SKETCH: Angel Eyes
© 2000 jemiah jefferson
This is the first of what I plan to make a series of sketches, based on actual people that I know. This is placed under the aegis of "fiction", but Angel Eyes is quite real and I know where he lives. =)
"Am I decieved or did you sigh?" - Roxy Music
I had an image in my mind of the seraphim -- inspired undoubetdly by the Sandman comic's depiction of Lucifer as being this weird Harlequin Romance cover man with brooding eyes and definitive jaw. But the angels themselves -- the very lowest rank of angels, closest to humans, have creamy skin and crooked smiles and stumble and stub their toes on the earth once in a while. At least one of them must look just like him. In fact he was probably kicked out for excessive self tit-play, and they parked the big white Heavenly Caddy at the side of MLK Blvd. and kicked him right in his bony li'l hiney and bam, he's out here with the folks who are at least as much meat as vapor. So what's an indigent ivory-skinned confection with no money supposed to do? I know! get a job at Montage and join a rock band. Nobody in a rock band will mind if you have skin like the Nightmare Life-in-Death and tend to stare into space with those freaky eyes, the color of water in a glass, the pupils of which are slightly oval and resemble the slit-pupils of cats.
It is the eyes that are the giveaway. Human beings don't have eyes like that, so blank and peaceful-calm and inward-glancing and yet ready to deal out blessings casino-style. Humans don't have bodies that are more like the green young brances of sumac. The wings horribly missing. But the laugh is pure flesh, pure teenage parking lot, not yet girl or boy or man.
I think they will begin to miss Angel Eyes up here and they're going to send the white Caddy down and pick him up, run to Taco Bell on the way back up through the soup of gray clouds. I decided to get out of the way before they came, since the Heavenly Exhaust has been known to set homes and businesses ablaze, and I don't want to go back there again. I took a last breath of ozone and felt the gallop of the immortal heart between the ribs, and got the hell out of there, back to the heavy mammals who are unable to shimmer above the sidewalks. I can only imagine the glory until it's time for me to make my way back to the source of him and all the other wisps of vapor masquerading as musicians...