DISENTANGLE

It was midnight on a Tuesday, and instead of sleeping, I was trapped in my childhood bedroom with an angel crouched on the four-poster bed.

The angel was white, but not in the way cotton and marble are white. It was white in the way every color of light blended together becomes so blinding your eyes can only perceive it as white. When I looked at it head-on, I could see everything. Every star in every galaxy, every human iris exploding into desert dunes and ocean waves, all focused in a pinhole of light, like sun pouring between clouds.

My head pounded and my eyes stung like they’d grown onions in the tear ducts after I took one glance. I’d only just stumbled home after a late shift at the dining hall, and the pain shocked me more than the sudden appearance of a heavenly body less than ten feet away from me.

Then the panic set in.

I’d heard about the angels on the news—the anomalies, as the pinch-browed anchorman called them—and I knew most sightings coincided with unexplainable disappearances. Blame followed panic, the sour-gut chaser to my cold blood. This was my fault, even though I hadn’t seen any light under the door, I should have been more careful. I shouldn’t have let the slog of dishes bloodied in marinara sauce dull my senses, even if I despise the acidic smell and the globs of pasta stuck to the plates. I shouldn’t have forgone a shower, shouldn’t have let the early May heatwave convince me I could just strip off my uniform and sink straight into bed.

I shouldn’t have shut the door behind me, because as soon as I did, the angel appeared.

“Be not afraid,” the angel boomed. Its voice was neither masculine nor feminine. It almost sounded like a child, except that it was obvious that this voice did not belong to anything that had ever been born.

I couldn’t tell if it was tall or short, wide or slender. I’m not sure it had a shape at all. I took one glance and crumpled to the floor, palms pressed to my eyes, flickers of vast cosmos still scratching at the back of my eyelids.

“So that’s why they’re calling you an angel,” I said in lieu of greeting.

“You may call me whatever you wish. I need not of names.”

The way it spoke took me by surprise. Nervous laughter bubbled up into my throat.

“I’d call you a righteous prick for blinding me, but I doubt you did that on purpose,” I said.

“Your kind struggles to perceive mine. Please take what visionary precautions you must.”

“Sure. Will-do.” I got up, feeling around the room for my dresser and then froze when I saw the mirror reflected a dark room.

My uniform still stank of marinara, and I wanted nothing more than to be rid of it, but fear gripped me in its vice. The angel’s light didn’t affect our world at all. I could see it pulsing in my peripheral vision, white beacons waving to me like lighthouse hands, but its light cast no shadows, left no glowing white edges on my bedroom furniture. It had no reflection, and in mine, I could see my eyes lacked a shimmer.

Even not looking at it made me feel ill; my brain was having just as much trouble understanding what I wasn’t seeing as what I was.

“Why are you here?” I said, then frowned at myself. I wasn’t sure if I could offend this thing, but I didn’t want to find out what would happen if I did.

“I have always been here, but here has not always been where I am,” it said.

I licked my lips, and my dusky reflection split in two as my vision doubled.

“I’ve heard people sometimes go missing when your kind shows up.” I chose my words carefully. My chest tightened, remembering my parents asleep in the next room. “Is that going to happen to me?”

“My being is incompatible with flesh. You would not disappear but become many if we were to occupy the same space.”

“Right. So I just… can’t touch you.”

“You can.”

“But I’d be pulled apart and spread across the fabric of reality?” I recalled the phrase molecules disentangled into light waves articulated on the anchorman’s lips, clearly read from a cue-card.

“Distance is irrelevant at the scale of everything,” the angel said.

“For you,” I hissed, then clenched my jaw shut. I expected the angel to be insulted, or to ramble off more near-nonsensical poetry, but it merely shimmered in the corner of my vision, patience radiating from its silence.

“How many of you are there?” was my next question.

“Your counting does not communicate our vastness,” it answered.

“But why are some of you talking to humans? And why now?”

“Your time has intersected with our existence. We communicate the way you communicate, to facilitate understanding.”

“Yeah, I guess my eardrums would probably burst if you spoke to me in your language, right?” The quip was out of my mouth before I could stop myself. I grimaced at the tarnished handles of my dresser drawers.

“We do not speak,” the angel said.

“What?” I almost looked at it again, but covered my eyes in time to only get a brief glimpse of Fibonacci spirals swirling at the edge of it. “So you, your kind, you don’t communicate with each other? You don’t need to?”

“We know all. Conversation is excess.”

I suppressed a laugh.

“Is this conversation excess?”

“Your kind is so limited, you must speak, because every word still appears new.”

“Rude,” I whispered, and turned back towards the door. The wood was checkered with half-white squares where tape once held up drawings of dragons and knights, dark-winged angels and fallen gods. The back of the door was the only place I could display my un-biblical artwork, growing up.

My stomach curdled. I said I’d never come back here when I cut my knee-length hair and fucked off to the farthest university I could afford to attend. Now I scrubbed dishes for the local college where my mom and dad would have paid for a full ride, and I didn’t even have a diploma to display on the wall, much less artwork to tape up behind the door.

My life was nothing but marinara stench and empty sketchbooks.

“What am I supposed to do with you? I mean, what do you want from me?” I asked the angel.

“I want not,” it said. “But you writhe with wants. They feed off your fear, maggots to a corpse.”

“My—what?” I shuddered out the words. My mind raced to recall what else the. anchorman said. Something about altering the flow of time, the movement of particles. Heat and light and closed spaces. My eyes caught on the doorknob.

“You desire not desire, but you hide from want,” the angel said. “Tell me, what is it you fear in wanting?”

Blood crashed against my eardrums, waves in the twisting caverns of a conch shell.

“What do you know about me?” I answered with a question.

“Your life is a series of concentric circles. You have buried hope and planted surrender for ground cover. You reach inside yourself and find an empty space where desire should take shape.”

It was almost affirming, hearing my identity echoed by a celestial being when I couldn’t even explain it to my parents, but only almost. The emptiness inside me wasn’t there because I didn’t want to kiss anyone.

“Desire, huh?” I said. “You mean attraction? The thing I don’t experience?”

“Have you given up on filling it?”

“Have you given up on minding your own business?” I snapped, and my hands trembled into fists. My mom was convinced I must be gay, keeping my hair short and avoiding the boys from the church she tried to introduce me to. But I’ve never wanted a woman, either. Not even before I stopped wanting much of anything.

Light poured over the bed, swallowed the pillows and the quilted coverlet. I turned and faced the far wall.

“Don’t touch me,” I said.

“I am not moving. Your world merely moves through me.”

Panic returned, jumping through me like a squirrel loping across a busy road. Could I open the door or not? Would the disruption of the closed space seal my doom, or was it my only chance at freedom? Maybe if the angel liked me better, it would let me go.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t introduce myself,” I said, the words strung together without a breath between. “You can call me Anna. What’s your name?”

“A name is a gift best returned,” it said.

I scrubbed my hands over my face.

“What about a purpose?” I asked. “Do you have one of those?”

“To learn,” the angel said.

“I thought you knew everything? What’s left to learn?”

The room hummed, and from behind me I felt a sudden heat, like starlight licking my back. I stood so still, I swore my heart stopped beating for a breath.

“I know the vastness, but I do not know the miniscule, the individual,” the angel told me.

“I must learn perspective.”

Perspective. That’s what attacked my eyes when I tried to look at it—and that’s what I could fight back with.

“You want my perspective?” I asked. “You want to know what it’s like to be me?”

“You are here. I am here. Let us intersect.”

“No,” I said, then braced my hands on the wall and breathed out slow and careful. Condensation kissed the yellowing wallpaper. If it took me, would it consume my parents next? Did they deserve that?

Would they think this light was just the rapture, come to claim the faithful?

“I can give you perspective by talking. I can tell whatever you want to know,” I said.

“Ask me something. My words will be new, right? Something you’ve never heard before.”

The tide of light retreated. I felt my gut unspooling, and I clenched my muscles to keep myself together.

“Why are humans obsessed with love?” it asked.

“Why does the moon orbit the earth?” I chuckled. “Attraction is nothing but gravity. A natural force. Unless you don’t feel it. That’s me, breaking the laws of physics.”

“Love is not attraction,” the angel said. “You may not be pulled, but you do glow.”

“I glow?” I wanted to laugh again, but my tightening throat choked off the sound.

“With love.”

“Where?”

“Dimly. From within. Your spark has not gone out, Anna.”

I felt the sound of my name like a hand on the small of my back. A gentle nudge forward.

A gift returned.

“Tell me, what is it you love?” the angel asked.

“Art,” the word came to me naturally, and vowels and consonants unspooled from my tongue. “Colors. Queerness. Kindness. Songbirds and stray cats and inchworms. Songs about friendship and thick sketchbook paper and nude models in drawing classes who are so confident you just forget they’re naked. The stupidly loud wrens nesting in the backyard. Clean laundry. My mom. My dad.”

My voice broke. Tears chilled on my cheeks.

“Did they not hurt you?” the angel asked. “Did they not dim your light?”

“They’re still my parents. They do care about me, even if…” My eyes strayed to the door. The squares of tape residue. “Even if they’ve got their priorities wrong.”

I recalled a fragment of the newscaster’s voice. Never open the door if there’s an anomaly inside, he said. The space collapses if disturbed from the—outside? Inside? Why couldn’t I just remember? I was going to get disentangled into light waves and it was going to be my own damn fault.

“You have dimmed your own light,” the angel said.

“Yeah,” I answered honestly, too distracted to guard my words. “I even tried to blow out the candle.”

“Humans hold so little time in their hands. Why release the sand before it’s all slipped?”

“Sometimes, you get so scared you just go numb, and then you want that numbness all the time, because feeling anything at all feels like fear,” I said. “Any joy translates to shame. Any want translates to guilt. The world collapses to the scale of a single room and you just… swallow the key.”

Something shifted in my chest. The void didn’t fill, but the parts of me that had shrunk to make room for it expanded, strengthened, took on shapes of their own.

“A single room can explode to the scale of the world,” the angel said. “A single body can explode to the scale of the universe.”

“Thanks, but I think I’ll stay this size for now,” I said.

My hand reached for the knob, and the angel made the sound of a star screaming, all heat-rush and particle explosion. The light chased my arm, but I looked at it head-on, and the tendrils shrunk into an involuntary dance. It showed me planets swallowed by suns and bacteria reproducing in mindless clumps. I saw the deepest dark of empty space boil into ocean depths and the brightest burn of nuclear fission fan into downy feathers. I saw everything I could have been, and I chose to be me, stepping out into the hallway of my childhood home.

My eyes pulsed red and turquoise. My vision was burned away for the time being, but I could feel the floor, solid beneath my non-slip shoes, and I could hear the familiar sounds of my world.

Mom and dad snoring out of sync in the next room. A lone car stalking down the street, tires grouching on the pockmarked pavement. One of the wrens in the backyard already up, proclaiming its stake on life with every note. I am here, into the pre-dawn grey. I am here, I am here, I am here.