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.

Challenge

Challenge of the Month VII: May

You wake up, hungover, in Mexico, with no idea how you got there. $100 purse to our favorite entry. Outstanding entries will be shared with our publishing contacts. Fiction or non-fiction, poetry or Prose.

latanasova

150 reads

An Angel wakes up in Mexico (~700 words)

The sound is distant but all the more irritating for it. She has no interest in it. Her body is contorted in a position that might scream suffering to anyone else but moving is the furthest thing from her mind. Her mind – locked in the limits of a human brain and skull, is blissfully blank but she knows from a millennia and change of experience that her kind is not immune to hangovers. If anything, they suffer worse.

It’s probably some clause in her contract – prohibiting the consumption of volatile manmade substances for pleasure. As if she consumed it for pleasure.

But for now her head feels like it is hardly attached to her body and she is loath to move and disrupt that feeling of unaccountability. Of course, the noise has not stopped. It’s clearing and sharpening and with horror she realizes that she is waking up.

She doesn’t need this. Her kid is still asleep. She is off duty.

It continues. By now she has realized that it’s her phone ringing. Maybe she can curse whoever is on the other side when she picks up. It takes her a few seconds to remember she can’t curse people anymore. She read that clause alright or rather, it was very specifically pointed out to her.

“Motherfu— What? What? Why?”

As far as 7am greetings on a Sunday go, she thinks it’s quite formal.

“Hey, Gabi.”

“Who is this?” she feels the air crackle with her hiss and she hopes the obviously shitty connection doesn’t diminish its menace too much.

“It’s Michael. From— umm, Michael, one of the new guys.”

“Do you know what time it is, Mike the New Guy?”

“It’s… uhh, well, it’s around 3 here so—“

“In Mexico, New Guy. You’re calling me in Mexico so you should’ve probably checked what time it is here. Or have you not gotten to the timezone lesson yet? It’s this pain in the ass thing they—“

“Yes, yes, I know what— I believe it’s early morning where you are.”

“You bet your ass it’s early. So you better have an asteroid-shaped reason for calling me.”

“Well… yes, I— No, I mean… it’s rather… human-shaped.”

She sighs, turns her head a little to the side and feels like she has flown half across the room and hit the wall.

“My kid is passed out in a lounge chair on his terrace as we speak, so you better not mean what I’m starting to think you mean.”

“F-funny you should say that because my human is also passed out somewhere… in Mexico.”

“Your kid is in Mexico,” she states and reaches up to pinch the bridge of her nose – yup, her mind is definitely in residence now and so is the Heaven-approved hangover. “And you are…”

“In Cannes.”

“Cannes.”

“France.”

“I know where Cannes is. It’s not in Mexico.”

“I-it is not.”

“Do you have an explanation as to why you’re a world away from your kid?”

“Yes, you see, last night—“

“No, no, stop. I asked if you had an explanation, I didn’t ask to hear it. Start doing your paperwork while I go find your wayward son.”

“So you’ll help?”

“Do you know how he got here?”

“Not precisely, I… I’m pretty sure even he doesn't know how he got there but I do know that he was severely inebriated when he got on the plane—“

“Weren’t we all,” she mutters to herself, regretting her decision to specialize in Guardianship for the fifth time since waking up.

“I beg your pardon? Look, Gabi, I can—“

“Listen, New Guy, I’m probably much more hungover than your kid and mine combined even though I most certainly drank less than each of them and, if you ask me, that’s something south of unfair. But, hey, nobody is asking me and now, thanks to you, I have two charges today. Both of which might die of dehydration, if you keep me on the line much longer.”

“Right. Sorry. About the… the added… the trouble and t-the hangover.”

“Yeah, well, make sure you have something greasy ready for me when we land.”

“Land?”

“Yes, man, what did you think? I’ll look after him for a week so you can kick back a bit?”

“No, of course not. I just—

“I’m bring your kid back. Today.”