The isolation of Angels is absolute.
The fact of the matter is, you'll never know about them. Not given enough time, or patience, or prying. Not with blackmail or violence. Not with watchful stillness. You simply will never know because they exist in places where the narrative consciousness does not. They exist outside of the stage built to hold this world. They can actually be alone, where a Dragon cannot. A Dragon can only tread the planks of this world where the narrative follows them. A Dragon is a whore that way, an applause junkie. They want to tell all their secrets because to tell a secret, even under the guise of not telling it, allows it to exist.
Angels don't exist. They die unsung, deeds unknown. They might exist, in a margin world we almost never tread. They might get close to existing, but the bitch of it is that once there, none of us exist anymore, either. Narrative consciousness vanishes, in that place.
Narrative consciousness being the certainty that someone is always watching you, of course. That you are the main character of a story being told, and that nothing that terrible will happen to you. Narrative consciousness is the lie we all buy into that tells us we will get the girl, we will not die in the plagues, and in our darkest moments, a miracle will arrive.
The miracle, of course, is an angel. And they arrive in moments of great need, sure. But from where do they arrive? I bet most of us have never given it one single thought. If God (existent here for the sake of argument) is always watching us, then he isn't exactly watching them, now is he? And if there is no God, and all we have is one another, then the supernatural planes which we claim to inhabit and then abandon through dreams and intuition is a pretty lonely and transient place. Whatever you believe, it still leaves them alone and outside the frame of this world.
None of that matters, however, since most people live and die without ever meeting one. But here in Gray House, there are five, and so the consequences of nonexistence are something we deal with everyday. How it means they need nothing, voice nothing, have nothing, want nothing, and lose... nothing are all snags in the idea we try to create daily of family.
They do not commodify the things Dragons have learned to commodify, like pain or sorrow or secrecy. If I have a secret, I can make that secret exist. If I have pain, I can make that pain exist by actively and with artistry not telling you about it. Angels simply hold it, silent, in their endlessly waiting jaws, until they no longer have it. Angels don't know how to not tell someone something. They don't tell, and therein lies the subtle differences of existing. I expect someone someday to find me out. They resign themselves to the isolation of forever.
When we think to ourselves (Dragons, that is), "No one will hear me scream," we mean to say, "No one will hear me scream for a very long time."
But listen, Jack. Listen carefully.
No, no, come here. Turn the light off and come around this corner.
Here.
Here, no one will hear you scream.
Do you hear the Angels, Jack?
No. Of course not. They're all silent.
When no one is listening...
The night Drama raged at you, he did it knowing full well it would never matter to you, what he'd said. He knew you would take it to mean a hundred things he didn't mean, and none of the meanings he meant. He knew it was all for nothing, and he is buried alive forever under the weight of non-existence, and you and he would never touch the way you and I can, and yet refuse to. He got up on the stage in Gray House we have hidden from you, mostly, and he... well, he told his tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Nothing, Jack.
Absolutely nothing.
Rosie and I laid in bed together afterward, and we sobbed, alone with him in the bright violet stage lights of his despair, because we heard him. It was a monologue delivered to convince you of your own existence, which you have never seen or understood. He lamented his own non-existence. He wished he could be you. He wished he could be anyone besides the empty vessel of desires that comprise an Angel.
His words floated out over us listening to him that night, the members of Gray House who have come to understand, even minutely, what an Angel is (or isn't) and we shifted, however imperceptibly, away from this world and toward the one none of us exist. Because we all found ourselves in his words, and have almost never found ourselves in yours.
In 2013, five of the six members of Gray House that were home at the time met in the bayou to pledge themselves to an idea of home where we might be able to find family. We wore white, and we met at the edge of the yard of the Old House, recently left to us, to encircle a yew tree with our hands and make a promise that we would protect one another. The person missing that night, who in fact opted out of that ceremony altogether, was you, Jack.
The next morning, I burned the pattern of a yew tree onto the inside of the back door (the front door of the Old House was barely used). When we moved to Gray House, the door couldn't come with us, but the Gray Children burned the design onto the inside of the two front doors, and painted it blood red with some kind of enamel that bleeds through any subsequent coat we give it.
It was a sign that we could never go back, that it was on the inside of the door and not the outside. That you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. And I think I knew that on some fundamental level when I came home; that I could never really be alone in a room again. Sometimes, when things like Drama's speech to you happen, I imagine the wood of that door swelling microscopically, and adding pressure to the place it joins the two halves in the center, until one day, they will fuse entirely and be unusable. It happens slowly, in small applications, over eons of time, that God closes doors.
Drama killed himself on the radio, at the end of a show, on the 7th of October. We listened to his farewell songs to all of us. He took pills, and vomited onto himself as he typed. I wasn't with him when he died, and I did not follow him to the river. In the snow globe, he arrived in silence like a ghost. He wore a patterned shirt tucked loosely into his khakis, and dirty tennis shoes. The wind was strong enough to move his hair off of his forehead, and show the paleness of his skin in the shine of the starlight.
"You didn't do this for me," I reminded him, as he watched the earth rise over the cold atmosphere on the moon. He didn't turn to look at me, but slid his hands in his pockets like he was waiting for the train to come for him. When he answered me, he sounded almost sad, the way the Angels do when caught at an unguarded moment.
"Evelyn, I do everything for you."
His words floated out over us listening to him that night, the members of Gray House who have come to understand, even minutely, what an Angel is (or isn't) and we shifted, however imperceptibly, away from this world and toward the one none of us exist. Because we all found ourselves in his words, and have almost never found ourselves in yours.
In 2013, five of the six members of Gray House that were home at the time met in the bayou to pledge themselves to an idea of home where we might be able to find family. We wore white, and we met at the edge of the yard of the Old House, recently left to us, to encircle a yew tree with our hands and make a promise that we would protect one another. The person missing that night, who in fact opted out of that ceremony altogether, was you, Jack.
The next morning, I burned the pattern of a yew tree onto the inside of the back door (the front door of the Old House was barely used). When we moved to Gray House, the door couldn't come with us, but the Gray Children burned the design onto the inside of the two front doors, and painted it blood red with some kind of enamel that bleeds through any subsequent coat we give it.
It was a sign that we could never go back, that it was on the inside of the door and not the outside. That you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. And I think I knew that on some fundamental level when I came home; that I could never really be alone in a room again. Sometimes, when things like Drama's speech to you happen, I imagine the wood of that door swelling microscopically, and adding pressure to the place it joins the two halves in the center, until one day, they will fuse entirely and be unusable. It happens slowly, in small applications, over eons of time, that God closes doors.
Drama killed himself on the radio, at the end of a show, on the 7th of October. We listened to his farewell songs to all of us. He took pills, and vomited onto himself as he typed. I wasn't with him when he died, and I did not follow him to the river. In the snow globe, he arrived in silence like a ghost. He wore a patterned shirt tucked loosely into his khakis, and dirty tennis shoes. The wind was strong enough to move his hair off of his forehead, and show the paleness of his skin in the shine of the starlight.
"You didn't do this for me," I reminded him, as he watched the earth rise over the cold atmosphere on the moon. He didn't turn to look at me, but slid his hands in his pockets like he was waiting for the train to come for him. When he answered me, he sounded almost sad, the way the Angels do when caught at an unguarded moment.
"Evelyn, I do everything for you."
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