Good Bones - Margaret Atwood [20]
No, she would say. I don’t know. I need a cigarette. Don’t make me dizzy.
An Angel
I KNOW WHAT the angel of suicide looks like. I have seen her several times. She’s around.
She’s nothing like the pictures of angels you run across here and there, the ones in classical paintings, with their curls and beautiful eyelashes, or the ones on Christmas cards, all cute or white. Much is made, in these pictures, of the feet, which are always bare, I suppose to show that angels do not need shoes: walkers on nails and live coals all of them, aspirin hearts, dandelion-seed heads, air bodies.
Not so the angel of suicide, who is dense, heavy with antimatter, a dark star. But despite the differences, she does have something in common with those others. All angels are messengers, and so is she; which isn’t to say that all messages are good. The angels vary according to what they have to say: the angel of blindness for instance, the angel of lung cancer, the angel of seizures, the destroying angel. The latter is also a mushroom.
(Snow angels, you’ve seen them: the cold blank shape of yourself, the outline you once filled. They too are messengers, they come from the future. This is what you will be, they say; perhaps what you are: no more than the way light falls across a given space.)
Angels come in two kinds: the others, and those who fell. The angel of suicide is one of those who fell, down through the atmosphere to the earth’s surface. Or did she jump? With her you have to ask.
Anyway, it was a long fall. From the friction of the air, her face melted off like the skin of a meteor. That is why the angel of suicide is so smooth. She has no face to speak of. She has the face of a grey egg. Noncommittal; though the shine of the fall still lingers.
They said, the pack of them, I will not serve. The angel of suicide is one of those: a rebellious waitress. Rebellion, that’s what she has to offer, to you, when you see her beckoning to you from outside the window, fifty storeys up, or the edge of the bridge, or holding something out to you, some emblem of release, soft chemical, quick metal.
Wings, of course. You wouldn’t believe a thing she said if it weren’t for the wings.
Poppies: Three Variations
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row.
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
–John McCrae
1.
I HAD AN uncle once who served in Flanders. Flanders, or was it France? I’m old enough to have had the uncle but not old enough to remember. Wherever, those fields are green again, and ploughed and harvested, though they keep throwing up rusty shells, broken skulls. The uncle wore a beret and marched in parades, though slowly. We always bought those felt poppies, which aren’t even felt any more, but plastic: small red explosions pinned to your chest, like a blow to the heart. Between the other thoughts, that one crosses my mind. And the tiny lead soldiers in the shop windows, row on row of them, not lead any more, too poisonous, but every detail perfect, and from every part of the world: India, Africa, China, America. That goes to show, about war – in retrospect it becomes glamour, or else a game we think we could have played better. From time to time the stores mark them down, you can get bargains. There are some for us, too, with our new leafy flag, not the red rusted-blood one the men fought under. That uncle had place-mats with the old flag, and cups and saucers. The planes in the sky were tiny then, almost comical, like kites with wind-up motors; I’ve seen them in movies. The uncle said he never saw the larks. Too much smoke, or fog. Too much roaring, though on some mornings it was very still. Those were the most dangerous. You hoped you would act bravely when the moment came, you kept up your courage by singing. There was a kind of fly that bred in the corpses, there were thousands of them he said; and during the bombardments you could scarce hear