Fingertips: Everything Is Catching On Fire

Fingertips: A Flash Experiment, is a project where I’m writing a different flash story for each bit of the They Might Be Giants’ “Fingertips” songs from Apollo 18. See info here.

Everything is Catching On Fire

“It’s not your fault. You have to believe this. You were a cog in a war machine, and the war machine lost the war. It wasn’t the actions of any one person,” I said, the words sounding old and tired in my ears.

The angel was a young one, his wing stumps drooped behind him and he refused to meet my eyes. His dingy blond hair hung in his face. He had to have been only 4, maybe 500 years old. His name was Abdiel.

“But I was there, Dr. Patterson,” he whispered. “The front lines. I had my flaming sword, and Lucifer was there.”

This was different. Most of the angels I counseled in the post-apocalypse days were simply guys who were deep in the trenches, fighting demons, when the Lucifer Morningstar had his triumphant battle. All of the angels had been de-winged and flung to live on Earth. No one knew what had become of God. But this guy was there at the final battle.

I was a former nun, a doctor of theology and expert on demonology. If I’d been male, I would have made Cardinal. As it was, I left the church and taught theology at Notre Dame. After the Second Fall, as theologians were calling it, the demons weren’t keen on someone teaching about them, so I went underground and found trade in counseling guilt-wracked angels.

Faith? I hadn’t officially lost it, as most everything we believed had come true. We didn’t need faith, as the scientists said; we had proof. Some humans had tried to follow angels, creating a new set of religion around them, but the demons put a stop to that. Slave camps, whore houses, gladiator games, that was the reality of life now. No church, no praying, no God. There was little to live for- most of us just survived.

This was the first new thing I’d heard since I started counseling angels for barter. I tried not to sound too eager. “What happened?”

“I don’t remember much. All I remember is he was within my reach. I swung at him, then my sword turned black and I fell. When I woke up, my back was bleeding and I was being pissed on by a demon.”

I winced. It hurt to see angels living as mere humans, but it hurt more to see them bitter and committing the minor rude sins.

“And you don’t know why you failed?”

“I don’t know!” he wailed.

I gestured to the bag he carried, a large duffel. “What’s in the bag?”

“That’s the thing,” he said. He leaned over, showing me his horribly scarred back, and reached into the blue bag. His thin hand closed around a hilt and he pulled out a black sword.

“By the Holy Mother,” I said, and reached back to pull the blinds. I was rarely bothered, but you never knew when you were under surveillance. “How did you manage to keep that?”

“They never took it from me. All of the flaming swords were confiscated when we lost our wings. They never even tried to take this one. It was like they couldn’t see it.”

I leaned forward. “Abdiel. What made the swords flame?”

“The will of the divine, Dr. Patterson. You know that.”

“So what do you think is making it invisible to the demons?”

He paused and slowly raised his head. His eyes met mine. He looked unwilling to say the words.

“You know, it’s possible that the Second Fall was part of the plan,” I said. I stood and opened a drawer on my desk. Two wooden sticks with angels carved like small totem poles lay on a velvet swatch. I pulled them out and hefted them, holding them by the smooth bases.

The angel raised his golden eyebrow. “Fillipino fighting sticks,” I said. “Or sentimental tokens. One or the other. I don’t have Divine Will on my side, but they do work to keep the demons off of me and keep me out of the slave camps.”

“What are you implying?” he asked, his eyes wide.

I separated the blinds with my fore and middle fingers. A demon wandered the street, chewing on a raw chicken. His blackened skin flaked off, leaving little blooms of fire on the street.

I grinned, feeling more alive than I had in months. I gripped my sticks. “Abdiel. God hasn’t been found; he may not be dead or defeated. This could be part of the Plan, the part that wasn’t prophesied. It’s time to instigate the Third Fall.”

“Just the two of us?”

“And the Divine Will.”

This is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike license.

Fingertips 1 – Everything Is Catching On Fire (LP Version)

Fingertips: A Flash Experiment by Mur Lafferty is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Tags: angels, Fingertips, tmbg

Category: Writing