Raz
Bluelighter
My sister's angels don't work for me.
She finds white feathers and she sees them as a sign from her son or her mother or her grandmother or her uncle or any other members of our family who swim now on the other side of that milky divide.
She collects them and pastes them to her car, to her walls, to any place where they can be seen. Any place where the peace offered by a dead person can put her fear at bay.
But they're from seagulls.
The feathers are from seagulls that live in the park on my housing estate. They shit and they squawk and they chase food like the vermin they are, and they're the furthest things from angels I can imagine.
They gather en masse as if to remind us that all beauty is ethereal. The real world is about dirty little birds trying to find a scrap of food to survive. The real world is about earth that can't grow grass and stinking men who pass out in doorways tainted by their own vomit and piss. The real world is no place for angels.
I just don't have the heart to tell her.
In the end, despite my scars and hardwon cynicism, I suppose there's still a boy in my head who wants the angels. There's still a boy in my head who cries when he's standing under a strobe listening to songs in the embrace of artificial smoke, because he still believes in beauty. I see that in my sister and I guess it's not something that needs to be discouraged.
Even if I can't fully believe beauty exists, there's still a place in this world for people who do.
Sometimes birds can be angels.
She finds white feathers and she sees them as a sign from her son or her mother or her grandmother or her uncle or any other members of our family who swim now on the other side of that milky divide.
She collects them and pastes them to her car, to her walls, to any place where they can be seen. Any place where the peace offered by a dead person can put her fear at bay.
But they're from seagulls.
The feathers are from seagulls that live in the park on my housing estate. They shit and they squawk and they chase food like the vermin they are, and they're the furthest things from angels I can imagine.
They gather en masse as if to remind us that all beauty is ethereal. The real world is about dirty little birds trying to find a scrap of food to survive. The real world is about earth that can't grow grass and stinking men who pass out in doorways tainted by their own vomit and piss. The real world is no place for angels.
I just don't have the heart to tell her.
In the end, despite my scars and hardwon cynicism, I suppose there's still a boy in my head who wants the angels. There's still a boy in my head who cries when he's standing under a strobe listening to songs in the embrace of artificial smoke, because he still believes in beauty. I see that in my sister and I guess it's not something that needs to be discouraged.
Even if I can't fully believe beauty exists, there's still a place in this world for people who do.
Sometimes birds can be angels.
lovely work!
