Talking quickly now, Pam pointed out the few positive features of the tiny cabin. “The range and refrigerator are newish, and there’s one of those stackable washer/dryer combos in the bathroom. There are clean sheets and blankets in the chest at the foot of the bed.”
“Bed?”
“Through that door.” Pam gestured toward the opposite end of the cabin, but all there was to see was box after box piled to the ceiling, leaving only a maze-like path between them.
“Door?” Adriel repeated blankly.
“It’s there behind the wall of boxes. A little cleaning could make this into a cute place.“
“A little cleaning?” Adriel felt like a parrot stuck on repeat. Pam deserved a prize for understatement of the year—maybe for the century. “What do the boxes contain?”
“Probably a bunch of junk. My uncle lived here until…early onset dementia set in a few years ago; I had to put him into a nursing home this spring and since he had no kids of his own, all of this,” she waved a hand expansively, “turned into my problem. There’s been no time to even think about sorting it all out.”
“Sisyphus would have chosen his rock compared to this task,” Adriel muttered.
“Who?” Pam’s brow wrinkled. “Did everyone have a weird name where you come from? I’ll bet you grew up in a commune. That would explain a lot.”
“Sisyphus? Mythological figure sentenced to push a large boulder up the same hill every day for eternity, and no, I did not grow up.” Catching the raised eyebrow Pam shot her, Adriel quickly added, “in a commune.”
Pam threaded her way through the piles of detritus to the one space in the cabin that was relatively clear: the kitchenette. Mismatched lower cabinets sprawled from the refrigerator in one corner to the stove in the other, with the sink halfway between. The upper cabinets were all the same except for the handles. Adriel watched impassively while Pam reached down behind the small range and presumably switched on the gas. Once each burner had been tested, she moved on to plug in the fridge.
“Let me just get the water turned on and fire up the water heater.” She grabbed a couple of tools from a drawer near the sink, then bit her lip as she looked around critically. “I’ll stop by Bud’s Shop Rite on my way home and pick up a few essential items. This mess is worse than I remembered. Sorting through the boxes alone will be enough to earn you a year’s worth of rent. I’ll stock up the fridge.” She pulled open a few cabinets to see of there might be any usable foodstuffs left in them.
Her eyes met Adriel’s, chagrin on her face when she found nothing more than a dozen cans of something called SPAM. “And the cabinets. And some cleaning supplies. And I’ll have the phone line reconnected.” Twisting her body to reach under the sink, Pam did whatever it was she needed to do. Adriel couldn’t tell, other than that it involved some banging and a fair amount of cussing.
Satisfied, finally, Pam brushed a bit of dust from her hair and turned on the tap. Whooshing noises preceded sporadic gushes of water before the flow settled into a solid stream. Adriel watched Pam duck behind a stand of boxes. From what Adriel assumed was the bathroom came a series of similar noises followed by a faint, “All set.”
“I’ll be back later,” Pam called over her shoulder as she breezed out the door leaving Adriel to look around her new home. As an angel, being thankful was eternally ingrained into her the very molecules of her being; however, today she was no longer an angel, and neither was she thankful. Disgusted, annoyed, and abandoned were closer to the description.
All she wanted was to go to the one place where it seemed she was no longer welcome: home.
***
In the silence that fell after Pam closed the door behind her, Adriel felt more alone than ever before. Despair settled deep in her chest, stole her breath in a suffocating blanket of sadness. A ringing noise sounded in her ears that had nothing to do with bells or phones. Stumbling to the table, she sat and dropped her head onto folded arms while the stinging in her eyes turned to a flood of burning tears. Being cut off from everything she had ever known—her work, her identity as an angel—and landed here, amid a shallow layer of dust and some poor soul’s castoffs felt like more punishment than she deserved. What was she supposed to do now?
Sinking lower into self-pity, the blackness descended until she cursed herself for the stupid choices that had led her to this place; to this time; to this body. This treacherous body with its hunger and pain and tears; she hated it more than she hated pure evil. And she still had to pee.
Too busy wallowing in misery, she missed the rustling sound of the pet door when it opened, the padding of tiny feet as the cat approached. When a tentative paw batted at her hair, Adriel shot out of the chair with her heart hammering in a chest that, before today, had never known the base nature of fear. Today, it had known little else.
Gifted with the ability to become corporeal when necessary, while an angel, her body had always been a thing made of energy, not mass. She was unaccustomed to the way emotions affected the physical.
“Was that really necessary? You scared me,” she wagged a finger at the black cat, who merely regarded her with an unblinking green stare. If he could have, he probably would have smirked at her. Calmer now, she decided a little company might make life here more bearable. A loud yawl split the air.
“Howling at me is not polite.”
As though he understood the words, the cat gracefully turned to spill languidly to the floor. A short span of living in
