“What fools they are to believe the angels in this window are in ecstasy. They do not smile. Their eyes are rolled back in annoyance not in bliss, as my mother’s eyes roll back when she finds us in the dirt with the cider— flies and juice blackening our faces and hands. When the sun comes up behind the angels then even in their dun robes they are beautiful, with their girlish hair and their mean lit faces, but they do not love the light. As I do not love it when I am made clean for the ladies who bring my family money. They stroke my face and smooth my hair. So sweet, they say, so good, but I am not sweet or good. I would take one of the possums we kill in the dump by the woods where the rats slide like dark boats into the dark stream and leave it on the heavy woman’s porch just to think of her on her knees scrubbing and scrubbing at a stain that will never come out. And these angels that the women turn to are not good either. They are sick of Jesus, who never stops dying, hanging there white and large, his shadow blue as pitch, and blue the bruise on his chest, with spread petals, like the hydrangea blooms I tear from Mrs. Macht’s bush and smash on the sidewalk. One night they will get out of here. One night when the weather is turning cold and a few candles burn, they will leave St. Blase standing under his canopy of glass lettuce and together, as in a wedding march, their pockets full of money from the boxes for the sick poor, they will walk down the aisle, imagining their own hymns, past the pews and the water fonts in which small things float, down the streets of our narrow town, while the bells ring and the birds fly up in the fields beyond—and they will never come back.”
@2 years ago
