Kent Kelly - Archangel

“She loved black kittens, she wanted to be an astronaut. She had this book from National Geographic, not yet eight years old and she knew it, that damn old star-book, front to back. Our Universe .

“She’d watch History Channel and Hell, she’d yell at the TV when they got the order of the moons of Saturn wrong. Her idol was Doctor Mae Jemison, yes you know. Michelle Obama got nothing on Doctor Mae. First black woman astronaut in space.

“Mabelie, she actually learned painting, watercolor no less and that’s a tricky thing ‘cause you can’t do over. She learn that watercolor solely to make a perfect portrait of Mae, it was perfect , which she had hung up on our wall over our TV, so it was there when she came over to watch all the cable space shows with Grandma Jenny.

“All of that, take down every memory. You write this down when I am gone. Know it well. The others in me, even my grandson, they all had beautiful lives, but oh. My Mabelie.

“She never got to be a whole person. And when I die, she’ll be gone forever. But I put her inside you now, and now she will live on in you. You many people, now. Goodness now will always be a part of you.

“Your Lacie, this lovely girl you tell me we going to drive all the way to Kersey for, your happily ever after? For only love. Only for love.

“That, that is a destiny. I will proudly die beside you to get you there. All my heart. I know these mountains, I guide you well.

“Yeah, I pray all my heart that destiny be for you, Mrs. S.-G. We get you there, sure and true. I kill to get you there to Kersey if I have to. I’m a mean shot with a rifle or machine or even pistol if you got one, that I promise you.

“What? Course I was. Saigon, Tet Offensive, Bien Hoa and a marksman. First Infantry all with Sergeant Talley, me and Kilbride and Melly Gee. Sixty-eight, eternity. Back then standing, covering my own like an eagle out of Hell, that was me. That still me. I shoot true, I kill for you if ever anyone dare to touch you ere to Kersey. And that’s all I’m ever telling you about that.

“Even today, bet you I can take out a running quail at fifty paces, one shot. Lying down aside. I’m that damn good I don’t mind telling you. Ain’t bragging because it’s true.

“All I ask in return is your immorality for my little girl, your memory and your voice for my poor Mabelie, my stargazer. She live in you if you record all I am saying. You keep her inside you now, let her be there with your Lacie-love. You hug her close. Forever.”

(The session continues over another day.)

“Well, after I saw what I saw, I don’t remember all what happened for some time. I went mad to see my Mabelie, you see.

“I could hear so much more screaming, but certain it wasn’t my Jenny. Oh, no. It was thousands of people, in torture all around me.

“Ever hear a song? Lucille used to love it on the radio, NPR. It’s by the Smiths, see? Yeah, that eighties group. Morrissey and Marr. You that age, you love that too? Well good. See, you just like my daughter now.

“Good band, but not one I ever really knew while I was young enough to fall in love with music for myself. Me, I was always a Roy Orbison, a Woody Guthrie boy. Well this song, can’t quite remember the name but it begins with like two minutes of piano and people screaming like they was burning up in Hell, begging all to die, but trapped forever in anguish because they already slaughtered one by one, only the voices all remain.

“You know that song? No? It’s lost now, like so much else. But that was that sound, a thousand-fold. Near and far out of Littleton and Highlands Ranch and all the way down to Denver, near and far and echoing ever after.

“A burning world of screams.

“I almost passed out again and it’s a wonder that the smoke didn’t kill me, I had… well, I had pissed a rag like my daddy had taught me if I’d ever chosen to become a coal miner. Had that smelly thing over my face to filter all the smoke so I could breathe my own piss and so survive. Saved my life, I’m certain of it. Radiation, it’s not just waves. It’s in the dust, the people. The ashes.

“But all the air was being sucked up into this huge scarlet-white glowing vortex in the sky. Called her the Archangel, I did, when I could bear to look at her. To gaze up into her, you see, or you will see though she black now. To behold her, I needed prayer.

“Could barely breathe, but I think without that cyclone sucking all those shingles and parts of people and smoke-gas up away, the smoke would have done me in.

“I regained some of my senses, rocking back and forth there on my knees and my circulation gone all to hell, legs asleep and aching an hour later, maybe longer. Who knows?

“And I was shivering. Still didn’t know how badly burned I was above the belt. Couldn’t feel a whole lot of it yet, somehow. But oh, I was shivering fierce and some ever-more burning wreckage had fallen down on my legs and I was almost burning up again.

“I think I ‘woke’ again to that, up and screaming, because with that piss-rag tied over my face and all that stinging smoke sucked up away, I was quick running out of air.

“I had no choice. I tugged the new wreckage off of me and that’s when my skin began to fall off. I pulled off my jean overalls, and some of my own skin too, didn’t feel it. And I wrapped myself in a tarp we used to use for Christmas trees.

“Hell, I can feel some old pine needles grafted into my body now. Sure you saw that in the shower.

“No? Well then I guess they’s burned deep in the scraps now, a part of me.

“Well, later that tarp, it had to come off. It was terrible and I won’t tell you. But I sheared it and replaced it one-handed, cover myself with a garbage bag instead. Taped it up around me best I could. That’s me, Colson in the trash bag tuxedo.

“I tried to pull some of my shirt off, but the skin started to come with it all the more. Black parts went and gone, but pink parts, when the meat of me pulled, that at the last was agony. Almost a blessing to feel the pain of my own flesh, to know that somehow I was still alive.

“Yeah, a little agony. That’s all right, that’s feeling. The scariest was the nothing, the on-again, off-again hollows flicking where all the pain should be. I worried about that true, terrible so. I worry now that you were able to clean me, that I can only feel a distant hum down to where my body was.

“Oh, Mrs. S.-G., these last few days. I do not think I can bear to know what you had to do to me.

“I cried out for my Jenny all over again. No answer, no answer to be ever.

“I stood up high, no bones broken, another miracle all its own. Somehow, I wasn’t bloody, just covered in things that were falling on and off of me, solid things curling away and melting down into tar. I realized only later that those burning squares piled up to my ankles they was shingles, up from the roof.

“I tripped over a burning gutter, it had a little line of burnt-up finches all down it with their little legs up in the air. Steam was still rising out of them, burning blood I guess, up out of the leaves where all the April rain had gotten vaporized. Was cold, you remember?

“Don’t think it ever will be cold again now.

“I was calling still a fool, oh a fool, ‘Jenny? Jenny?’ But of course she was gone, blasted out of the building, out of the kitchen and probably into the street. Or onto a roof somewhere and that tumbled down on top her, I don’t know. She’d been all the way upstairs, folding laundry and watching Kenny and Mabelie.

“I never did find her.”

“Well, I climbed out of my basement at last. Up I did, up burnt timbers used to be my kitchen’s floor, slanted down like catwalks and covered with shattered pieces of plates and Formica floor-tile and there, and I think some burnt-out streaks of Jenny’s blood. Or Kenny’s.