Angel Number

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After I had discovered this new gem, Delilah had all of us pop a few of the eggs into our own glass vials that she had pulled from her seemingly boundless gown pockets. As we flew back, the night air was crisp and reminded me of the opportunities awaiting. We congregated for a few minutes just smiling at one another. When you become close enough with your friends, it no longer feels awkward to have a few lingering moments of silence.

"Ok. Bye guys!" I crooned. Delilah and Melody turned towards the awaiting starlight, staring at me for a minute longer with their lovely faces, moonlight outlining the crescent of their jaws. "Bye Viv!" Said Melody cheekily. "Yeah, bye!" cried Delilah. I watched as they melded gracefully into the darkness.

Fiddling with the glass vial that hung by a tie of thistle, I did my best work to noiselessly open my window and slip back inside, cocooning myself once more with the paper thin sheet of linen Aunt Heather and Uncle Bert had dropped on my bare mattress of a bed. I lay on my back, staring dreamily at the little foggy eggs with their cherry-red nipples before I dozed off to sleep. It was rare that I didn't have nightmares about my fathers death. I was 5 when I first asked about my mother. We were in my fathers study, a broad room with wall-length mirrors that displayed a wonderful meadow outside, with a wall of trees along its borders. Wildflowers grew thick in this meadow, peeking through the bright green grasses that grew tall in this area. My father refused to cut them, allowing for the flourish of insects- butterflies, grasshoppers and ladybugs to name a few. Sheets of sun would waltz through these windows, giving my father a god-like appearance, with his horn-rimmed glasses and knobby hands always curled around a handful of scientific studies. My father was sitting comfortably in a simple wooden chair before his perfectly neat desk, a computer opened to an email in progress he was sending to one of the fellow scientists at his lab. I was sitting cross legged, looking up at to my fathers serene gaze.

"Your mother...she was an angel, just like you Vivian. I was 16. I had recently moved from China to America, and was strolling through the woods. I was starting to get lost, you see, and I found myself wandering in an area off trail. It was strange...there were plants and creatures I had never heard of before, tiny nymphs with smiling faces, tugging at my pant legs. I knew better than to follow them, i'd heard in fairy tailes they were known for trickery...there were of course fluorescent flowers, and huge plants that would snap their jaws at any passerby...I was horrified, and just as I was about to run home and ask my parents for some medications, I witnessed the most beautiful girl I had ever seen."

"Was it mommy?"

"Yes, honey, it was mommy. Now she wasn't beautiful in the way most people would perceive beauty." He chuckled. "Her eyebrows were a little bit thick and her skin was ghostly pale...enough to frighten any reasonable man away. And she had short hair...a pixie cut as some might call it.

"But she...was so...so beautiful to me. Her almost translucent skin had a crescent gold glow along the outline of her shoulder...I was mesmerized," as if he could see her there, standing across the room, a sparkle pierced his black-brown eyes. "And she had...wings...and at first I was scared...I thought she was an alien, but then I learned that such things as angels existed..."

But as months, and years slowly bled together like black ink and murky water, that light that pulsed through his golden skin that afternoon soon became gray. I'd peek into his study to see him hunched over his desk, his black hair disheveled, his curtains pulled over the sun from the garden. With each passing month, he grew to be obsessed with his work, with the scientific specimens he'd tinker with, and I was the only witness to this.

In the midst of it all, I heard bits and pieces of family conversation. "Aiguo has been acting strange lately. The doctors say it's s-schizto...fray...neya?" Nǎinai (my grandmother) with her thick tongued accent strangled that word...a word I soon became prematurely used to hearing as father left home more and more often for the desolate bleached white building called the hospital. I craned my neck further into the dimly lit kitchen. My aunt made exaggerated motions with her hands. "He talks about angels...ever since Sylvia died he's completely lost it." I wasn't sure of all the words my relatives were saying about Dad, but memories persisted in my head- the sunken quality of his eyes, the dishes piled in the sink from weeks ago. My relatives didn't know- about my mother's or my wings- they were kept a secret. But without Dad for me to hide behind, I felt my wings slowly press through the fragile shield of my t-shirt, practically waiting to be discovered.

I recall my aunt and uncle dragging me out of my house. "Come now, girl. Aiguo is dead, he joined the river."

All I knew...was that my father, Aiguo Liu was gone. Forever. It took me years to piece together that he'd killed himself.

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