Her Angels

A day has a finite number of minutes and an infinite number of moments – you can always find out which minute you have woken up in but you can never know which moment you have stumbled into.

She gets up at 5 am every damn morning and December is no different. The sun will raise and she must do so before it. She combs her black and silver hair and twists and turns until she is sure that it will stay out of her face until the day is through.

She sits on the floor. A desk has always felt out of place in her private space and she realized a long time ago that her waist cannot handle working at a table. She sets everything up and brews a cup of something stronger than coffee. Forms have started to emerge under her palms by the time the sun graces the sky with its presence. About time too.

People think she watches the sunrise every morning.

She does get a worrisome sense of satisfaction from destroying their romantic notions.

You get up at 5 am day after day and see how long it takes you to figure out that the sun rises each time and every sunrise is as unique as every callus on your hands.

She spares it a glance, a nod, and returns to her work. She passes from texture to texture, pays little attention to colour. Her eyes narrow, each hour that hangs on her lids making her squint harder. Her fingers slip, smooth over. She pricks herself on the glass pieces half a dozen times a day. There’s always golden paint under her fingernails and on her pisiform bone.

By noon her stomach is making ungodly noises but her legs have gone completely numb and she is loath to move. Eventually, a pot of noodles is procured. She keeps working as she eats.

In the afternoon, the noises of the town grow lazy, sluggish and monotonous, no longer providing the refreshing soundtrack of early morning. So she puts on some music. She has a soundtrack for each month. She likes to sneak in a couple of songs about a winter wonderland in each one, except for December. December doesn’t need any of that with its late sunrises, gutter-coloured days and early sunsets. December with its betrayals and disappointments that she has grown to almost look forward to in the way you look forward to finishing that last bite of the meal you didn’t enjoy even one bit.

There are conversations going on in her head as she makes the figurines. She likes to think that they are talking themselves to life – her angels. But it’s probably unwise to tell anyone that angels are having conversations in her head or under her guiding hands, as she moulds them carefully – one nip at a time.

Truth is, it’s pretty lonely work. And when your hands are so occupied and your brain – quite the opposite, doesn’t everyone start having conversations in their head? And it’s all downhill from there. How is she to know if she is talking to herself? Or if she is talking with someone else in her head? Or if her angels are welcoming each other into the world of existence and commerce and she has just grown to understand their silent holy language?

She supposes it’s all crazy talk anyway and it’s not like she’s particular about what kind of crazy she will be. Although, she does like the thought of her angels telling stories. Stories of the places they are about to be.

She is really enjoying the one today – about some blonde girl – twenty or so – to be engaged to some banker’s son. The whole house all in a ditzy about it. Her new dress with the little pearls sown into the neckline and her mother sending her to her own hairdresser for the first time because. And the table heavy with fruits that have no business being there in the middle of December and her mother going on about too many colours and her father going on about too few chairs. And then the bell is ringing and she is not there and the door of her closet is ajar and her coat is missing. And then by Christmas one of the Dallas boys from the post office is also missing – his closet door probably hanging open and his worn gloves gone.

It’s exactly the kind of story that her angels like to tell. The kind she loves to listen to. She is quite convinced their stories – real or not – keep her better company than any person could – real or not.

Her fingers clutch the little brush in her hand tighter, her eyes zero in on the little nook that she missed, her tongue peeks out as if to help direct her in her task. For a moment everything goes silent.

She used to have an imaginary friend. Not an angel but an elf. Not a dwarf either – no, an elf. She had to correct everyone all the time. He was the picture of haughtiness and mischief, not that she knew either of those words back then, but remembering him now she can tell.

She quits her work when the sun sets. She can work before it has risen but not after it is gone. In the evenings, the artificial light makes her angels seem less alive and almost grotesque in their pretence to be so. She shudders to think that’s how most people see them.

She does not get up immediately. She puts all her things to the side – carefully at first, one by one: the finished pieces, the ones she will continue working on in the morning, the ones that are still rough glass. Her patience seeps out gradually until her arms sweep the supplies along the floor – like wipers across a windshield, stubbornly fighting the unceasing snow.

Next she stretches out her legs – one by one, unfolding them like ancient pieces of paper that have been stuffed in some back pocket for ages, feels them tingle in a mix of pleasure and pain – little needles erupting everywhere she is trying to move for the first time in hours. She bends her spine, tilts her head back and stares at the barely-there ceiling in the scant light coming from the large windows. Then she straightens again, takes a deep breath and drapes her whole self over one leg, then the other. She lies there with her forehead pressed to her knee – sometimes she falls asleep like this, in this endless loop of work and sleep that is the month of December – sometimes she is not sure she has woken up at all.

At the end of the day, only her angels prove that her fingers have been to work.

The mere thought of them suddenly makes her hands throb in white hot pain and she hears her own soft moan from a distance. She sighs, she straightens, she sits, she stands, she staggers toward the small bathroom. She puts the plug in the sink, turns on the cold water and watches it fill the small space. Her own little sea of salvation. When it’s mostly full, she turns off the tap and slips her hands in, sinks all the way to her elbows and soaks the sleeve that has rolled down one arm. She stands there, shoulders sagging, chin resting on her chest, for ten minutes, fifteen, maybe twenty. Her newly reawakened legs start to protest, the back she keeps perfectly straight all day while working whines and twists in the unnatural position. Her fingers tingle. They know. This won’t do tonight.

She takes a deep, white bowl covered in blue snowflakes and fills it with cold water, considers, adds a few drops from a little vial above the sink. She slips beneath the cold sheets and white pillows on her bed, squeezes the bowl between her knees so it doesn’t sway and spill, and carefully submerges her red and prickled fingers into the blessedly cold water. Finally, her sigh is one of contentment.

It could be any night in the whirlwind of December, it could be the night for all she is aware.

Her angels have taken up a song that is nothing if not out of season. She smiles and lets it lull her to sleep.

This is the first in my book of short stories – 12. by Lyublyana Atanasova. Ranging from the joyful to the tragic and occasionally taking a turn for the frankly weird and absurd, none of them are more than flights of fancy except for that hung angel – that one is very much real.