by John Didday
Before I tell you this, I need you to know that I’m a normal person.
My name is John. I’m an accountant. Or, I was at least. I’ve never missed a credit card payment and I’ve never fallen for a Nigerian prince email scam. I’m not one of those people who goes on TV and fidgets in front of the camera about an alien encounter or a bigfoot sighting and then we find out they worked in a paint factory that slowly poisoned them and drove them crazy. I’m a normal, agnostic forty year old male. Or, I was at least.
It happened when I was alone in my office. My wife, Sara, was in the dining room practicing her piano. Outside, a streak flashed across the night sky. The light persisted as a relic in my eye. I went to the window to look.
I want to say the word that shot like a bullet into my mind as I stood there, but I’ll just describe it first.
A woman — a female body — was outside my window. She was clothed in white fabric, suffused with light, even though it was nighttime. Floating above the lawn at the side of the house. And behind her shoulders — wings. White wings layered with feathers.
Listen. I just told you my name and line of work. I’m not gaining anything by telling you what I saw. I don’t want to tell anybody – every time I do it makes my life worse. The problem is that I need to. So I’m writing it down here and I’m just going to put the copy in the back of my dresser.
Anyway, the figure’s hair shimmered and robes shined and eyes seemed not so much to watch me but to consume me, the window, the house, and everything around me. Her skin was statue-bronze, except it was real skin like yours or mine.
The longer I stared, the brighter she grew, like my eyes weren’t adjusting to the light but some opposite process was happening that made it harder and harder to keep my eyes open. A glorious purity emerged.
A purity of… I mean, I’m not a religious person, but there was something special about her. The smile on her face and her perfect posture and, well, the way she was floating five feet above the ground just by my fence and my manzanita shrubs. Her manner spoke to a greater power that was watching me through my flimsy old window, watching my tired forty year old body in my tired old house.
To be honest, her manner didn’t just speak to or suggesta greater power watching me. The message was clear: this woman was a part of heaven, and I was a mortal somebody. She knew me intimately but also just as one of many other people she’d seen in years past.
She loved me, loved everything I’d ever done, and her eyes told me that every minute of my life had had a purpose and that I mattered and that I always had and always would.
I went out to get Sara where she was playing the piano and led her back into the office, but the angel was gone.
The first person I told was my boss, on our Tuesday 10am Zoom call. He asked how my weekend was, and I told him it was good. He asked what was so good, and I said: “I had a vision on Friday and I’ve just been feeling better since then.”
His eyebrows pinched together. I maintained an earnest expression, and he laughed.
“Oh,” he said. Then we talked about the winter audit set for later in the week.
I wanted to see the angel again, so I convinced Sara to visit a church with me. On the way over, she told me that her parents still go to their church every week, but not because they’re believers; it’s more about having a chance to get together with the community. Her statement felt like something I would have appreciated a few weeks prior, but when she said it I didn’t like it at all. It sounded like a lie.
The church was next to a noisy road where sleek BMWs and big pickup trucks with double exhausts rumbled by. The wooden doors looked small compared to the huge facade of the structure. Looking up at it, it seemed outdated and out of place in the modern world.
It was quieter inside, and the ceilings were very high. Up toward the front there was an obscene life-sized Jesus on a wooden cross, and behind that, stained windows of a shepherd holding a sheep and three poorly-depicted guys in pointy hats.
“It’s quiet here,” Sara said.
“I guess,” I whispered. It smelled like old fabric and the air was cool.
The angel wasn’t there. Maybe she had been once, a lifetime ago, but not anymore.
I’ve spent a lot of time standing in my office, but I haven’t seen anything since. I still kind of sense that she’s calling me. And that I’m supposed to do something with the experience I had. That I have a certain amount of time to honor the memory before it disappears or I convince myself, like everyone else wants to, that it didn’t happen.
Each time I tell someone about it, the power of the memory diminishes. When I’m talking to someone I trust, and I find the right time to bring it up, I get excited. This person will understand me, I hope. But when I describe the feathers or the skin or the way my yard grew so bright I could hardly see, a familiar skepticism invades their eyes. The subtle movements of their eyebrows, like daggers, penetrate into the place inside me that was touched and cut me.
My boss fired me after I told the auditors about my vision during a coffee break. They told my boss I was a frightening religious fanatic, and he put me unpaid leave. Can you imagine that? I guess that’s what happens these days if you see something. You don’t become Moses or Joseph Smith or Joan of Arc. You don’t even get to be a crazy alien person on a TV show. You just get told you can’t be a certified accountant anymore.
Everything in my life and everyone I know wants to tell me what I saw doesn’t exist.
But I know it does.
I’ll just put this in the dresser and maybe someday somebody will see it and believe me.