Angel Meat

At wakes the babushkas would whisper—he’s resting now, he’s sleeping, he’s gone with the angels. The angels were up there and I was down here, sad and bored, eating pinwheel cookies, wondering if ghosts were the same thing as spirits and which one would want to spook me.

            I was six when I really started wondering where angels lived.  Where exactly was up there? Of course, the one place I wasn’t supposed to go—the hole in my sister’s closet, the small square door in the ceiling that led to the attic. I knew it was stuffed with angels. It seemed so logical, especially because all of the ornaments and snowmen and wreaths were kept in the attic above the garage and I assumed that if anyone loved Christmas, it would be an angel and of course if the garage was good enough for angels, well, a pale yellow bedroom with Snoopy posters and stuffed animals was even better.

I tugged on the light string and crawled up the column of built-in shelves. Each cubby was another step on the makeshift ladder.  When I reached the long top shelf lined with my sister’s sleeping bag and stacks of winter clothes, I pushed off the piles of turtlenecks and puffy coats, letting them drop to the floor. I knew she’d understand once she saw an angel sitting at the dinner table.

I pointed my red flashlight at the square door, letting the cone of light focus on the four dark seams. All I had to do was push the door open, push it up with my hands, and I’d be on the other side with them. I knocked. And then I stood up into the attic door, my sides easily pushing through the frame. It was hot and dark. The room was lined with wooden beams and the air was full of dust and smelled of splinters. I could see piles of pink fluff, giant rolls of cotton candy. I called out my name, hoping someone would recognize me. The pink sparkled and as I leaned forward to touch the magic, I tripped on the thick cuff of my overalls, falling inside the drifts. The itch was immediate—a scraping, cutting itch that riddled my skin with red bumps. It hurt to breathe. Slivers of glass coated my lungs. I didn’t know I’d fallen into fiberglass. In that moment, I knew that the angels were all dead. Their red blood and white feathery wings had been crushed and run through a meat grinder into this soft, pink mess. And if the angels were up here then so were all of the dead and this is where they went after funerals and up here there was no coffee, no cookies. And this is why I wasn’t supposed to crawl through the hole in my sister’s closet. I cried and screamed and itched my way back down to my world, into my mother’s arms, screaming and begging for her to wash off the dead angels.