Free Seraphim by Jon Michael Kelley Page B

swan? Anyway, the scene disappeared as we pulled her away from the doors. I only saw half his face.”
    “Angel wings?”
    “I know it sounds crazy, ma’am, but, on my mother’s grave I swear to you—”
    “I believe you,” she said, surprising herself. Something about it made sense to her, though she hadn’t the vaguest idea why.
    Or had she? Something swept through her just then, like a breath passing through her soul.
    Now oblivious to everything around her, she searched desperately for that bit of salience, as resistive to the pull of recall as a bat is to daylight. Dammit! It was important; vitally so, she was sure. She had to remember. Had to . It had something to do with wings…
    Angel wings.
    “Are you okay, ma’am?” Dave said.
    She had entered that vault where such memories lay stored and catalogued; was pulling desperately at the file drawers like an heir to a billion-dollar estate, searching for the lone key that would allow her entry into unimaginable wealth.
    Then, as the last sliver of sun winked off the horizon, the memory dawned in her mind.

     

8.
     
    A shellacked portrait of Jesus Christ—that popular rendering where he’s clean shaven and appears to be posing meekly for his senior high school yearbook, circa 1978—hung crooked over the kitchen sink.
    Josephine Kagan removed the Stouffer’s entree from the microwave, peeled back the plastic cover, then placed it on the floor.
    She’d lost her faith years ago.
    “Alright, Jacob, eat up,” she barked with a grouchy fondness only the elderly can master. Jacob was a monkey-bat, a term she’d christened for the animals that had started prowling her house years ago, ever since Eli’s first window appeared on her basement wall.
    Perhaps her son was right: she’d not lost her faith, but had simply misplaced it, given her failing memory. Not that he gave a shit.
    Jacob primped felinely as his dinner cooled, backlit against the two glass patio doors of the adjoining dining room. There, the curtains were partially drawn, revealing the warped planks of the cedar deck outside. A white plastic table and chairs sat in the middle, each piece home to a puddle of stagnant water replete with leaves, birdshit, and hatching mosquitoes. Against the railing stood a rusting gas grill, the upper right half lost behind the overhanging branches of a willow tree. The entire backyard lay beneath a willow canopy, allowing in only sparse dapples of sunlight.
    She was remiss. But then, she was invalid. In body and soul.
    If she could hasten her dementia, she surely would. She’d been treading crazy waters for so long that her mind was exhausted, shriveled like a prune.
    She was ready to go home.
    Throughout the years, she’d seen the monkey-bats come and go. But out of the hundreds that had passed through, there were a few strays that always came sniffing back around. For these particular gypsies, she maintained a certain affinity.
    All the others could go straight back to hell.
    They were smart, too. Human smart, she was sure.
    “Well, what are you waiting for?” she said. “It’s Yankee Pot Roast, your favorite.”
    Jacob leaned over and whiffed. Satisfied, he began eating.
    Oh, who was she fooling. She’d already sank and drowned in those waters; had already died and brought the craziness with her. Maybe her son was right, that everything was just one big man-made illusion. That heaven and hell were only real when the synapses were firing en masse , were only legitimate when the “majority mind” believed them to be, and simply evaporated for those leaving the congregate; those who finally die and disconnect. While the brain was alive, went her son’s theory, God wavered like a mirage. Upon death, He just faded away.
    As did everything else, she supposed, only to open up another existence to a “majority mind” even crazier than the last.
    Or perhaps just a single mind was necessary to create this new dimension she was in.
    She knocked her cane twice