Read by Peter Noble
After I died I managed to get an entry level position as an assistant angel, wingless class. It was a good job to have. In my day they didn't just give you your wings, you had to earn them; and dying half way through December meant I was earning them the hard way, carrying out miracles. The biggest miracles God does himself, the smaller ones however he feeds down to the angels, subcontracting them out to the lowest bidder. The winged angels in turn, being too busy with all their flying and such, feed down the work to their assistants. Which was where I came in.
The angel assigned to train me reminded me of my first driving instructor. That calm, patronising demeanour combined with the sudden unjustified outbursts of fearful rage made me wonder how they could allow someone so incredibly unstable to be in any position of authority. We started with some pre-prepared drawn out speech on the basics of miracling, the importance of following what he said to the letter and on the proper use of ... something or other. After that I was given my list and sent down to a small village in the south of England to get started. The training hadn't really been necessary, I already knew the key tenets to getting ahead: Work harder than anyone else, think outside the box and most importantly, cut corners.
The first person on my list was Percy. Percy was a grumpy, cantankerous old man. No family and no friends. To his neighbours the Smiths he was nothing more than a nuisance; even Mrs. Smith had lost all sympathy after she'd tried to take pity on him one afternoon, only to be stuck in a two hour conversation about how the recycling didn't take the right kind of paper. The Smiths were just an average family. Mum and dad worked, the ten-year-old son played and the 15-year-old daughter sulked. They didn't hate Percy, he just wasn't in their circle of love.
Deep down, Percy wasn't what he seemed. Yes, he was grumpy and cantankerous. He was most certainly old, with no friends or family to speak of. But outside of that he wanted to be loved. When Percy was eight his mother had run off with the milkman; at ten, his father explained this had been because she didn't love Percy and promptly left himself. When he was 17, Percy's first boss fired him for being ugly. At 26 Percy married the love of his life, but two days after his 28th birthday she ran off with the milkman. Percy's life carried on like this; he was 72 now, and longed for the warmth of another human being who truly cared about him.
Percy had two paths ahead of him this Christmas. If he spent Christmas Day alone he'd die late in the afternoon. To say that he would die of loneliness was absurd; it was going to be the sleeping pills and vodka fuelled by the loneliness that killed him. If, however, the Smiths were to take him in that Christmas, make him a part of the family for even just one day, he'd die happy two months later of a heart attack.
I set to work dropping hints to the Smiths to invite Percy round. Nothing seemed to work. Even when I let Mrs. Smith see a subtle hint of what the day would hold for Percy on his own, she just took it as a Bailey's-induced daydream and moved on. Eventually I realised that it wasn't about bringing the Smiths to Percy, but bringing Percy to the Smiths. With that in mind, I popped a note through Percy's door inviting him to Christmas dinner.
Percy was delighted. He put on his best suit, squeezing into his trousers and chuckling to himself at how much they'd shrunk over the years. He got out a few small knickknacks for the son; for the daughter pulled £20 out of his cash tin. For Mr. and Mrs. Smith, to whom he was eternally grateful, he took out an exquisite bottle of scotch.
At 1pm on Christmas Day Percy rolled up to the front door to give his gifts and enjoy his first proper Christmas dinner in 20 years. Regrettably for me, the timing of his visit coincided almost exactly with the peak of the Smiths’ Christmas argument. It was heated, it was nasty and it happened every Christmas Day. Had he turned up 30 minutes later the argument would've been over and the family as joyful as if it had never happened. At that moment however, Mr. Smith answered the door looking for anyone to take his undirected anger out on.
His unreasonably brutal dismissal snapped something in Percy's head, or at least that's what the detective at the scene had written in his report a few days later. It was apparently one of the most violent scenes of uncontrolled fury and murder that he'd ever seen. Percy didn't actually die that day, or even in a few months. He lived for another three years in prison and made a lot of friends. When he died, Percy was happy and surrounded by inmates who cared about him. I still don't get why they say that this doesn't count as a successful miracle.
*
And then there was the church. That bloody, stupid church will haunt my record until the day I die (which is a long time in the afterlife). It was a classic situation, big company wants to demolish the church to make room for a shopping centre, the church trying to raise enough money to buy the land and keep its doors open. The 'guidelines' told me to visit each and every person in the village and to nudge them into donating. With everyone giving a little money the church could've been saved and then some. Frankly, this was inefficient and uncreative. I had a much better idea, and on paper it was brilliant.
Nothing saves a building like an endangered species taking up residence. I wasn't exactly allowed to create life, but that didn't mean that I wasn't allowed to move it. I decided to move a species that would not only save the church but give it enough attention to keep it open forever. I moved the last known Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers into the basement, then waited for their noise to attract attention and for the church to be saved.
It was during the evening mass that the beams in the basement gave way. It turns out that they were rotten anyway and had maybe six months left in them. Had all the donations been received then it would've been discovered and repaired in a survey, but with the woodpeckers going at them hammer and tongs they collapsed under the strain. 57 people died in the wreckage, not to mention all the woodpeckers in the basement. I suppose it was one less species for the endangered list.
*
I had just one thing left on my list, and after my previous failures I wasn't just going to get it right, it was going to be spectacular. Screw this subtle unobtrusive miracle nonsense. If I was going to finish this I was going to do it in style. The last thing on my list was an eight-year-old named James.
James was a lively boy, but just ever so sensitive. On Christmas Eve his parents had been fighting. From an adult perspective it wasn't a real argument, it wasn't about anything serious and it certainly didn't mean anything. To James though, it meant that his parents were breaking up, that it was all his fault and that the only way to save them was to leave and never come back.
He packed the important provisions he'd need for his trip. His toys and a few cans of food went into his backpack and out of the door he went. He was crying at the first corner, partly from missing his parents, but mostly from not getting to open his presents. As he reached the next corner he started to feel nervous. After twenty minutes his nervousness was replaced by fear, and after another ten minutes his fear was replaced by terror. It was dark by then, and James was lost.
On his own, James would've made it back easily, cold and tired but safe nonetheless. My job was to give him just a little helping hand, but I was going to do more than that. I created a star shining miraculously in the night, guiding James home. Before he had time to think, James was walking through the front door, greeted by the confused faces of his mother and father who'd thought he'd been asleep upstairs the entire time.
NORAD spotted the star at 12:07am on Christmas Day, along with over a dozen astronomers. At 12:54am it was identified and confirmed as a previously undetected asteroid on a collision course for earth.
By 6pm on Christmas Day the news was global; they were saying they had 48 hours before it struck. The star had completely disappeared by then but it didn't stop the selfish, headline-grabbing reporters making a meal out of it. Following the news were mass suicides, looting and rioting, a sweep of murders and violent crimes across the planet. By midnight the death-toll was well above 100 million. News finally came out that it wasn't really Judgement Day the next morning, but by then I was already getting the blame.
They made a wall in heaven honouring all the people who'd died on that Christmas Day, and thereafter nobody really celebrated it any more. On earth, it became known as the day the world almost ended. Saying that, some people did say it was a miracle that it didn't.
For me, I like to call it a learning experience; unfortunately, nobody seems willing to give me a second chance and show what I've learned. It's like the old saying goes; an angel without wings is one of two things; a good man on a journey or a demon at the end of one. Well, from what they tell me this is the end of my journey, so that's just peachy.
© Gawain Griffiths, 2012
Gawain
Griffiths would describe himself as
intelligent, witty, charismatic and above all, modest. Living in
London most of his life and working with children and young people,
he only began to write quite recently after his partner talked him
into it.
Peter Noble trained at LAMDA and the Royal Academy of Music. He is a narrator for RNIB Talking Books, and is now doing an MA in Creative Non-Fiction at UEA. He attended 18 different schools in seven different countries, on four continents, so there’s a lot of material.
Comments