Um... my first proper foray into fiction.
Posted: Thu Sep 22, 2005 11:37 pm
Apart from school assignments and suchlike, obviously.
But I wrote this story this evening; it's quite long, but not TOO long (I think it came to about 2200 words). I'll probably want to edit it anyway - assuming that I don't read it in the morning, think "What the HELL!?" and delete the whole thing. But any comments/thoughts/criticism/praise for it would be much appreciated. Even a simple "It sucks" will be fine, because the last thing I want is to go away thinking I'm a great author. Although reasons for its suckage would be quite useful too.
Anyway.
I called it "Angels", since it seemed the most obvious choice, but I haven't put much thought into the title. *crosses fingers*
To start with, the books about the angels aren't true. You know those stories as well as I do. Well, that's not what happens. Angels don't sing hymns, for one thing. And they don't appear in the sky. They don't even come from God. No, those are the stories in books, and that's all they are.
The angels did come down once, though. And only once. It was a brief stay, a holiday. They are, as I said, not some “heavenly host”. They’re – I can think of no other word to describe them – beings whose purposes and interests I can only guess at. They certainly have no time for evangelical missions. But, just this once, they conversed with us. None of them said why. Not even why they picked us. Heaven knows - no pun intended - what they wanted with our community. We weren't humble, spiritual beggars, and we weren't powerful world leaders. And whatever you may read on the Internet, we aren't the upper echelons of some ancient, secret society. No, they chose us, as far as I can tell, at random. And they talked, and they listened to what we had to say. A conversation with an angel isn't a speech, nor is it an interview. It's almost like talking to two people in one.
They were certainly wise. They exuded wisdom. It radiated from their skin, their words; it lingered in the room once they left on one of their exploratory sojourns away from our large village (as one might expect, they could not be followed). Ask them a question – any question – and they will answer you immediately. Yet their naïvety was almost incredible. To watch them at rest was a truly remarkable experience. They looked about themselves constantly; not fearfully, not like a stalked animal, but in utter wonderment. They gazed at everything they saw - plants, people, houses, cars - as if nothing else could possibly be more worthy of their attention. But for all this childlike curiosity, they moved with a precision and a certainty that could belong to no one but a sage, a doyen, utterly at peace with themselves and the world about them.
This peculiar conflict of personality was very much evident to anyone who had even the slightest contact with an angel. Even their gaze was impossible to decipher. Talking to one, their mien would convey both an impression of being eager to absorb whatever information you might impart to them, and one of an abundance of knowledge on any subject you may care to bring up. It was not a case of slipping from one extreme to the other, however; their calm eyes embraced both at the same time, embodying all points in between and somehow, paradoxically, resulting in a peculiar balance. Despite the inconsistency of their expression, at all times you felt that, knowledgeable or not, they cared about what you had to say.
Their visit to our world lasted only eleven days. I don’t doubt that conspiracy theorists around the globe would love for me to recite a list of other elevens involved in their behaviour. Linking events with number-patterns seems to be a human trait that’s been around for centuries, all the way from the supposed code involving the “flight numbers” of the planes used in the attack on the World Trade Centre back to the time in years, months and days between the two great fires of Ancient Rome. I suspect that people simply wish to find some sort of order, some pattern in the seemingly random – and thus frightening – catastrophic events that occasionally disrupt our lives. Sadly, I cannot. The angels’ trips out of town had no comprehensible pattern; they would sometimes leave before sunrise, sometimes during the day, and sometimes after dinner. They usually returned after around six or seven hours, but one excursion lasted only two. By day, they would wander about the village on their own or in pairs. When evening drew closer, they formed groups of anywhere between four and ten angels. No explanation was given for this conduct, and it seemed inappropriate to ask.
This was not the only time when we collectively shied away from asking a question that perhaps would seem normal to ask. As I said, they would answer any question that was put to them, and would answer immediately. But there were some seemingly obvious questions – “Where do you come from?”, “Where do you travel to on your outings?”, “Why did you choose to visit our community?” – which were just not asked. To have done so would have seemed rude, presumptuous. The angels did not come for our sake. They came for their own reasons, and if they chose not to give us that information of their own free will, then it was not for us to ask. You’d conceivably expect at least one of us, one townsperson, to have gone against that, to have asked. But no one did. The angels’ presence simply inspired a respect for their culture – if that’s the right term – and their motives. However, they did inform us that this was indeed their first visit to our “demesne”.
So, for the first ten days, we simply conversed. They tended to centre on our world: philosophy, nature, and history being the main areas of discussion. That simple act of spending a good four to five hours at a time just exchanging opinions on a range of issues, filled us with a sense of calm. It was not, I hasten to add, a meditative sort of calm. We did not feel enlightened. We simply felt relaxed, peaceful. The angels did not sleep, but a little after midnight they would congregate at the town hall and sit on or near the steps of the clock tower. Snatches of soft murmuring could be heard through our open windows during this time, but the language was not our own, and sounded unlike anything we humans have come to think of as language. It sounded more like melody; pure melody, untainted by what, in the presence of this natural, flowing song, we could only think of as the crudeness of words and grammar. The cadences and modulations of their voices seemed to give form to the conversation. The precise meanings remained hidden to us, but as more and more of the angels joined in each night, the harmonies created seemed to gradually undulate in and around each other, sweeping and soaring softly into the otherwise tranquil night. One could not help but feel that, despite the undeniable beauty of the angels’ talk, we were merely hearing a fragment of the total splendour, our meagre senses only scratching the surface of some multi-dimensional symphony.
The eleventh day, however, was different. When the first few of us awoke, the angels had already left for what was to be their final outing. How I wish, in the interests of narrative, I could say that the atmosphere that morning felt different. That the morning breeze carried with it some air of trepidation. But I cannot. It felt no different to any day of the past week. Nonetheless, the day was to be quite different to any other. The angels returned mid-morning, at around nine o’clock. They did arrive a little more slowly than on previous days, with small, tight bunches of them arriving at varying intervals, and growing in size, over the hour. Yet once they had all returned, they acted as they had before; we spoke with them over lunch – our lunch; the angels did not appear to need any physical sustenance – as we had previously.
Gradually, though, a change began to move through them. If pressed to describe it, I might say that the angels’ wiser aspect (if I may call it that; as I said, it was not as if they had two distinct sides to their personalities) seemed a little more prominent. They perhaps began to dominate our conversations. This change was imperceptible at first. But after maybe three or four hours, each angel – or pair of angels – was quite clearly talking more than their human counterparts. This was not an aggressive action; none of us felt threatened or intimidated. But as the hours dragged on, past two o’clock, past three o’clock, past four, and as the angels showed no sign of relenting in their discourse, slight confusion and worry started to spread through us. The speech of the angels became more forceful, louder in tone. They began to, of their own accord, change the subject of conversations – until this point, despite the growing congruence in tone and attitude, the angels had still been elaborating on whatever matter was being discussed previously. We stood, however, captivated, almost motionless. Time began to lose its meaning, or at least our own perception of it began to alter radically. Yet the angels talked on, each conversation – although by this point lecture would perhaps be a more appropriate term – slowly converging towards a common theme; via intricate and deeply profound ideas on consciousness, sentience or spirituality, each and every angel reached their final message, and in an instant, every single angel throughout the town was reciting the same words, as one, so that their voices filled the air around us, deafening us to every other sound, beating rhythmically like some mighty heart.
As they spoke – an echoless chanting that permeated every part of the town – the steady rhythm of their oration opened up from the unfathomable pulse of some greater life-force into a noise like scores of majestic wings beating about us. The sound deafened us, numbed us, blinded all our senses until sight, sound, everything, blended into the immense tapestry of the angels’ message. All we knew was their voice. There was no time, no Earth. There was nothing else. Yet still it built up, crescendoing, multiplying – and then stopped. As sudden as the moment when every angel had started to speak together, their voice was reduced to almost nothing. It was still there; its meaning could still be felt within us, but our senses were opened again. Whether the voice had in fact ceased, or whether it just had reached a pitch and volume beyond any human capacity, I do not know.
And as awareness flooded back into my mind, sensation and light coursing back through my veins, I realised that I was not back in the town. I was not anywhere on Earth. The reality I found myself in was so unlike anything ever seen here that any description I give will not do it justice. It was as if I were everywhere at once; I felt not, as you might think, ‘threaded’ into every part of the cosmos, but literally omnipresent – I was not everything; everything was me. At the same time, I felt with unalterable certainty that I was within a greater existence; suspended – perhaps for an infinitesimal instant, perhaps for an eternity – in emptiness. But I was not afraid. You recall my description of the calm we had all felt when talking with the angels earlier in their stay. This universe seemed to be the essence of that calm. I could feel it. A dimension had been added to my senses that allowed me to know, through my eyes, my ears, my mouth, that I was at peace as I had never been before. As I said, this was not a state of bliss. It was nothing, it was pure oblivion, and it inundated my self, my being. I had no ‘body’ as you could understand it. I could not close off my senses as you might shut your eyes – but I instinctively knew that even if I could have done so, it would have made no difference. I was finally at rest; no one, nowhere, and nothing else mattered.
Then it was over. It was neither gradual nor instant; the world I had found myself in simply became our world, the town crystallising into being as if it had been there all along; a pattern in the emptiness that I had not seen. I became aware of the others about me, standing, sitting or lying on the street, regaining their normal consciousness as I was. The angels were not to be seen. Unease flickered through the crowds of people, confused and only half-aware of what was going on. In our groups – friends, families – they slowly formed small huddles; huddles that began to slowly move homeward. As for me, I was able to rise to my feet swiftly enough, and made my way back to my apartment alone. I climbed the stairs, entered my room and sat heavily at my desk.
So here you find me, having written this. The time is a quarter past three in the morning, the day after the angels’ departure. I do not believe that the other townspeople will have followed my course of action; already I can hear my neighbours settling into bed. But I do not just believe – I know – that what I felt and experienced tonight will not occur again. The angels will not return. This world and its meagre life will not feel enough. I know that from this point on I will be forever alone. I do what I do because I have no choice. This way, I can once again embrace oblivion, and in doing so, I know that it will be forever.
But I wrote this story this evening; it's quite long, but not TOO long (I think it came to about 2200 words). I'll probably want to edit it anyway - assuming that I don't read it in the morning, think "What the HELL!?" and delete the whole thing. But any comments/thoughts/criticism/praise for it would be much appreciated. Even a simple "It sucks" will be fine, because the last thing I want is to go away thinking I'm a great author. Although reasons for its suckage would be quite useful too.
Anyway.
I called it "Angels", since it seemed the most obvious choice, but I haven't put much thought into the title. *crosses fingers*
To start with, the books about the angels aren't true. You know those stories as well as I do. Well, that's not what happens. Angels don't sing hymns, for one thing. And they don't appear in the sky. They don't even come from God. No, those are the stories in books, and that's all they are.
The angels did come down once, though. And only once. It was a brief stay, a holiday. They are, as I said, not some “heavenly host”. They’re – I can think of no other word to describe them – beings whose purposes and interests I can only guess at. They certainly have no time for evangelical missions. But, just this once, they conversed with us. None of them said why. Not even why they picked us. Heaven knows - no pun intended - what they wanted with our community. We weren't humble, spiritual beggars, and we weren't powerful world leaders. And whatever you may read on the Internet, we aren't the upper echelons of some ancient, secret society. No, they chose us, as far as I can tell, at random. And they talked, and they listened to what we had to say. A conversation with an angel isn't a speech, nor is it an interview. It's almost like talking to two people in one.
They were certainly wise. They exuded wisdom. It radiated from their skin, their words; it lingered in the room once they left on one of their exploratory sojourns away from our large village (as one might expect, they could not be followed). Ask them a question – any question – and they will answer you immediately. Yet their naïvety was almost incredible. To watch them at rest was a truly remarkable experience. They looked about themselves constantly; not fearfully, not like a stalked animal, but in utter wonderment. They gazed at everything they saw - plants, people, houses, cars - as if nothing else could possibly be more worthy of their attention. But for all this childlike curiosity, they moved with a precision and a certainty that could belong to no one but a sage, a doyen, utterly at peace with themselves and the world about them.
This peculiar conflict of personality was very much evident to anyone who had even the slightest contact with an angel. Even their gaze was impossible to decipher. Talking to one, their mien would convey both an impression of being eager to absorb whatever information you might impart to them, and one of an abundance of knowledge on any subject you may care to bring up. It was not a case of slipping from one extreme to the other, however; their calm eyes embraced both at the same time, embodying all points in between and somehow, paradoxically, resulting in a peculiar balance. Despite the inconsistency of their expression, at all times you felt that, knowledgeable or not, they cared about what you had to say.
Their visit to our world lasted only eleven days. I don’t doubt that conspiracy theorists around the globe would love for me to recite a list of other elevens involved in their behaviour. Linking events with number-patterns seems to be a human trait that’s been around for centuries, all the way from the supposed code involving the “flight numbers” of the planes used in the attack on the World Trade Centre back to the time in years, months and days between the two great fires of Ancient Rome. I suspect that people simply wish to find some sort of order, some pattern in the seemingly random – and thus frightening – catastrophic events that occasionally disrupt our lives. Sadly, I cannot. The angels’ trips out of town had no comprehensible pattern; they would sometimes leave before sunrise, sometimes during the day, and sometimes after dinner. They usually returned after around six or seven hours, but one excursion lasted only two. By day, they would wander about the village on their own or in pairs. When evening drew closer, they formed groups of anywhere between four and ten angels. No explanation was given for this conduct, and it seemed inappropriate to ask.
This was not the only time when we collectively shied away from asking a question that perhaps would seem normal to ask. As I said, they would answer any question that was put to them, and would answer immediately. But there were some seemingly obvious questions – “Where do you come from?”, “Where do you travel to on your outings?”, “Why did you choose to visit our community?” – which were just not asked. To have done so would have seemed rude, presumptuous. The angels did not come for our sake. They came for their own reasons, and if they chose not to give us that information of their own free will, then it was not for us to ask. You’d conceivably expect at least one of us, one townsperson, to have gone against that, to have asked. But no one did. The angels’ presence simply inspired a respect for their culture – if that’s the right term – and their motives. However, they did inform us that this was indeed their first visit to our “demesne”.
So, for the first ten days, we simply conversed. They tended to centre on our world: philosophy, nature, and history being the main areas of discussion. That simple act of spending a good four to five hours at a time just exchanging opinions on a range of issues, filled us with a sense of calm. It was not, I hasten to add, a meditative sort of calm. We did not feel enlightened. We simply felt relaxed, peaceful. The angels did not sleep, but a little after midnight they would congregate at the town hall and sit on or near the steps of the clock tower. Snatches of soft murmuring could be heard through our open windows during this time, but the language was not our own, and sounded unlike anything we humans have come to think of as language. It sounded more like melody; pure melody, untainted by what, in the presence of this natural, flowing song, we could only think of as the crudeness of words and grammar. The cadences and modulations of their voices seemed to give form to the conversation. The precise meanings remained hidden to us, but as more and more of the angels joined in each night, the harmonies created seemed to gradually undulate in and around each other, sweeping and soaring softly into the otherwise tranquil night. One could not help but feel that, despite the undeniable beauty of the angels’ talk, we were merely hearing a fragment of the total splendour, our meagre senses only scratching the surface of some multi-dimensional symphony.
The eleventh day, however, was different. When the first few of us awoke, the angels had already left for what was to be their final outing. How I wish, in the interests of narrative, I could say that the atmosphere that morning felt different. That the morning breeze carried with it some air of trepidation. But I cannot. It felt no different to any day of the past week. Nonetheless, the day was to be quite different to any other. The angels returned mid-morning, at around nine o’clock. They did arrive a little more slowly than on previous days, with small, tight bunches of them arriving at varying intervals, and growing in size, over the hour. Yet once they had all returned, they acted as they had before; we spoke with them over lunch – our lunch; the angels did not appear to need any physical sustenance – as we had previously.
Gradually, though, a change began to move through them. If pressed to describe it, I might say that the angels’ wiser aspect (if I may call it that; as I said, it was not as if they had two distinct sides to their personalities) seemed a little more prominent. They perhaps began to dominate our conversations. This change was imperceptible at first. But after maybe three or four hours, each angel – or pair of angels – was quite clearly talking more than their human counterparts. This was not an aggressive action; none of us felt threatened or intimidated. But as the hours dragged on, past two o’clock, past three o’clock, past four, and as the angels showed no sign of relenting in their discourse, slight confusion and worry started to spread through us. The speech of the angels became more forceful, louder in tone. They began to, of their own accord, change the subject of conversations – until this point, despite the growing congruence in tone and attitude, the angels had still been elaborating on whatever matter was being discussed previously. We stood, however, captivated, almost motionless. Time began to lose its meaning, or at least our own perception of it began to alter radically. Yet the angels talked on, each conversation – although by this point lecture would perhaps be a more appropriate term – slowly converging towards a common theme; via intricate and deeply profound ideas on consciousness, sentience or spirituality, each and every angel reached their final message, and in an instant, every single angel throughout the town was reciting the same words, as one, so that their voices filled the air around us, deafening us to every other sound, beating rhythmically like some mighty heart.
As they spoke – an echoless chanting that permeated every part of the town – the steady rhythm of their oration opened up from the unfathomable pulse of some greater life-force into a noise like scores of majestic wings beating about us. The sound deafened us, numbed us, blinded all our senses until sight, sound, everything, blended into the immense tapestry of the angels’ message. All we knew was their voice. There was no time, no Earth. There was nothing else. Yet still it built up, crescendoing, multiplying – and then stopped. As sudden as the moment when every angel had started to speak together, their voice was reduced to almost nothing. It was still there; its meaning could still be felt within us, but our senses were opened again. Whether the voice had in fact ceased, or whether it just had reached a pitch and volume beyond any human capacity, I do not know.
And as awareness flooded back into my mind, sensation and light coursing back through my veins, I realised that I was not back in the town. I was not anywhere on Earth. The reality I found myself in was so unlike anything ever seen here that any description I give will not do it justice. It was as if I were everywhere at once; I felt not, as you might think, ‘threaded’ into every part of the cosmos, but literally omnipresent – I was not everything; everything was me. At the same time, I felt with unalterable certainty that I was within a greater existence; suspended – perhaps for an infinitesimal instant, perhaps for an eternity – in emptiness. But I was not afraid. You recall my description of the calm we had all felt when talking with the angels earlier in their stay. This universe seemed to be the essence of that calm. I could feel it. A dimension had been added to my senses that allowed me to know, through my eyes, my ears, my mouth, that I was at peace as I had never been before. As I said, this was not a state of bliss. It was nothing, it was pure oblivion, and it inundated my self, my being. I had no ‘body’ as you could understand it. I could not close off my senses as you might shut your eyes – but I instinctively knew that even if I could have done so, it would have made no difference. I was finally at rest; no one, nowhere, and nothing else mattered.
Then it was over. It was neither gradual nor instant; the world I had found myself in simply became our world, the town crystallising into being as if it had been there all along; a pattern in the emptiness that I had not seen. I became aware of the others about me, standing, sitting or lying on the street, regaining their normal consciousness as I was. The angels were not to be seen. Unease flickered through the crowds of people, confused and only half-aware of what was going on. In our groups – friends, families – they slowly formed small huddles; huddles that began to slowly move homeward. As for me, I was able to rise to my feet swiftly enough, and made my way back to my apartment alone. I climbed the stairs, entered my room and sat heavily at my desk.
So here you find me, having written this. The time is a quarter past three in the morning, the day after the angels’ departure. I do not believe that the other townspeople will have followed my course of action; already I can hear my neighbours settling into bed. But I do not just believe – I know – that what I felt and experienced tonight will not occur again. The angels will not return. This world and its meagre life will not feel enough. I know that from this point on I will be forever alone. I do what I do because I have no choice. This way, I can once again embrace oblivion, and in doing so, I know that it will be forever.