Riley Passmore

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Manna from Heaven

Once, there was a boy who found the body of an angel in a cow pasture. The angel’s wings, long and white and splayed like those of the Ancient Mariner’s albatross, lay mucked with manure in a pit of the angel’s own making—after, the boy assumed, the angel fell from Heaven.

The boy approached the angel’s body, his too-small boots squishing through the mud. He had never seen an angel before, nor a demon, nor a ghost. In fact, the only things he had ever seen were the cow pasture in which he walked, the one that belonged to his mother and his father, and the town his family’s farm once fed over ten miles down the road.

He ducked under the rails of the sun-bleached fence, his greasy black hair catching on the prickly timber, and came to the edge of the angel’s wings. Up close, he could see that they were like an eagle’s wings, made with the same larger-than-life majesty of the Creator, except their tips were gold instead of brown, as though dipped in beeswax. The boy’s eyes followed the wings down the angel’s back and soon enough fell upon the angel’s body and the angel’s face. To the boy, the angel looked like a man, with a strong nose and a square chin, but the boy knew that no man had wings like this, save the saints he had seen in the rainbow-stained glass of his church.

The boy plucked a tall blade of grass from the earth, one as long as his arm, and poked the angel in the face. The angel did nothing. He was truly dead.

“Don’t touch it,” the boy heard his father say, coming down the path from their farmhouse. He had spat out the words. “We don’t know where it’s come from.”

“It’s come from Heaven, Papa,” the boy said. He pointed to the sky with his blade of grass as though Heaven were only an arm’s length away.

“Nonsense,” his father said. “Nothing ever comes from Heaven, boy.”

The boy frowned at his father, but his father wasn’t having it. His father was too stern, too hardened to believe in anything like the angel, even though it was right there in front of him. He had always had this problem, the boy knew, not seeing things that were right there in front of him, ignoring whatever he didn’t want to see, explaining away whatever he didn’t want to be true: the blight that had taken their cornfields and the plague that had taken their cattle. The infection that had taken the boy’s mother last summer on a night abloom with the lightning of fireflies.

“What do we do with it, Papa?” the boy asked. His eyes ran up and down the angel’s body one more time, tracing the edges of the angel’s granite-hard, wrought-iron musculature, the muslin shawl wrapping its body like the snake in the Garden.

The boy watched his father surveil the empty pasture that surrounded them. In the distance, the boy could see only the wilted stalks of corn that his father had planted and the carcass of a cow that he, in his advancing years, no longer had the strength to remove. They needed money, the boy knew. The salted meat and canned vegetables in the root cellar would only last another season, maybe less, and how long could either of them last without anything to eat?

Without, the boy thought, anything to sell?

“Go in the barn,” his father told him. “Grab my axe. The heavy one, the felling one. The one hanging up by your mother’s things.”

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They worked well into the evening, first plucking the angel’s feathers as though preparing poultry, ripping out the quills in handfuls, each large enough to write a hundred Bibles, maybe more. Then the boy took an old hacksaw, his father his axe. Together, they butchered the angel’s body in the same way the boy’s father, his father, and his father before him once carved up their family’s cattle. It was hard, sweaty work preparing the meat for market—slicing each cut, wrapping them in newsprint, tying off each piece with twine—but for the first time in a long time, the boy and his father had something worth selling: enough meat to stock the biggest stall in the market.

But the muscle, the boy noticed, was oily to the touch and sticky, too, as though covered in the same kind of slime as a freshly-caught bass. After handling each slab of meat and preparing it for storage, being sure to have cut away the excess fat like a Sunday roast, the centerpiece of a Thanksgiving delight, the boy smelled his fingers and took in the sweet yet pungent scent. The boy’s father said he couldn’t smell a thing, but to him the redolence was unmistakable: freshly-scraped honey, the same kind his mother used to can before she died.

“Are you sure we can eat it?” the boy asked his father in the moonlight.

“We won’t be eating anything,” his father said. “Only the people in town.”

They went to bed exhausted, having piled up their bounty in the root cellar one slab at a time. While putting away the cuts, the boy noticed how happy his father was, how relief had straightened out his back, stretched him out to full height. He, however, felt different. It was as though they had switched places. That night, lying in bed, the boy had all sorts of terrible dreams, nightmares filled with everyone in town feasting on the angel’s sweet, iridescent flesh—the shopkeeper and the sheriff, the bank teller and the schoolteacher. Even his mother was there, her lips slick with grease. One by one, they licked their fingers clean, grew wings from their backs, and ascended into the sky, their fragile, mortal bodies radiant with golden light.

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Banner Art:
Photo by Zoltan Tasi, Unsplash, 2018