Guardian Angel
My guardian angel is hideous.
Seriously. I can’t read books when he’s near. He breathes like a pug. Puff. Blow. Snort. He sounds like an ogre with bronchitis. The fibrillations of his nostrils trying vainly to snort through the mucus repulse me.
And the hair! Everywhere I go, he sheds in a path behind him like a Persian cat in the spring, except that my angel has thick, straight, almost insectile hairs. They’re like strings from a guitar. Luckily no one can see them except me but they’re seriously gross. It’s a blessing that they’re invisible.
I tell people that I have no sense of smell but the truth is that the reek of my guardian angel overpowers everything except burning tires. It’s an acrid stink. It’s not like human body odour. It’s a stink combining scents like leaking batteries, rotting tree trunks, and burning plastic. It’s hard to describe. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
If he smelled sulphurous at all, I’d suspect I was being duped. But he doesn’t.
And he’s fat. I don’t mean ‘a little extra’. I’m talking huge. He stomps around because his wings long ago lost the ability to carry his bulk. He always manages to keep up with me, though, no matter what I’m doing. There’s something miraculous about that, I guess.
And don’t get me started on his looks. It’s like he dived face-first into a swimming pool but forgot to put the water in. His face is practically cubist. He makes Sloth from the Goonies look like Brad Pitt.
His wide, thick lips hang like deflated inner tubes over the ruined jut of his splintered, brown teeth. His chin pushes forth like the prow of a ship. His huge nose would probably come down to nearly touch his shelf of a chin if his snout wasn’t broken to the point of zig-zagging off to the right. One of his eyes is dark brown, too big for his face, and can barely stretch its tight eyelid over itself to blink. It waters constantly. The other eye lives in a pit on the other side of his face. I don’t know what colour it is. It glitters from time to time if light manages penetrate that deep.
Sometimes, looking at his ears, I joke to myself that he has two pairs of wings.
His body looks stapled together from whatever was left over on god’s table. Like a pelican. He is the opposite of grace. His ugliness transcends race. It goes beyond any definition of ethnicity. He is from Ugly Country.
His voice is thick with guttural noises. Half of his sentences are sighs, grunts and other unidentifiable glottal utterings that make no sense to me.
However, I have been safe from harm and lucky all my life. Even when I’ve unknowingly placed myself in harm’s way, the worst I’ve ever received is a lesson.
And the love in my angel’s eyes when he looks at me almost makes up for his disgusting appearance. I swear that if it was possible to cut him, nothing but admiration for me would leak out.
It’s hard to spurn that kind of devotion. I’m lucky to have him.
tags
Seriously. I can’t read books when he’s near. He breathes like a pug. Puff. Blow. Snort. He sounds like an ogre with bronchitis. The fibrillations of his nostrils trying vainly to snort through the mucus repulse me.
And the hair! Everywhere I go, he sheds in a path behind him like a Persian cat in the spring, except that my angel has thick, straight, almost insectile hairs. They’re like strings from a guitar. Luckily no one can see them except me but they’re seriously gross. It’s a blessing that they’re invisible.
I tell people that I have no sense of smell but the truth is that the reek of my guardian angel overpowers everything except burning tires. It’s an acrid stink. It’s not like human body odour. It’s a stink combining scents like leaking batteries, rotting tree trunks, and burning plastic. It’s hard to describe. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
If he smelled sulphurous at all, I’d suspect I was being duped. But he doesn’t.
And he’s fat. I don’t mean ‘a little extra’. I’m talking huge. He stomps around because his wings long ago lost the ability to carry his bulk. He always manages to keep up with me, though, no matter what I’m doing. There’s something miraculous about that, I guess.
And don’t get me started on his looks. It’s like he dived face-first into a swimming pool but forgot to put the water in. His face is practically cubist. He makes Sloth from the Goonies look like Brad Pitt.
His wide, thick lips hang like deflated inner tubes over the ruined jut of his splintered, brown teeth. His chin pushes forth like the prow of a ship. His huge nose would probably come down to nearly touch his shelf of a chin if his snout wasn’t broken to the point of zig-zagging off to the right. One of his eyes is dark brown, too big for his face, and can barely stretch its tight eyelid over itself to blink. It waters constantly. The other eye lives in a pit on the other side of his face. I don’t know what colour it is. It glitters from time to time if light manages penetrate that deep.
Sometimes, looking at his ears, I joke to myself that he has two pairs of wings.
His body looks stapled together from whatever was left over on god’s table. Like a pelican. He is the opposite of grace. His ugliness transcends race. It goes beyond any definition of ethnicity. He is from Ugly Country.
His voice is thick with guttural noises. Half of his sentences are sighs, grunts and other unidentifiable glottal utterings that make no sense to me.
However, I have been safe from harm and lucky all my life. Even when I’ve unknowingly placed myself in harm’s way, the worst I’ve ever received is a lesson.
And the love in my angel’s eyes when he looks at me almost makes up for his disgusting appearance. I swear that if it was possible to cut him, nothing but admiration for me would leak out.
It’s hard to spurn that kind of devotion. I’m lucky to have him.
tags