There is nothing interesting about angels. You would think there would be. You could be right if you had a lot of time on your hands, and the patience, and desire to watch things unfold at the speed of molasses. If you were a modern human, with the attention span of a goldfish or worse, you would be disappointed with the entertainment value of most angels.
Over the years Cecelia had come to revel in the small shifts and changes in the life of her roommate Chloe. Chloe, which was short for something Cecelia would never try to pronounce, would stand there, stiff and bemused as Cecelia exuberantly celebrated something as minute as the day that Chole left a mug to air-dry instead of whatever it was that she usually did. Cecelia never did see exactly what Chole did when she washed the dishes, but she would turn around and the whole kitchen shone as if newly built. The cups and plates would disturb Cecelia slightly every time she opened the cupboard, as if they shouldn't be touched, at least until she had used them a few times and they were restored to their familiar faded and chipped appearance. Any slight shift towards something less than perfect always delighted Cecelia. She would pour Chole a glass of wine, kiss her cheek and tell her she should shake things up more often. Chole would tilt her head slightly, and gaze calmly at her until Cecelia blushed and turned away, her playful grin faltering into a puzzled frown.
This afternoon the sun was shining into the livingroom, and jazz music was playing on the radio. Cecelia had just arrived home from work and Chloe was staring at the wall. Cecelia didn't ask. She was looking somewhere far from here, observing something boring to do with something very important. Cecelia went into the kitchen, paused with the fridge door open, and sighed quietly as she started pulling things out of the fridge. Chloe had done the grocery shopping again. There was nothing wrong with the things Chloe had purchased, she had clearly listened when Cecelia had asked her to purchase more fresh vegetables. There was one of each kind placed precisely an inch apart on the shelves. Eggplant, cucumber, green pepper, a carrot, an artichoke and single snap pea. There were other things in the fridge too, things Cecelia did not recognize, but each and every one of them were clearly at the height of possible freshness. She hesitated as she reached for the cucumber, catching sight of what looked like a curl of a vine. She shook her head and the optical illusion faded, they don't sell cucumber on the vine.
Cecelia left the strange vegetables in the fridge.
She started some rice in the rice cooker, and began to dice the vegetables. Chloe had started to hum. Cecelia stopped to listen. She had to stop. If she hadn't stopped, she probably would have cut herself. The sound always made her head tingle and made her mind drift. When Chloe hummed in the evening, it helped Cecelia drift off to sleep. Her dreams were bizarre, and involved sacred geometry and strange epiphanies that made sense until the moment Cecelia woke up. She often had the thought that she had made important discoveries during the night. As her feet contacted the cold floor the impression was lost amid her morning quest for socks and coffee, not necessarily in that order.
"If you are going to hum, " she called out, "can you take over the chopping please?"
Then Chloe was there, and thankfully had the fast reflexes to avoid getting cut by the knife that Cecelia stuck out in her general direction. She took the knife and gently directed Cecelia away from the cutting board, chopping the pepper and humming.
Cecelia swayed and reached out a hand to steady herself on the chair-back as she considered the mechanics of sitting.
"Work was nuts. I brought home wine." She waved vaguely towards the paper bag on the counter.
Chloe hummed, and the knife on the board took on a cadence that brought to mind the thrum Cecelia often heard when the hummingbirds visited their covered porch.
She blinked to clear her vision as the rhythm ceased, "How was your day?" Her mind felt fuzzy and her voice echoed strangely in her head.
Chloe washed the knife, dried it and put it away. She did not answer the question, but Cecelia knew the answer would come, if she waited. Some questions took time to answer.
She was startled when Chloe spoke. It seemed loud until Cecelia realized that Chloe was now seated directly beside her, the wine open and a glass in her hand, "What did you dream last night?"
Cecelia lifted the glass in her hand and took a small sip, "I can't remember."
"You should start paying attention."
"Maybe you can help me remember." Cecelia discovered she had finished her wine and reached out to pour another, offering to refill Chloe's as well.
Chloe tilted her glass to show that it was mostly full, "Is that permission?"
"Um.." She gulped the next swallow, "maybe after I have had more wine."
Chloe stood, glided into the living room and returned her gaze to the wall, but she didn't seem to be as distant as before, some part of her was paying close attention as Cecelia eyes drifted to the cutting board. Cecelia flew to her feet too quickly, and she had to grab the chair again.
"Holy fucking shit Chloe!" She shouted, "What did you do to the vegetables?" Cecelia stared at the elaborate display her roommate had created on the counter
Chloe flicked her gaze towards the kitchen, then back to the wall, "I chopped the vegetables."
"How did you manage to cut the pepper into those shapes?" Feeling steadier with the surge of adrenalin kicking through her, Cecelia took a few steps out of the kitchen, "You know I was just going to fry the vegetables"
Chloe's forehead wrinkled slightly, but she didn't turn around, "Do the shapes get in the way of frying?"
"No," Cecelia turned in a daze to look again at the intricately textured and vibrantly coloured mandala on the cutting board, and smiled ruefully, "No, not at all." She put up a hand as if to forestall a response that she knew would never come, "Please, go back to whatever you were doing."
Dinner was eaten in companionable silence. Cecelia ghosted a kiss on Chloe's cheek, and headed for a bath. Chloe's resumed humming vibrated the bath water and pulsed through Cecelia's soles as she dried off and while she brushed her teeth. Cecelia snagged her notebook from the bookshelf and dropped it onto her bedside table. Did she really want to remember what would come next? If she did, she could write it down, she probably wouldn't, but she could. She tumbled into her bed and dropped instantly to sleep, a wet towel draped across her legs and the blanket half-heartedly pulled over her shoulders.
The dreams were much like the dreams she was used to having, an intense blur of images that made so much sense, and almost hurt to hold in her mind. She tried to pay close attention but she knew it was impossible to hold on to a single image or concept. She felt ready to give up on even trying to make sense of what was going on, when something shifted. She realized that the symbols weren't as foreign as she had thought at first, she knew them as well as she knew the english alphabet and what they were telling her was too much.
She sat up in bed, tears coursing down her cheeks.
"Chloe!" Her friend appeared at the door and flowed into the room, she took a seat at the foot of the bed.
"What did you do?" Cecelia irritability swiped the still damp towel away and struggled to sit up, "The dreams was different this time, I remembered something."
Chloe tilted her head, a cat observing a mouse that it had no intention of chasing "Not a thing, Cecelia. You did not give me permission."
Uninteresting, you say, it would be amazing to live with an angel! Assuming, that is, that you even believe such a thing were possible. It is, possible, and quite the opposite of amazing. It's dull, boring, if something so strange can be called boring. Consider the fact that the water that drains out ot the tub these days is clean enough to drink, clean enough to act as a natural disinfectant, you'll never experience a skin infection in this house. You'll never experience a clogged pore or a rash; if you have a sunburn, you won't have one once you are out of the shower. Sounds perfect, right? How do you know that you are alive, that you are moving through time? A scar that holds a memory of a mistake and a story of healing? A blemish that your mother had in the same place? A rough patch of skin that you take the time to care for and then enjoy the results of? What if none of those things ever happened, what if your face in the mirror was exactly the same as it was yesterday, or last year, or six years ago? How would you know that anything had happened, if nothing ever changed? And if the water still goes down the drain, why does it matter if it's blessed?
Cecelia leaned her head against the tile of the shower under the steady stream, watched the crystal clear water slip away and wished for a hangover headache. Since Chloe moved in six months ago, handing over a copy of the add asking for a "quiet, clean and respectful roommate" as if it were a resume, Cecelia hadn't even had a minor sniffle to excuse her from work. She really wanted something today: raspy vocal chords to convince whoever answered the phone that she was really ill, a slight cough, a pile of used tissue on the coffee table. She could fake it, but the last time she had tried that when Chloe was home she had spent the morning trying to explain why some lies were okay. Not that Chloe ever questioned her, or said anything, or gave any indication that she cared. It was just, a feeling, like she had done something wrong, that eventually drove Cecelia out of the house and off to work a half-day. Having a psychotic break was a good reason not to go to work, right? She wouldn't have to lie. Her head felt ready to burst from the pressure of insight, and the still threatening tears had actually roughened her voice enough that she wouldn't have to actually lie, just call in and let them draw the appropriate conclusion.
She wanted to talk more to Chloe, she also didn't want to. Maybe she could explain what the dream had meant, but Cecelia felt a rush of fear at the thought of knowing anything more. She remembered the paralyzing nausea that gripped her the moment everything in that chaotic realm had coalesced, and she had known with complete certainty that she was being asked to do something terrifying. Had she said no? Had she said yes?
She got dressed and poured herself a cup of coffee. Her hand shook slightly and she petulantly ignored the spilled coffee as it spread across the table's lightly grained wood. Once, she would have been concerned about the beautiful birds-eye maple that was a part of her inheritance, the cottage and it's furnishings had been left to her when her grandmother passed. She turned away as the table absorbed the liquid like a sponge, leaving no evidence of the mishap.
Chloe's gaze was fixed on the same wall, and she clearly wasn't seeing it. Cecelia leaned against the door-jam and waited. Usually, when she stood silently nearby, Chole would take a shuddering breath, as if her lungs had forgotten how to, lift her shoulder slightly and raise an eyebrow to indicate she was listening. The moment stretched, and Chloe remained exactly as she was. A bizarre wax-figure placed in an inane location, facing the wall instead of the room.
"I'm not going to work today," Cecelia said, taking her cell phone out from her pocket.
Chloe did not respond.
Cecilia sighed, got her stuff together, paused to assure herself that Chloe was actually still breathing, and left the house. At least work would provide a distraction. Maybe she could finally stop thinking about whatever it was that the dream was trying to tell her.
As soon as she arrived at the office she felt reassured that she had made the right choice. Everyone needed her attention and there was so much to do, that she was able to lose herself in the routine of answering questions, closing complaints, and clearing her inbox.
She was almost finished writing her monthly report when a message popped up on her screen.
"Can you take a call?"
She frowned, almost typed no, then wrote, "Who's on the phone and why are they calling?"
She took a sip of her coffee and waited.
"Someone named Matthew, asked for you directly, and told me just to put you on. Do you want me to take a message?"
Cecelia saved her report and minimized it on the screen.
"Send the call through."
Before she could take another sip of coffee, her phone rang, "This is Cecelia, how can I help you today?"
All she could hear was a high pitched tone. She turned down the volume but it got louder. She winced, was it an accidental fax to the phone line? "Hello, caller? Are you there? Do you have me on speaker phone?" The sound crescendoed to a pitch that drove sharp pain to the base of her ears, Cecelia's blindly snatched her headset off and it clattered to the floor.
The line disconnected.
Cecelia requested that the recording of the call get pulled and within five minutes it had been sent to her. She plugged in her earphones and listened to the call. She was shocked as she listened, there was no high pitched tone and she could hear Matthew introduce himself and state that he was the store manager for store 1702, and he had gotten the message that she wanted to talk with him. After she has asked if he had her on speaker phone, he had said they he would call back later.
Cecelia called the manager back, and thankfully the line was clear. He had called the customer who had sent the very nasty email that morning and everything was resolved. She apologized for the bad connection they had before, and made notes in her note book to follow up with the customer later that afternoon and make sure they were happy with the resolution the manager had offered.
She finished writing her report, and sent it off.
The rest of her workday went by fast. She logged out of her phone fifteen minutes before her shift ended, so that she wouldn't end up on a 30 minute call, which always happens if you stay logged in until the last minute. She tidied up her things, made notes for herself for the next day and left the office.
On her way home she picked up some Milk and cereal for the next morning, and a few boxes of tea. Chloe liked tea. She would stir it seemingly absentmindedly and create mesmerizing shapes in the milky water. It was for this reason that Cecelia always handed Chloe her tea in glass cups.
You would think that it would be easy to predict what she would come home to each day. Cecelia had found this not to be the case. Everyday was a new experience for her. One evening she had come home from work to find Chloe carefully examining one her cds. She had been holding it up to the light and chattering at it. When Cecelia had asked her what she was doing, Chloe had simply advised her to throw the cd out, that the hidden messages were really not good for her mind and would have long term negative consequences if she did not discard it immediately. When Cecelia suggested mailing the cd to one of her customers, Chloe criticised her choice of vengeance and began to suggest alternatives that made Cecelia's skin crawl.
As Cecelia arrived home from work, something felt off. As she unlocked the front door she could feel the door knob vibrate. She frowned. More music? Was she going to have to ask Chloe to take a break? When your humming vibrates the front door, you have crossed a line.
She stepped inside and gasped, then began choking on dust. She ducked out of the apartment in a coughing fit, her eyes filling and overflowing with tears. When she has caught her breath, she put her grocery bags on the ground to the side of the door and covered her nose and mouth with her sweaters and stepped back inside her home. Everywhere there was a layer of fine dust.
"Chloe?" she called out.
No one answered.
At least she cleaned the windows, they were so clear you could hardly tell they were there. Now they would have more birds crashing into them. Maybe those birds would come back to life and fly away, enhanced in the process. She crossed the room to open the windows but as she reached out, her hand met nothing but air.
"What is this Chloe?" She called out, going to retrieve her groceries. She carried the bag into the kitchen. She needed some water, she opened the cup cupboard. Out poured more dust and all of the cups were gone.
She was trying to figure out how she was going to clean up and keep her nose and mouth covered, when the dust cleared in a great sweeping motion that Cecelia did not have time to follow with her eyes but felt as a steady pressure moving across her back and chest. She had closed her eyes as a lighter breeze tickled her face, and when she opened them again, the glasses were back where they belonged and a hand was on her back. She began to cough again and it felt as if she would never stop coughing. The hand kept patting her back until a she coughed out a handful of red-tinted dust.
"What did you do Cecelia?" Chloe asked.
"I didn't do this...how would I do something like this?"Cecelia gestured around herself at where the mess had been. Everything was spotless. "Not this, I mean the this that was here before you did that."
"Tell me about your dream last night."
Cecelia got herself a glass of water and took a seat in the living room. Chloe followed her.
"When I was at work today, I heard this horrible, high pitched sound over the phone line but when I listened to the call after, the sound was not on the recording."
"So something in this space must have reached out to you while I was out. I can try to trace it back and figure out what it was. Before I do that..."she paused for several seconds
"Yes?" Cecelia asked, gesturing for her roommate to continue.
"Your dream?" she asked
"I'm not ready to see things like that, to go that deep. It's too much. It's starting to make sense and when I look out there.." she wiggled her fingers in front of her face, moving her hand outward, "I feel drawn further out and I feel watched."
"Okay. Go make dinner and I will see if I can track what was reaching out to you." She said in a soft, lulling tone, her gaze distant again.
Cecelia got to her feet and hesitantly moved away from Chloe. She wanted to say more, or ask more questions but no words came to mind, so she moved on.
In the fridge she could see that the vegetables she had used the night before had been replaced and multiplied. Now there were three peppers, three carrots and a whole bag of snap peas. A glass bowl was filled with what she could only assume were the strange vegetables, prepared and cooked ahead of time in case she wanted to try them.
"Are you sure these things are safe to eat," she called out, pulling the glass bowl out of the fridge.
Chloe didn't answer,
Cecelia prepared stir fry, adding in the strange vegetables at the last moment, just to warm them. She made a pot of jasmine tea and carried everything to the table, placing the stir fry in the middle, along with the pot of rice and the pot of tea,, and she place cups, plates and utensils out neatly front of their usual seats.
Chloe sat down at the table, and poured tea for the both of them and served herself some of the rice and stir fry. Cecelia did take a small amount of rice and stir fry and tentatively poked at one of the strange vegetables. It was green and bumpy and looked a bit like a little green flower.
Chloe smiled, "Cholla buds."
Cecelia speared it with her fork and took a small bite, "not bad, a bit like asparagus."
"There have been a few times when I have seen you sitting at your desk, looking into the mirror and I wondered what you were doing. You stay there after you finish doing your makeup and you look into the mirror. Have you ever felt like you were making a connection with it. As if you wanted to reach out and touch a part of the mirror, intimately?"
Cecelia blushed, "no!, What are you suggesting?" She stared Chloe down, color coming to her cheeks. " I look at my face and my eyes look different in the mirror, like I am shifting into someone else, someone bolder, sexier, stronger. It would narcissistic if I wanted to be intimate with my reflection! What are you suggesting?"
Chloe made her puzzled head-tilt and took a sip of her tea, "I am trying to say that something is trying to reach out to you from the mirror, something that has become familiar with you over the years and become accustomed to the familiarity and tenderness with which you observe it."
"And you think that that being...reached out to me and…"
"Made a mess. Yeah. The fear it must have felt as it did that, I know what that feels like. It is asking for your help."
"How do I help something, someone, like that? How would I even begin?" She took a bite of her food, staring at the strange colors and textures in her bowl to avoid looking at Chloe.
"It begins," Chloe stated simply, "with you telling me what you have been dreaming about."
Cecelia abruptly shoveled a generous forkful of food into her mouth and spoke around, a child avoiding the heart of a question, "It's-mmph... nofing... just-mmph" she swallowed, "night-terrors my mom called them." Cecelia picked up her tea and gratefully burned her tongue as she gulped the piping hot liquid, "Shit!"
She felt Chloe's eyes boring into her back as she guzzled a glass of cold water at the sink. The atmosphere of the room felt close and heavy, like a storm was building. Cecelia took a deep breath and turned to face her friend, to discover the Chloe wasn't seated at the table anymore. Confused, Cecelia walked into the living-room, then down the hallway, after checking Chloe's room she finally discovered her seated at the vanity. Cecelia hesitate at the door, as if it wasn't her own room, and frowned as she watched Chloe open the foundation and select a blender.
Chloe picked up every brush and eye-pen with precise and flowing movements. It took Cecelia a moment to recognize that this was the same routine she observed her mirror image following each and every morning. She was sure that Chloe had never seen her do this, and yet each selection was an exact replica of what Cecelia herself had done this morning before leaving the house. A cold chill crawled up her spine, "Chloe, what… what do you think you're doing?"
Chloe's eyes never left the mirror, yet Cecelia felt as if she were being closely observed. She wondered, in a moment of hysteria, if this what what the wall felt like. Chloe's voice seemed distant and hollow, "I am waiting."
Cecelia gripped the door-jam, unsure if she was resisting fleeing down the hall or if she was straining to avoid being pulled into the room. Her mind screamed at her to run, but her body seemed to think that the thing to run from was outside of the room, not inside it. Frozen with fear and indecision, she gasped a deep belly-breath and tried to hold it for the count of three.
Chloe had finished with the makeup and was now doing something that Cecelia had never seen from this angle. She raised the finger of one hand to her cheek, hovering slightly above the skin, and followed the eye-liner from temple to temple. Simultaneously, her other hand reached forward and traced the same line on the Chloe in the mirror. "Clean and clear. Each line perfect." Cecelia shivered as she heard her own voice issue from someone else.
Chloe's fingers finished the tracing and she turned her hands and ran the backs down the twin faces, "Hello beautiful, ready to start the day?"
Watching from the door, Cecelia saw the shift in the mirror image.
How had she ever mistaken this for her reflection? How had she ever believed that the face looking back at her in this moment was human? The pupils were black but surrounded by a circle of white. The nose was pointed and slightly turned up. The teeth were pointed and pearly white. She didn't have any eyebrows, just a smooth forehead that blended into a mass of smoke, that curled upwards.
The reflection was in front of her then, close enough to touch. Then she blinked and it was back in the mirror. Had she really seen what she thought she had seen. It was just Chloe's reflection, masking that slowly hissing sounds that...Chloe never made. Then the mirror went black.
Chloe nodded, as if this was what she had been expecting and got to her feet.
Cecelia struggled against the writhing thing that held her down. She tried desperately to roll away from its grasp, to pull off the choking grip from her throat that made her gasp and try to scream. Her throat felt raw, as if she had already been screaming for too long and had exhausted her ability to do so. Her heart-beat spiked as she thrashed wildly at her captor, and her breath was knocked from her as dropped to the floor and a blinding light pierced her eyes.
"Cecelia?" Chole stood over her, her auburn hair a burning halo, backlit by the ceiling light which she had apparently just turned on. Chole frowned down at her roommate and it took Cecelia a moment to resolve the angle into a realization that she was laying on the floor of her bedroom, tangled in her sweat-soaked sheets.
She allowed her body to acknowledge gravity and measured her length on the floor, blinking her eyes to clear the after-image of Chole with fire for hair, eyes black and endless, featureless and imposing. She took a ragged breath, and then another. A cool cloth was lain upon her forehead and a straw met her lips. Instinctively, she drew on the straw and something cold and sharply sweet made her open her eyes. She stared into Chloe's eyes, a normal hazel with flecks of gold. "I had a nightmare."
Chloe nodded, "Yes, I believe that you see it that way." She let Cecelia sit up and pressed the glass with its odd amber-coloured liquid into her hand. "Finish your drink, then tell me what you saw."
What had she seen? She sipped slowly, holding the liquid in her mouth before swallowing. As it went down her throat it felt icy and warm at the same time. It reminded her of when she had put her hand in a sink full of piping hot water, how it had been hard to tell if it was very hot or very cold. She tried to bring images to mind, but she really hadn't seen anything in this dream. She had felt things, and sensed things. It had been so dark.
"I wish I could just show you...not actually. I don't actually want you in my head."
Chloe sighed, and shifted slightly.
"Nothing personal," she looked down at the empty glass, "that one time was disorienting enough to know I don't want you wandering around the mess that my mind is.." The thought of a shower was beginning to feel very appealing, she felt wrung out like she had run a marathon. "I felt terrified, and trapped, and I felt...this suffocating pressure. I really thought I was going to die in there." Cecelia shook her head and fumbled to put the glass down. An attempt at standing resulted in her sitting back down, hard. "Ouch" she muttered.
Chloe tilted her head again. Cecelia felt, as she often did, like a particularly interesting specimen that was navigating a maze in a novel and unexpected manner. Chloe appeared to react to Cecelia's thought, amusement lighting her eyes. "If it helps at all, I'm not responsible for managing maze design." Cecelia blinked, Chloe had never actually admitted to being able to sense what she was thinking, the discrepancy made Cecelia feel scared instead of reassured.