Maximilian Lamb (Max) and Mary Margaret Hart (Maggie) are two manifestations sent to earth to bring together Emily and John. That, as it turns out, is the easy part of their assignment.
Dust On Their Wings is an entertainment about romance, passion, and love. The novel will appear in print and on Kindle by December 1st. (A great Christmas present, if I do say so myself!)
Here for your reading pleasure are the first ten pages or so of the novel. I will post more from Dust On Their Wings every few days.
Dust On Their Wings is an entertainment about romance, passion, and love. The novel will appear in print and on Kindle by December 1st. (A great Christmas present, if I do say so myself!)
Here for your reading pleasure are the first ten pages or so of the novel. I will post more from Dust On Their Wings every few days.
Dust On Their Wings
A
Novel
By
Jeff Minick
To you who have lived and loved with passion,
The living and the dead,
The wise and the foolish,
The starry-eyed, the soul-broken,
The kith and kin whose errant hearts
Never abandoned the quest--
To you I dedicate this book.
What are angels?
Angels are created spirits, without bodies, having
understanding and free will.
--Baltimore Catechism, no 3, Lesson 4
Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.
--G.K. Chesterton
From dust you came, and to dust thou shalt return.
--Lenten injunction taken from Genesis 3:19
1
Spark: Are you here yet? Are you in communication? Reply, please.
Log Entry: M. Lamb: No reply. Odd. While I await my associate’s response, I shall record my impressions and locate my subject.
As usual, manifestation was a shock, even for a veteran like me. One leaps in a twinkling from ether to lead, from light to shadows, from thrones and dominions to footstools and clay. How odd to mutate from pure spirit to human dust! How, I wonder, did the One who is our heart endure so sluggish and awkward a machine for thirty-three years!
Yet here I am, tumbled into a crowd in Pritchard Park in Asheville, North Carolina. The time is 6:56 Eastern Standard Time. The date is Friday, May 16, 2014. According to the Seraphic Manuel 35.1, materializing in a swarm of people is the preferred means of entry, as it diminishes the flash-and-bang of scaring some poor human soul witless.
When making my appearance, I sound the traditional alarm, “Be not afraid,” but no one pays me the slightest attention except the dark-haired child at my elbow, a boy three or four years of age, who glances up, recognizes, as small children are wont to do, my true nature, and chirps, “Okay.” His mother, who sees him speaking to me, puts her hand round his shoulder, bends to his ear, and mutters a warning about talking to strangers. When the boy keeps smiling at me, she interposes her body between us and sidles away.
This human congregation into which mother and child disappear has gathered this warm and pleasant evening for a strange ritual called a “drum circle.” These drums and the accompanying dance remind me of a week I spent in the Congo in 1885, when brutal Belgium overlords worked the natives to death. The Lokele people in those dark days communicated with one another using bongungus, signaling their lamentations and despair by drum, most often at dawn.
Their drums throbbed with a harrowing beauty: this present entertainment is an ugly charade. Fifty feet from me, some twenty drummers sit side by side on concrete benches, beating out repetitious rhythms on hand-held drums. Ranging from teens to the geriatric, these bucket-beaters pound away on a variety of thud-boxes, some constructed from steel, some from plastic, some from the tanned hides of animals. Before them on the flat courtyard of the park some thirty dancers, mostly female, stomp their feet to the monotonous rhythm, swirling, swaying, their arms undulating like serpents. Several hundred observers surround these drummers and dancers, some of them clapping their hands or nodding to the primitive beat, others clicking away with their cameras like anthropologists among savages. This hot arena smells of automobile fumes, marijuana, body odor, and traces of vomit and urine.
From time to time one of the female dancers raises her head toward the heavens and ululates like an Arab. Her cry brings to mind another of my assignments, when, dispatched so very long ago to offer hope to an Italian slave in Damascus, I watched warriors in their white thobes and checked ghutras ride from the city on prancing stallions and groaning camels, waving their swords and promising death to their enemies. The dancer’s cries bring back the memory of women standing on the walls and roofs of that city, uttering their own ululations of grief and harsh exhortation.
As I make my way through the crowd, I pause to observe one of the dancers, an extraordinarily tall human I initially take to be female. Closer examination reveals the shadow of a beard and masculine facial features, both of which dictate against the breasts and skirt of the creature. “A transvestite,” I murmur aloud.
I clearly speak more loudly than I intended, for a bare-footed woman with tangled dreadlocks stops caressing the shoulder of her teenage companion, turns to me, swears, and with disgust adds, “Get it right, asshole. That’s Ursula, and she’s transgendered. A transvestite wears the clothes of the opposite sex, but Ursula’s had the fucking operations.”
“Operations?” I say. “You mean those breasts aren’t original? And the nether-parts are—”
“Oh, for God’s sakes,” the woman says. She swears at me again, and then addresses the girl, who stares glassy-eyed in my direction. “Come on, baby. Let’s dance.”
For God’s sake indeed.
Spark: Are you there? Is something wrong? You’re late, you know. Respond!
Log Entry: M. Lamb: Still no response. Very unusual.
As the two daughters of Lesbos attach themselves to the thumping drumbeats, I spot my contact on the far side of the crowd. John Flyte is standing with two acquaintances beneath a sickly maple, watching the spectacle and punching away at his iPhone. Let it be recorded that he is wearing a baseball hat turned backwards, a T-shirt sporting some sort of logo, a pair of baggy shorts, and running shoes, an outfit pronouncing him more boy than man. His adolescent garb dismays me: it can only make our work more difficult. Let us pray the young lady he is destined to meet has eyes for his physical appearance rather than for his clothing.
For John Flyte is, as I find when I edge around the crowd and come closer to him, a well-built specimen, thin, muscular, and just a tad under six feet. His hair is brown and cropped short; his eyes are dark, most likely brown; he is tanned, despite the season; his lean face is passably handsome. He gives me, in short, material suitable for work.
At this particular moment his face most attracts my attention. He stands slightly apart from his two companions, both slouching males, and though he participates in their talk and laughter—he has returned his phone to his pocket—that sharp-cut face reflects an inner anxiety, a perplexity with the world and his place in it. His history, given me during my briefing, reveals a lack of faith in anything beyond the material world, yet like most of his race John Flyte is haunted by that nagging sensation of a realm beyond this veil of tears, some place better than the world in which he dwells, a home beyond home.
Each time I embark on a manifestation, I am both fascinated and baffled by this longing among human creatures for their real home. They feel the longing, but they disbelieve in its reality, and so they attempt to fill the void inside themselves in a thousand ways other than seeking the Way. They strive to satisfy that desire, that interior emptiness eating away at them, with all sorts of philosophies, some of them noble, some inane, some as cracked as a broken dish, and to mask their discontent, they chase a rainbow of pleasures—money, drink, sex, sports, hobbies. They make for themselves a thousand tiny gods that bring, predictably, tiny satisfactions.
Our young man, John Flyte, and his friends have turned from the park and are crossing the street. I am in pursuit and will notify my partner of their whereabouts in another quarter hour.
Spark: Have you arrived? Are you all right? Have you located your subject? Where in heaven’s name are you?
Spark: Oww! Owwwwww!
Spark: Oww? What do you mean?
Spark: It hurts.
Spark: What hurts?
Spark: Manifestation hurts. And the controller manifested me next to a rose bush and my wrist was caught on the thorns.
Spark: Of course manifestation hurts. Surely you remembered that?
Spark: How could I remember?
Spark: Oh, no. No, no, no.
Spark: I feel all wobbly inside.
Spark: Please. Please tell me you have manifested on previous occasions. Please tell me you are a veteran.
Spark: I am Novice Class, Yellow Rank.
Spark: YELLOW RANK? YELLOW RANK? Repeat, please!
Spark: I am Novice Class, Yellow Rank.
Spark: In the name of all the angels and saints, what are you doing here?
Spark: I was dispatched.
Spark: We should have trained together.
Spark: My controller refused training me with you.
Spark: WHAT?
Spark: My controller said our mission was special and you were accustomed to coping with the unknown.
Spark: Why me? Why now?
Spark: For heaven’s sakes!
Spark: Very amusing. All right, then. I can work with any material, however inept or clumsy.
Spark: I didn’t know we were allowed to be snarky.
Spark: Mark it down to my assigned human personality. And I do feel snarky. Thunderously so. Now, where are you?
Spark: I was manifested behind a privet bush in the garden of an apartment building on Cumberland Avenue.
Spark: Have you managed to liberate yourself from the deadly rose bush?
Spark: Yes. And there’s no need for sarcasm. Why on earth do humans find this bush of thorns so romantic?
Spark: The beauty of its bloom, its scent, its intricate pattern, and possibly its prickly stem. Now to business: have you located your subject?
Spark: She just now walked past the garden.
Spark: If you have recovered from your wounds, I suggest following her.
Spark: I’m trying, but my feet and hands aren’t operating properly.
Spark: Move, move, move! Your limbs will feel better with movement.
Spark: I’m spinning and I keep falling down.
Spark: Did they teach you nothing? Move!
Spark: I see her. She’s about a block away, walking slowly.
Spark: Quickly, tell me your assigned name.
Spark: Hart. Mary Margaret Hart. I don’t like it very much. Please, just call me Maggie.
Spark: My assigned name is Maximilian Lamb, Ms. Hart. My acquaintances here will call me Max, but you, Ms. Hart, will address me as Mr. Lamb in these sparks.
Log Entry: M. Hart:
I had no idea we were allowed to be snits to each other. It must have to do with our human manifestations.
I am now walking slowly behind my contact toward town.
The heaviness of my form, the scents of flowers and mown grass, the sound of robins, crows, mockingbirds, and traffic, the touch of the breeze on my face: these sensations dizzy me. My limbs are functioning better, but my feet keep getting tangled up. I feel like a fourteen-year-old in heels.
Emily Hoffman is alone this evening, as she is alone most evenings, and is walking, as she often walks, the eight long blocks from her apartment to the Battery Park Book Exchange and Champagne Bar for a glass of chardonnay and some reading. She is wearing a yellow sundress and brown sandals, and carries a green shoulder bag for her purse. Her auburn-red hair falls to her shoulders, and is kept from her face and eyes with a yellow headband. Her glasses—black-rimmed, of all things!—detract from her good looks, but they do magnify, as I observed when she passed me, a pair of beautiful eyes. Those eyes are her strongest feature: wide, blue as the heavens, guarded. She wears only a touch of makeup. She could use, I think, a little meat on her bones—she has a slight build and appears frail—but she has a lovely slim neck. Despite the fact that she teaches kindergarten at a local Montessori school, and so has her summers free, she apparently avoids the heat of the sun, for her skin is alabaster and lightly freckled. Her posture is a marvel, the result of ballet lessons taken through high school. She has no visible marks or piercings.
This particular evening, Emily wears an aura of dejection, of sadness. According to my sources, she travels many nights to the champagne bar, where many men have approached her, but always she has politely turned them away. Part of her rejection stems from her fear of the new. (You would think a kindergarten teacher would be accustomed to the new). Mostly, though, she is shy, protective of her heart, fearful of being hurt again.
Unlike Mr. Lamb’s man, Emily is a believer, a communicant at the Basilica of Saint Lawrence, which the two of us will pass if she follows her regular path. I wish I could record that her faith was that of a lioness, but reports indicate she has lately questioned the Church’s teaching, particularly in the areas of sexuality and of all things, euthanasia. Her mother died last Christmastide of pancreatic cancer in North Florida while under the care of a sister, and Emily now asks herself if she shouldn’t have helped her mother die to avoid so much suffering.
It is not our role to question the purpose of Emily and John meeting each other, but I do wonder whether such an encounter might cause grave damage to her soul.
There: that is description as it should be, as I was so instructed to deliver.
One final note: having recorded my remarks about Emily’s appearance, I wonder about my own. Am I by human standards pretty? I wonder if there is a mirror in my purse.
Spark: Where are you now, Ms. Hart? My contact is entering the Battery Park Book Exchange and Champagne Bar.
Log Entry: M. Lamb:
John Flyte is approaching the bookstore alone. His two companions wanted to drink at the Bier Garden, a local sports bar, and teased him when he insisted on going first to the bookstore.
“Come on, man,” said the shorter friend, who has the build of a baseball catcher. “The Braves are playing.”
“Books?” said the other, taller and ruddy from the sun, and wearing a tattoo of a dragon on his forearm. “What kinda wuss are you?”
“I like their Civil War collection,” Flyte said, striding off toward the store and calling back over his shoulder that he would “catch you later.”
Spark: Our progress is slow but assured. When setting foot on Flint Street, Emily stopped to pick a magnolia blossom from the sidewalk. Someone must have ripped the poor thing from the tree, only to discard it. She spent a full minute studying the branch and its blossom and then, carrying it with her, continued her procession uptown. She seems even more pensive. Not a good sign.
We are now passing the Basilica. In the Marian Garden Emily stopped before the statue of Our Lady and placed the magnolia blossom at her feet. How sweet. And there are several fireflies—lightning bugs, as people here call them. They signal one another as do you and I, with flashes and sparks rather than words. Lovely little creatures….
Spark: I know what lightning bugs are. They also go by the more noble title of fireflies.
Spark: Still in a mood, are we?
Spark: I asked where you were and you responded with magnolia blossoms and bugs.
Spark: We’re passing the Basilica. The church is throbbing with the light and power of the One located inside in the tabernacle. On Max, it’s so beautiful.
Spark: Please, let’s be professional, Ms. Hart.
Spark: My apologies, Mr. Lamb. A question. Can human beings see this energy of the One the way we can?
Spark: Most cannot. Too bound in the flesh. Too settled into the earth. Maybe a few of the saints. Now where are you?
Spark: We are within sight of the Grove Arcade, which of course contains the bookshop, and you have neglected to ask me about my appearance. Or was that on purpose?
Spark: I have a better question. How can you know your appearance?
Spark: I found a mirror in my shoulder purse and looked at myself.
Spark: Good grief! You took time to do that?
Spark: I wanted to see how the controller manifested me. I just wanted a peek. Max—I mean, Mr. Lamb—I think I am what human beings would describe as chubby.
Spark: What do you mean?
Spark: I mean, I think I’m about twenty pounds over the optimal weight.
Spark: That’s not chubby. Women on Internet dating sites with extra pounds describe themselves as “curvy.” Like Bridget Jones in the movies.
Spark: Who is Bridget Jones?
Spark: Look it up in Reference. Now--
Spark: In case you’re wondering, you will find me about Emily’s height, 5’5” tall, but heavier. Hair: blonde tied in a braid, worn over my right shoulder. Eyes: hazel. Face: full. Attire: black dress but informal. Footwear: black sandals. Jewelry: A single slim gold necklace and a number of bands of different colors on my left forearm.
Do you remember Constantia? She accompanied you on a mission not long ago in human time to that house church in China. She told me that you sometimes neglected details. Please keep me apprised of your appearance.
One more thing: How should we approach them?
Spark: While you were mirror-gazing, we have arrived inside the store. My client has secured a glass of red wine—the cheapest in this establishment—and has gone off toward the coffee bar, now closed for the evening, and the shelves of books beyond. After asking for my own glass—I chose the house champagne, and am delighted by the effervescent tickling of my nose and upper lip—I followed in his trail and have found him grazing a long shelf of war histories. He seems, like so many of his gender, particularly smitten with the accounts of violence and mayhem in which human beings so often indulge. I have settled near him in the gardening books and am currently perusing a volume detailing the rudiments of growing radishes.
As for Constantia! I well remember her. The controllers manifested her as a young woman grieving from a forced abortion and seeking solace in the church. An easy role to play: she had merely to shed tears and the congregants—a non-denominational sect of Bible believers—warmed her with pity. I had the onerous task of being a Marxist student confused about God. Try on that part for size, and then critique me for absent-mindedness.
Spark: Mr. Lamb, I meant no disrespect. I--
Spark: A quick note on my appearance. Height: 6’. Weight: about 180 lbs. Face: pleasant, angular, and intense. Hair: black. Eyes: dark brown. Clothing: white shirt with sleeves rolled up on the forearm, khaki trousers, shoes but no socks. I resemble what might be charitably called a “prep or preppie.” No scars or visible marks. No jewelry. No accouterments of any kind save the billfold in the hip pocket of my trousers and the sunglasses in the pocket of my shirt.
Incidentally, I discerned these details with a glance at my reflection in a store window. Please, put away the mirror.
Now, contact me immediately on your entrance, and we will lay our plans.
Spark: My regrets for having offended you. Please mark my comments as stress-induced. Constantia never mentioned the characters the two of you played. Charity demands that she misapprehended your difficulties.
We have arrived, and Emily Hoffman is approaching the wine bar. Ideas for our relationship? Brother and loving sister?
Spark: No, no. We can’t pass as siblings. You don’t resemble me in the least, either in appearance or, I suspect, in demeanor. We will employ the friendship gambit. We met each other at the University of Virginia. You graduated with a degree in nursing and presently work at Mission Hospital. I am an attorney in Winston-Salem who has traveled to the mountains to visit you. I am also investigating the possibility of moving my practice here. You approach Emily, I John, and when he appears comfortable I will bring him to meet you. This tactic will preclude your client’s propensity to flee from male advances.
I do wish John Flyte would either remove or front that baseball cap. Right now he is examining a book on the Boer War, and with the backwards cap, his parted lips, and the blank look on his face, he could serve as a breathing billboard for witless nincompoops.
Spark me when you have news.
Spark: You are awfully rough in your description of John Flyte.
Spark: You are correct. I apologize to nincompoops everywhere.
Spark: At the bar, Emily ordered a New Zealand chardonnay, also the cheapest wine in the establishment, and a glass of water. For myself I selected a German white, expensive but I simply couldn’t resist. How strange everything is! I spoke my first words to a barmaid with a tattoo of an anchor on her shoulder, its chains running up her throat. When I sipped my wine, I choked and coughed, but the second sip glided down my esophagus and took some of the evening’s heat from my face.
Emily has poured some of the water into the wine, no doubt to increase the longevity of the glass. She then dilly-dallied in poetry for a moment—she opened a volume of Hopkins, a good sign—and is now perusing the shelves of fiction in the room just down the steps from you. If you turn, you’ll see her. She has deposited her glasses of wine and water on the short table, and is currently flipping the pages of Tender Is The Night.
Should we switch to client-history modality?
Spark: Commence client-history modality.