How can an angel bargain with God?

Then again, maybe I’m not really an angel. Maybe I’m a fiend in disguise and my whole existence is a just a joke. Either way, I despise my existence. I despise the lack of control over what I have to do. And I despise what I do.
To watch an innocent child surrender to the atrocities and idiocies of the ignorant adults who are sworn to protect her takes strength and ambiguity that only a being with no soul could possibly bear. But I’ll tell you this much; if I had a soul, if I had a heart, I would gladly give her mine and take her place.

So how do I stand in the shadows and merely watch as this gullible little flower wilts in my presence while I wait like a vulture for her to take her last breath? Watching her frail chest rise and fall with each labored breath; listening for the hoarse pleading from her lungs. Just waiting.

How is it that I can creep closer and closer while I feel the fading beat of her heart within my own empty lifeless shell? Lub dub, lub dub, lub dub. Slower, weaker, indistinctively begging for relief, until finally it’s electrical pulses can give no more and I steal in to seize her soul and carry her away.

It is not an easy thing to do, to be sure, but it must be done and I must be the one to embrace the guilt for not stepping in. Yes, even those of us without souls still feel.
With Rubenstein’s Melody in F playing softly in the background, I watch as tiny beads of sweat began to pool into streams that pour down her pale blond hair onto the starched white sheet beneath her. Streaks of crimson began to swell as the crusty leather strap that binds her forehead starts to bite into her delicate flesh and an angry cyan hue adorns the space between her terrified blue eyes and the wispy bangs of her sweat soaked hair.

And those hands. Perfect miniature hands sporting perfect miniature fingers, with perfect pink polish garnishing the perfect little tips of her perfect little fingernails. Hands that should someday comfort a child, caress a loving husband, or create a masterpiece of paint or clay. A tiny silver ring that she had begged to wear until the last minute sits beside her on the vague gray blanket that’s covering her soon-to-be urine soaked body. Little do they know, it is the last minute.

Her pitiful wrists pulled against the strong leather cuffs that mercilessly pinned her hands to her sides as the fragile skin on her wrists began to stretch and tear. Old scars from other visits like this catch the droplets of blood that begin to seep towards the gurney. She knows it will do no good to try, but she pulls and twists until the floor below becomes decorated with snowflake spatters of blood mingled with sweat and tears. Falling so gently, yet with each drop another moment of life lost, surrendered to the elements of science and well-being.

Oh how it would break my heart, if only I had one, each time I see her cerulean blue eyes open wide in fear. Each time I hear her scream out, “Mommy, please don’t! I’ll be good, I’ll be quiet, I promise!” And how angry it should make me each time I see that ***** just standing there emotionless, looking down at the child she claims to love, with blank eyes and tight lips, a woman who doesn’t know the meaning of love. A woman afraid to find out. And I’m the one with no heart, no soul, and yet I wish I could cry for her. I wish I could take her mother instead. I wish…

Forever’s a long time, but each time I’m forced to watch this, it feels like forever all over again. Even though I have existed since the beginning of time, eternity begins again with each child’s soul I am compelled to take. This time is no different, but this time won’t be the same.
She knows what’s coming next. The nurse swabs her little arm with alcohol and ruthlessly shoves a needle full of sedative into her quivering muscle, what little there is of it anyway. Too much though, but she doesn’t know that. A little whisper in the ear to distract her was all it took, a little nudge to her psyche and an adult dose flows into a child’s waiting bloodstream. It won’t be long now.

How many times I’ve stood here and watched her, trying to put myself in her place, wondering if I’m even capable of thinking on her level. Don’t get me wrong; not that her thinking is any lower than mine, it’s just different. Less experienced. Innocent. I’ve often wondered what it must be like, playing with toys, running in the yard barefoot, feeling the grass and mud between my non-existent toes. To hug a kitten or catch a frog, to actually lay there at night and wonder what the stars are saying to each other. To actually wonder and not know…

How I wish I had hands to pull her from them. To take her away to a place where no one could ever hurt her again. But I can’t, that’s not my job. My job is simply to take her.
And so here I stay until the time arrives. Her time. My time. Her mother crosses her arms. It’s always the same. The doctor in his lifeless looking white coat steps to the side of the gurney and smooths her drenched locks. With his fake smile and his smelly breath, he leans close and tells her to relax and in a few minutes, it will be all over and she won’t remember a thing. If only he knew. He looks at the snaky b!tch in her bandanna and horn-rimmed glasses and gives her a nod. I’d like to break her neck for each nod she’s given him in return; but I can’t, it’s not my job.
Muffled sobs become screams of terror as the sound of the machine grows closer. The crescendos and diminuendos clash bitterly as the music becomes louder in a pathetically vain attempt to cover her shrieks. But it is my opus and I will ultimately cause the encore between life and death and it will be me who stands as the sole conductor of this symphony of destiny.

I drift closer as the doctor cleans her temples and attaches the small white electrodes to her pale skin. Anger begins to flood me as the devilish machine begins to whir and sputter to life. I can feel her heart pounding, the blood coursing through her veins; her fear feeds my hatred and I long to unleash it… but I can’t, not yet.

Helpless, I watch as she tries hard to clamp her teeth shut, but the nurse’s strong hands pry her jaws open, just far enough for the hard plastic plate to slip in where the straps hold it tightly in place. It’s times like this, I question if God really does exist.

Her eyes grow heavy and a dull film takes the place of the blue that I’ve come to love over the months. The sedative is working; soon she won’t feel much at all and my work will be done.

I can hear her heart slowing and I watch as her chest evenly rises and falls. Closer. Closer. The switch is thrown and her delicate little body tenses with each current that is forced through her weakened brain. All because she didn’t behave the way her mother thought she should.

Slower. Almost there. Her hands clenched in hardened fists, her body convulsing uncontrollably, tears from her unconscious eyes, still seeping to the sheets below. Closer.
I can smell her sweet breath as I bend to kiss her with my unseen lips. The kiss of death? Not for her. Not this time. Cast me to hell but I can’t stand it another second.
Every moment of anger from thousands of millennia break the surface of my consciousness and unspeakable power bursts into the room. No more children. No more watching them cower and whimper while they are brutalized into conforming into what someone else wants them to be. No more pain. No more blood. No more tears.

If I am evil, then so be it. I don’t think I’ve ever smiled so much as the surge of my power flows into the minds of the adults surrounding her. The machine goes dead, but it won’t be the only thing that dies today. There will be more blood, but it won’t be hers. There will be more screams, but they won’t be hers. And there will be more tears, but they won’t be hers.

How I did it, I may never know but I laughed as three sets of eyes flew open wide with unimaginable fear. Every nightmare, every campfire horror story, every evil wish. Here I stand before their eyes in all my ghastly, cold-blooded glory. Taking the form of whatever frightens them the most; such power, such freedom.

Cringing on her knees, I watched as the blood began to pour from mother’s eyes. Screaming, begging for mercy, as the putrid life spilled from her onto the floor, washing away the snowflakes of torture that had since dried to the cold tile beneath her daughter. With such great satisfaction, I reached down and grabbed her soul, chucking it to the bowels of the earth where some demon would more than certainly claim it for it’s own. Her lifeless body, broken on the tile, such a fitting end for such a frigid, heartless b!tch.

But something deep within me cautioned that my time was short and that my actions were wrong. Care? Never! My thoughts and anger turned to towards the doctor and nurse. Sworn to help, protect, and heal. Untrue to their Hippocratic Oath to do no harm. Pleading for compassion, begging for escape, crying as they made her cry so many times before. But I am not a merciful being nor am I one to feel compassion. Forget that they are redeemable, forget that they have helped others. In the dim atmosphere that surrounded them, they clung to one another as if by combining their strength, they could avoid the inevitable.
And then a small whimper, a gurgle of life or perhaps the gagging of death. She’s awake and struggling to breath, I can hear her heart slowly tick-tocking away and as I turn to her, I know now why those such as I are not given hearts.
Rivers of blood flowed from her ears and mix with her mother’s on the floor below.

In all my hatred and self-righteousness, in my attempts to cause pain and suffering to those who hurt her, it is I who have hurt her the most. Through the sedative’s darkness she watched me slay her mother. And through my inadequate attempts to save her, I have doomed her, for the machine continues to pulsate with charges of electricity that I fought so desperately to stop.

I do not have a voice to demand that the machine be turned off. I do not have the hands to pull the horrible pads from her head and I do not have the strength to kill again.
So how do I stand in the shadows, weak and unmoving, watching the child I tried to protect, wilt and fade before me? How do I stand and watch the doctor and the nurse, still clinging to one another, knowing they will more than certainly do this to another child? How do I stand and watch the lifeless body of the mother as it lay on the floor, as her tortured child silently screams for her? How do I die, when I have no life?

And so I linger and wait. Not to regain strength, but for my own trial and judgment. I wish I could weep, but I can’t. I watch her as she watches me through her tears. Tears for me? She nods as if she can hear me then slowly closes her eyes. One last beat of her heart, one last breath, and one last shudder as one last burst of electricity surges through her lifeless body.

Too feeble to collect her soul, like I should have done in the first place, I watch helplessly as it rises from her broken flesh and stands to face me. Afraid to meet her eyes, I look away only to have her reach out for me, the spirit she can’t touch yet her love and compassion more than touch, they give life and I know somehow, that she understands and forgives me for what I’ve done.

Destiny has a strange way of making you see things differently. As I watched her fade into obscurity that even I couldn’t imagine, a small voice whispered, “Come home, your work is done.”


Copyright 2007-2008 CZF

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