Hell Followed with Us(39)

The hospitals are full. We have patients on the floor, in the halls. They’re dying there. And the ones that don’t die…Look. My advice? As soon as you start vomiting black, or feel your organs moving inside you, the only thing I can recommend is euthanasia.

—Anonymous nurse at West Acheson Medical Center



Six wings. Death on his pale horse. The monster of the sea and blasphemy.

The wrath of the Lamb.

I chase Seraph.

At first, I’m not sure how. I spend the rest of the day reciting Revelation from memory, and when I get to Revelation 22:20—Even so, come, Lord Jesus—I rewind back to the top. The end times, measuring the Kingdom of Heaven, the woman in labor, the dragon, and the bride of the Lord. I whisper to nothing, trying to find some connection to the disease under my skin. I run my tongue over my teeth, chew on my nails, grind the bones in my hands together until they hurt. I take a wad of rags from under my pillow and cough up rot.

Is it visions of the end, or the Flood eating holes in my brain? Seraph is burning through me, readying my insides for the inevitable shattering of my human form into something blessed. It’s reached my gray matter, burrowed between my synapses, and gotten into the lobes, the neurons, all the little pieces of me, and maybe that’s why, when I squeeze my eyes shut and pray, I am given the gift of sight.

Dead New Nazareth and the blood-pink river. The crows. The trees and the underbrush. The beast of fangs, feathers, and flesh across the stream, dappled in sunlight and shadow, baring its teeth. The angel that gave the vision to John of Patmos, and the angel that gives this to me: a body twisted under God’s will into something else, winged and sacred.

Isaiah 6:2—And above him stood the seraphim. Among the trees is Seraph.

I wade into the water and climb up onto the other bank, squeezing between trees. Seraph rears back and snarls, but I whisper, “You don’t scare me.” I can make out more of it now—its blazing white eyes, the gleam of the sun on its teeth—but not much else before it clamors into the branches of old-growth trees, sending down a rain of twigs and brown leaves, a massive winding shadow disappearing farther into New Nazareth.

I follow and come out from the trees into the back of campus. The old university has been scrubbed clean of all things secular, transformed into a liminal space between the old world and our next life in the Kingdom of Heaven. For once, it lies silent. The soldier preaching in the plaza is gone. The bell doesn’t ring to call the faithful to worship. There are no women walking to the parking lots made fields, no children running through the grass. But there are still blessings painted across sprawling windows, concrete paths winding through towering buildings, trees wavering in the breeze. This was home for five years. I know New Nazareth better than I know myself.

The shadow of Seraph digs its claws into the side of a building and hauls itself up to the roof. I follow.

I’ve never chased anything like this, not really. Theo chased me, and I let him, both now and when we first fell in love. Dad chased freedom for both of us in Acresfield County, and I just held on to his sleeve. I barely even chased the idea that I might be a boy. I didn’t want to think about why I never felt at home in my skin, why my name never felt like mine, why I was so apathetic about everything the Angels said a girl should be. I thought I was tired of an Angel’s womanhood, of loyalty and purity, of all the terrible things they tried to cram into our heads. But that was never enough, all the excuses were never enough, and dysphoria had to wrap its hands around my neck and hold me down, baptism in drowning, before I faced the fact that living as a girl would kill me long before the Angels did.

My boyhood threatened to destroy me unless I looked it in the eye. I’m not going to let Seraph do that to me too.

I follow Seraph into the heart of campus, where towering buildings encircle the student union. I throw open the glass doors and step through the mess of chairs in the old food court, up the spiral steps to the fourth floor and through a hidden staircase to the roof.

Up here, Seraph sits on the other side of the skylight, a towering shadow backlit by the sun. A massive creature of wings and sharp edges. Diseased flesh and exposed muscle.

How close do I have to get? What do I have to do to face it? Whisper across the roof, hold its warped face in my hands, look into its eyes and bare my own teeth?

I pause, watching. A long tail made of sinew and bone wraps around its hunched body. I squint against the sun, and I can’t make out any of its features, except the hissing of breath and the flutter of so many wings.

I say, “I’m here, you son of a bitch. What do you want?”

Seraph lunges across the skylight and smashes us both through the glass.



* * *





I wake up with a piece of glass in my mouth.

I roll off the mattress and hit the cold, waxed floor, kicking my sheets and trying to spit out blood. Nothing comes out. Nothing? I stare at the ground, but it’s night, it’s dark, and I can’t see anything.

There’s glass stuck in my mouth.

I run my tongue over my teeth, and it snags on my top left canine. It wasn’t always this big. It’s scraped my upper lip raw. I didn’t think I had another smaller, normal tooth smashed backward to make room for it, and I didn’t think it was as sharp as—

As sharp as shattered glass.

For the word of God—it is sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow.