. I miss him. I miss his hands and his green eyes and the way he’d turn to you and smile like happiness was a newfound friend he wanted you to meet.
I have made a life without him, one with a different name and stolen credit cards, until the truth of me is almost buried beneath all those stories. I love Saiel - that is not a lie. But the missing is always there.
I don’t know where he is. Not in heaven. Not in hell. I have looked through all the places sacred and profane. I have read the gospels Saiel loves a hundred times, but in the end I have been forced to conclude that there are no answers in their pages. He is gone. Buried beneath the snow.
I shut my eyes. There is no stirring behind the candlelight, and no sign that my brothers and sisters were ever more than a creation myth. I sit there for a while all the same. Hoping. That elusive animal. Maybe someday, maybe if we bleed for long enough, if we hope hard enough, maybe if we place fire and thread in our home and trust with all our hearts in the unseen, the things we have lost will come home to us.
After a while I walk away from the silence and into the room where Saiel sleeps, quiet and faithful. I lie down in the warmth around him.