Angel Dust by Aurora Morgenstern (summer beach reads .TXT) 📕

dishes out in hell", and with those words he takes a fork and steals a bit of egg out of the pan. I playfully fake a glare and he pretends to be hurt. He laughs, the sound resonates loudly in my ear and I feel myself slip away and grow distant. As much as I feel better with him around, I don´t feel able to join him in his laughter. I can smile along and make jokes with him, but I can´t laugh like that. If I even tried he would notice and it hurts not being able to join in, I don´t want to be like this. I don´t want to be scared and distant again, I want to be...better. But I can´t be, not with everything resurfacing. It feels like a cold slap in the face by the universe. He stops laughing and looks at me for a good long minute in what I would call concern, but he obviously choses to keep hsi thoughts to himself and I am quite thankful for that. I transfer the eggs onto two plates and we eat together. Nathaniel tells me stories about how his first training sessions went and how he accidentally almost impaled himself on a spear during his lessons with Raphael. 

"How long do you think Gabriel and Michael will be gone?", I ask him suddendly conscious of my own training, especially the flying lessons. 

"That fully depends on the nature of their business, they shouldn´t be much longer than another day or two though. Since it´s raining I guess it´s safe to assume Raphael won´t be coming along to train you today. So I´ve been thinking that if you want I could go and get my guitar and teach you a bit?", he sounds nervous, almost as if he fears I´ll reject his offer. Something quite unusual for him. 

"I´d like that, I have to warn you though. When it comes to music I´m untalented and my lack of coordination doesn´t help at all", I answer him and he sighs in relief. 

"I´m sure you´re not that bad", he replies softly and soon after leaves to get his guitar. I feel sorry for him for having to trudge through the pouring rain. When he returns he is absolutely soaking and soon enough a puddle has collected around him. I rush to get him a towel since that´s the best I can do considering I don´t think raiding Michaels warderobe for something dry is a particularly great idea. It´s only then that i realise I don´t even know which room is his. Without respect for Nathaniels privacy I rummage through teh bag he brought with him the night before and I am relieved to find that he was thoughtful enough to bring more clothes with him. He gives me a questioning look when i return with the towel and his clothes in my arms, but he doesn´t dare to make any remarks. Probably because he is afraid I might send him straight back out into the rain fi eh doesn´t behave himself. I set the clothes down on the counter and hand him the towel, he dries himself as best as he can but his wings are still dripping wet by the end of it. 

"Do you want me to...", I begin awkwardly, unsure wether touching another angels wings is appropriate at all. 

"Please do", he says and hands me back the towel. He seems uneasy, almost uncomfortable. I take a deep breath before I turn to walk around him to get a better reach for his wings. I take a moment to admire the colour and teh softness of his feathers up close, I haven´t had a chance to get this close to a pair of wings other than my own before. Even though his wings are covered in water, I noticed that instead of soaking into the feathering, the water rather sits in drops on the cover feathers. The ones deeper down, the more soft feathers are soaked through with water. Carefully I reach out with the towel and begin to pat his wings down softly with the towel rather than rubbing it across. When i turn a bit to the side I can see that his eyes are closed. I stop for a moment and he opens his eyes to look at me, they look a little lighter than usual. 

"Am I hurting you?", I ask quietly with an evident worry in my tone.

"Not at all, why do you think you are?"

"You had your eyes closed and you´re really tense. So I thought I was doing something wrong"

"I´m sorry if I gave you that impression. It´s just been a long time since I´ve let anyone touch my wings. For angels it´s quite a show of trust because our wings are so sensitive to the touch", he explains with a half smile that seems almost forced. 

"Oh, I can stop if it makes you uncomfortable?",I offer.

"No, no you might as well finish drying them. It´s hard to explain what I mean...", I continue drying his wings, all the more careful now. We both let out a quiet sigh of relief when I set teh towel down on the counter and turn around to face him. His clothes are still clinging to his skin and I can´t help but stare a little at his chest muscles taht are quite visible due to his shirt sticking to him like a second skin. To my great surprise he takes his shirt of then and I blush. I turn around to give him some privacy to change, wondering why he doesn´t leave the room to get changed and why he didn´t at least ask me to turn my back. Thoughts race through my head and I decide for my own good to shut them out, be reciting a poem from my childhood in my head. The first blossom was the best blossom for the child who never had seen an orchard. For the youth whom whiskey had led astray, the morning after is the first day. The first apple was the best apple for Adam before he heard the sentence, when the flaming sword endorsed the fall....there it is again. I never so much noticed this line in the poem before, possibly because I didn´t know Michael back then. It´s one of the few poems I still enjoyed after what happened to my grandmother, after everything. My mother stopped reading to me then, she couldn´t really bear to be around me much and I never did blame her for it. So when she stopped reading, I began to read to myself in hushed voices late at night. This was one of the poems I stumebeled across by myself. Apple blossom it is called. Thinking about this poem I am drawn back into memories of when ym mother still read to me in our livingroom back in New Orleans before everything changed. 

 

The room is dimly lit with dozens of colourful balloon like lamps hanging on the walls. The floor is covered in heavy rugs of all shapes and sizes that my mother had aquired over the years. The small fire place in the corner gave off a cozy warmth and I could smell the fresh wood in the basket next to it. It smells like pines, like deep and dark forests. It smells like adventure. My mother is sitting infront of me on a red pillow made out of a velvet knock off material. It´s her favorite pillow. My mother is everything I am not, tall and slender and beautiful. He long hair is a stark contrat to my own short black curls and her eyes are dazzelingly blue. I can smell the heavy scent of her lavender perfume in the air. She reads to me in a melodic voice and I am entranced by her. She reads me poem over poem, sometimes they are happy poems that make her eyes light up. Sometimes they are sad poems and her voice shakes a little when she reads. There is one poems she always reads, I have heard it over and over again. It´s a very strange poem for her, much too long. She prefers short poems, but for some reason this one is addictive to her. She tried to explain it to me countless times, how it draws her in and holds a mirror to her face, subjecting her to all of her emotions and her own self. But despite all the emotional climax it leaves her unsatisfied, so she reads it again. It´s Poe´s poem "the Raven". By now she has commited it to memory and I have heard her read it so many times that I can almost whisper along to it. But I don´t dare to interrupt her when she reads, I am too much in awe. She becomes something beautiful, but distant. Untouchable until the last lines have sounded. Until the spell is broken. To me it´s just a poem, I don´t feel the yearning for it like she does. She tells me time and time again that some day I will find a poem that will draw me in like that, that will become my own personal heroin, a literary addiction. She always tells me that nothing is more compelling, more dangerous than literature. Literature changes you, you can start a book and finish it a completely different person. 

 

"Are you alright there?", Nathaniel´s words rip me from the memory almost cruelly. For the fragment of a second I am incredibly angry, could he not have just let me have this one moment of peace? I wish I could go back to the way things were back then, when I was still a child. Sitting there with awestruck, huge eyes listening to her. But then i realise he can´t know, he couldn´t possibly understand the importance this memory had to me. How could he know how dear thos emoments were to me and overall how much I miss the person I was back then. 

"Just a memory, sorry if I blanked out on you", I quickly apologise. I must have blanked for quite a while because he has changed and is now standing infront of me, his arms crossed infront of his chest. 

"Oh okay, come on then! I´ll show you some simple chords!", Nathaniel walks throuzgh the house as if he has been here a hundred times plus. His walk an arrogant stride as always. I shake my head, he is undergoing way too many personality changes for me to keep up this morning. My heart rate becomes rapid when instead of the livingroom, he goes up the stairs and into the library. Shit, shit...ok get it together. It´s only a book. It can´t hurt you. I swallow heavily, taking all my courage and enter the room after Nathaniel. 

 

The guitar lesson went pretty well, Nathaniel is a very patient teacher and he managed to teach even talentless me a few chords. I much prefered listening to him play though. He is incredibly talented, it seems like the music just comes naturally to him. He is completely at ease with himself when he plays and it´s amazing to watch. His playing almost managed to distract me from the nagging fear in the back of my mind, almost but not quite entirely. Right now he is playing some songs that I don´t reognise. An idea forms in my head as I watch him and I muster up my courage to ask him.

"Nathaniel, would you mind if I drew you while you´re playing?", I bite my lip nervously and my hand sneaks down to the hem of my shirt. 

"Not at all, go ahead. Do you want me to pose a certain way?"

"No no, just keep playing. It´s best if you just forget I´m here!", I advise while I hurry off to get my sketch pad and pencils from my room. Being able to manifest stuff would really come in handy, I´m going to ask Gabriel to teach me that next time. I