On Faith or Fate or Fathers by Auri (17, Canada)

[content warning: body horror]

I meet my guardian angel at the racetracks, waiting in the betting line with feathered scarlet wings folded as a metaphysical foot taps to an impossible rhythm. He holds a handful of coins that have not existed for a thousand years in his closed fists and smiles at me with rows of translucent icicle teeth. 

HELLO. 

I tell him you’ve been here before and he says SO HAVE YOU and I shake my head. No. In my ear, a voice like a laugh: HAVEN’T YOU? ​

---

I don’t remember. I don’t know if I want to. 

He flips the coins over his knuckles one by one, and they begin to roll themselves without guidance up his arms and down his legs and across his body, until he is nothing but metal and riches from another time. 

I watch his body devour the gold. It sinks into soft skin and shifts, changes, distorts. One by one he grows a thousand eyes. 

I find myself wondering whether gold has memories, whether he will dream about its pain. I am reminded of church bells and wine and bread. To consume is to become and on sundays I wake up screaming with nails in my hands and clumps of hair decaying on my scabbed-over scalp. A nightmare is a reality where divinity is concerned. When I realize I am unharmed I am relieved 
or guilty or furious. They did not tell me that to put the fear of God into your own heart can mean more than one thing. 

The angel says THE LORD DIED ON THE CROSS FOR YOU and I say I never fucking asked him to. At the same time I am saying I did not deserve it. 

Maybe no one does, and we are all just pretending. 

Where was he when I raised my head to a painted ceiling and tried to feel anything other than emptiness? Why do I find more sanctity in red birds in the back garden than communion? Where was the peace I was promised? WHERE WERE YOU WHERE WAS THE SAFETY STOLEN FROM MY SHAKING HANDS IN A RATTLING EXHALE OF LOVE OR RELIEF YOU LEFT ME AND I MISSED MY CHANCE AT MEMORIES I MISSED THE CHANCE TO GRIEVE AND REMEMBER IN EXCESS

There is scarring here. I left something at the racetracks in a lifetime before this one but I can’t remember what. 

When they open heaven’s gates, something shrivelled and whining always crawls back out. You can’t emerge from the maw of the whale without someone else’s dead skin. You can’t emerge without regretting it. 

I say, the world ate me and spit me out. 

The thing that is not my angel anymore looks at me with peculiar interest, replies with a mouth made of eyes and a smile turned melting, EAT IT BACK. 

All-seeing eyes coat its familiar body, my father’s skin made home to something foreign and unknown. No longer my garden, my sanctuary. 

They blink in unison and it’s gone. 

In its absence, the eyes fall and become coins again, nothing left to cling to and nothing to demand they retain their transmuted form. They flip through cold air, flash in the light. Each one lands atop the deadened and dirtied earth, heads-up.​