The wind battered his face, slapping him like a scolding lover and pulling his cheeks like a playful child.
His clothes clattered and flapped, pressing themselves hard against him, holding him in a tight, insistent embrace. Breaths came in struggling bursts, as his speed plucked each one away, leaving just enough, barely enough.
He neither minded nor noticed.
He felt the sheer pleasure and exhilaration of the fall.
Marvelled through squeezed eyes, at the misty curvature of the Earth. The clean blueness, the horizon. The wide spread of the land below him, which for the moment, appeared to be captured, still, a photograph.
The world was such a beautiful place from here. For a few short moments, he forgot the ugly, escalating canker of the towns and cities. The greed and hate, squalor and deprivation. There was no global warming, no dying planet; there were no extinct or ruined animals. This was the world as it was meant to be.
This was God’s vision.
For the moment he was a bird, an eagle, a being of light and lightness. He was a swimmer in the divine. He was flying with God and he was bursting with the joy of it.
Soon, he felt the disappointing ground rushing to him, as if on a mad lift. It grew, while the horizon shrank and soon he felt like a mere man. The divine far behind, life and mortality poking at his consciousness.
His arms spread apart, like an aerial crucifixion, as he accelerated towards the ground, vomited from the morning sky.
Suddenly, the desert below became real. Definition grew and he could see the terrain clearly as it shot towards him with a terrifying impetus. He could smell the humanness of “civilisation”. The factories and machines, as they farted out their foulness into the planets once perfect perfume.
He recoiled involuntarily as his senses sucked in the putrid taste of human detritus.
Why had God allowed this?
As his descent seemed gathered speed, he felt his motion, saw the sand and broken trees race towards him. Just a few hundred feet.
His sorrow almost stopped him from saving himself. Almost.
He didn’t want to be another sin on God’s growing list.
At the very last moment, he pulled up. Swooped high into the air, briefly away from the decay and misery. Arms stretched at his side, like a stunt flyer. Scaring a crowd of expectant watchers, giving them a sliver of hope that they would see the awful crash and death. A wish too horrible for most of them to admit. But it was there in the deepest corners of their corrupted souls.
He landed gently on the branch of a dried, dying tree. Gnarled and beaten from sucking up too much of the world’s verminous poison. It had lived for over fifty years at the edge of what had once been an exuberant oasis. Now just another foul stench. The tree had suffered its’ decline with humility and born the pain of mans’ advances.
Stroking the brown leafless branch. He whispered “Soon,….”
The angel kissed the tree gently, fed his love through its’ sickened sap, felt it shiver in recognition.
They sat together to await God’s work.
