A Murder of Angels
A remote meeting of a different kind.
“What’s it like to be dead?”
How do I even begin to answer that? How can the living begin to understand the afterlife—The endless floating down corridors and shafts of light? The unexpected waking up with no clue what you’ve been doing or where? The disconnected, dream-like visions into past lives and potential futures (yours or someone else’s)?
Like this moment: summoned by a power unknown, maybe unknowable, to peer down into a room as through a telescope, seeing two people, who appear to be in their early twenties, sitting over a Ouija board.
Summoned as a spirit to answer their questions.
I suppose I must tell them something. Mentally, I push their fingers on the slider—the planchette, as I recall—stopping at letters printed black on the polished golden board
H - A - R - D - T - O - E - X …
“Hard to explain?” The young woman interprets.
I push the planchette to the corner where the smiling face of the Sun lies beside the word “Yes.”
Something about that woman seems familiar.
“Why is it hard to explain?” Her male companion asks.
The slider moves easier now, pointing to initial letters, which the girl immediately turns into words.
“Fragmented … Not … mortal … life.”
This girl is a sensitive, in rapport with my thoughts. Have I known her before? Wavy brown hair, oval face, intense gray eyes. I had a daughter, Mina, who looked something like that in her early twenties.
But that was long ago.
“Do you remember your mortal life?”
I lean back from a slicing pain. Don’t want to remember. But how and why the pain? Almost as if I had a body . . . My perceptions strain to pull away.
But the unknown force draws me back, churning like an invisible whirlpool.
When I send no answer, she speaks again. “I am trying to contact my grandfather, Phillip Merkel. Might you be him?”
Pricklings of recognition, flashes of a life. I worked a boring job in tech support. At night I read—psychology, philosophy, anthropology—always looking for big answers, clear understanding. I was married, had a daughter. But my wife never shared my intellectual obsessions, never understood the yearnings inside me. We divorced when the little girl was nine. I tried to stay in touch, still be a good father.
Then I took a job in another city.
“You are!”
I’m surprised to see the planchette resting on “Yes.” I did not intentionally move it.
The young woman’s excitement surges into me. The rapport, it seems, goes both ways.
But beneath the excitement lie shadows: sadness, grief.
I was her grandfather. That explains why she reminds me of my daughter.
I never knew Mina had a child. I saw her only once after I moved away.
A scene blinks into view. Mina, on a road trip, had stopped in to visit me. She was 21 or 22, traveling with a guy who I knew at once was bad news. They both drank too much when we went out to dinner. I suspected they also did drugs. But I hardly knew her by then. How could I play the role of concerned, lecturing parent? Mina had grown up without me, but she held no grudge, even told me she loved me just before they left. Watching them drive away broke my heart.
I wonder if Mina is still alive.
Such painful regret. So much I could have, should have done better in that life.
The whirlpool around me quickens, making me dizzy. I glimpse sparkles of light, hear noise like flapping wings. Creatures appear amid the flashes.
Now I’m afraid.
I’ve heard of this happening. Spirits of the dead wander through the clouds and plains of the upper world. Some, after a time, move on to higher existence. Many more are sucked down into whirlpools—by karma, unfinished business, unextinguished desire. Next thing they know, so I’ve been told, they sense harsh light and air, hear distant wailing, and realize it is themselves crying in their newborn bodies, just as all memories of the afterlife flicker away to nothing.
“Can you still hear me, grandfather?”
Startled, I look down at the Ouija board, push the planchette back to the Sun.
But the emotion! The glittering whirlpool sucks at my feet. Winged beings fly around me—angels, I do believe. In the spinning motion I spot their eager faces. I recall an old song in which a “band of angels” comes and carries someone to heaven.
Ironically, it seems to be the reverse: They come when your soul drags you down to be reincarnated into the world. No pretty harp music either, the sound is like the raucous cawing of crows. A murder of crows.
Or rather, of angels.
Bored as I am with the afterlife, I really don’t want to be born again. And yet . . .
“We’re expecting a child, grandfather,” the sweet, sensitive girl is saying. “If it’s a girl, we plan on naming it after my mom, Mina. She passed away last year. She had her problems. But I know she loved me, and she tried hard to be a good mother. I never knew my father, but … Anyway, grandfather, if the baby’s a boy, we thought it might be nice to name him after you. Would that be okay?”
Will I be reincarnated as my own granddaughter’s child? I’ve read that some tribal societies believed this was a common thing—the deceased reborn into the same family.
Or will it be somewhere else?
I don’t know the answer, only stare, hypnotized by the whirling lights and the cries of the angels, as far below on the earth, the planchette slips again over the Sun.
Thanks for reading! You might also enjoy these previous stories:
The Bard of Bayonne, in which Welsh myth meets Looney Tunes
Standard Prescription, exploring Therapy by AI
For more of my fiction and blog posts, check out Triskelionbooks.com.
Thank you, really enjoyed this short story.