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Monday, August 3, 2015

Today's #flashfiction The After-After Life

 “There's nothing like a good power nap.”
Sleeping Beauty* #quote

Today I reinvented the wheel. It's better as a triangle. Anyway onto the flash fiction!

The After-After Life


          The man approached me with a wicked smile, a gun and sunglasses with glowing rims. I'd spent many years in heaven before returning to Earth to be a guarding angel so I'd seen people of every kind but I couldn't place where he was from. No apparent ethnicity struck me. His skin color looked a light lime, but not green enough to seem alien nor white enough to seem like a Caucasian. He shaved his head perfectly bald. He wore a black suit with a red tie.
         “Seems like you're unarmed angel. Mo' money for me.” He could see me. Him approaching me was no coincidence. “So, Edward, lookin' like you caught yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He knew my name, how long had he been following me? Wrong place at the wrong time my wings.
          “Who are you, how can you see me, and what do you want?” I asked. I paid close attention to the gun. Why'd he have a gun?
            He then said, “I go by Nobel, my shades let me see angels, And I'm here to kill ya, harvest your lovely feathers and sell them to whoever wants 'em. Anyway I think God gets mad when I don't give his angels a chance to say a few last words. Maybe offer up a prayer if you're devoted.”
          I didn't understand it at all. I almost dismissed the gun at first. I've already died. Life everlasting. But to be killed again? While being an angel? What did that do to me? Did I just pop back into heaven? Go to limbo? Did God have a second Heaven or something? I'd lived my first life doubting in Heaven, dying and being allowed through the gates anyway. And now I'm presented with the possibility of death again. I went back to Earth to serve as a guardian angel to someone. And now I'm being punished?
          “No last words?” Nobel asked, to confirm if shock silenced me. I responded not with words, but violence, trying to tackle him. I hoped I could beat his finger to the gun and push him down. A stupid idea but instead of hitting me somewhere vital, if my angel body really did have vitals, it hit me in the shoulder. Something in his gun really did allow him to hurt angels. I wrestled the gun from him but I couldn't fly. I couldn't fly back to Heaven and heal get to an “angel hospital” if anything even remotely near that existed.
          After I stepped away from my attacker I asked, “Can angels bleed out?” I figured he must be some sort of expert on killing angels.
          “Dunno,” he said, “They always prayed and I shot 'em in the head.”
          “How many of us have you killed?” I needed to know before I died again.
          He then smiled as I pointed the gun at him, apparently whatever he loaded it with could hurt him otherwise he wouldn't be so compliant. “I don't keep track. I just make a good living Edward.”
           He spoke so casually, even addressing me by name. How much did he assume I'd just take all he said. Oddly enough I felt like I should, being an angel. But being on Earth again, bleeding and wondering about death myself, I couldn't take it.

           I shot him in the head like he did my angel brothers and sisters. I knew I would bleed out soon. No mortal bandages would stay on my body. I didn't know what death awaited an angel. If God decided to make me ascend or descend for killing the man I couldn't guess either. But I did what I did and I'd carry that with me to whatever life awaited me after this one.  

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