Angel’s Gate – Teaser
Hi All, just wanted to give you a little taste of Angel’s Gate:
Life wasn’t supposed to move this fast. From birth to death so quickly. It was all too fast, too…over. So many words had been left unspoken, so many questions still unasked. So many things still unresolved between them, but now…now there was no more time. One sentence….one sentence had changed her life, shattered everything. Three words, one death and everything she’d worked so hard to achieve seemed worthless.
For AG Morris those words had stolen everything.
“Your mother is dead.”
Four words and here she stood waiting for a flight to take her back to the one place she had never wanted to return. A flight that would take her home. Home….no…no, it wasn’t home. Not now. Her mother was gone.
Around her was movement, life, sound. Laughter. There shouldn’t have been laughter. Shouldn’t the world have stopped along with her own grief? The weight inside of her seemed to expand, compressing her lungs until she felt she couldn’t breathe. The grief was so huge it should have compressed the entire world. But it didn’t. The pain was only inside of her. The loss was only inside of her.
She wished those words could be erased from her mind, that they could be taken back. That she could return to that morning when everything was alright. When it mattered that the sun was shining, that she was breathing. The words didn’t fade, they didn’t go away.
So much time had been lost, there were so many things she’d meant to say. So many apologies she’d meant to make. Now she’d never be able to apologize for words once spoken in anger. She’d never be able to close the gap they’d both pretended wasn’t there. She’d never be able to forgive her mother for the abnormal childhood she had lived. She’d never be able to ask why. Why an intelligent woman would carve spells into the window sills to ward off demons and to bind angels. She’d never know now why her mother had hated her father so much that she’d never even whispered his name.
“Your mother is dead.”
AG closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the wall. The waiting area near the terminal gate was over crowded. There were no open seats, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care that she was sitting on the floor, shoved into a corner between a stroller with a cranky two year old and an early twenty something that smelled like weed. All she wanted was to turn back time. She would have done anything at that moment to be at home, in her own house, in her own bed, and not there. Anything.
She opened her eyes slowly, hugging her knees to her chest. She watched a pair of teenagers walk across the terminal, heads bowed over their smart phones, but she wasn’t really seeing them. She wasn’t seeing anything. She was just…..waiting. Waiting for her flight and waiting to wake up from what she knew wasn’t a dream. She was just…
Memories came though she tried to shut them out. Memories of summers spent behind shuttered windows. Of hours kneeling before an effigy of a serene virgin while her friends played in the sun. Memories of walking to mass each day, while her mother looked over her shoulder for angels in human form. Angels who wanted to take her away. Memories in which spells were chanted like hymns while Barbie mermaids swam in a bubble bath and she was three and still believed.
Once long ago she had believed all her mother had told her. Once, long ago, she’d believed that angels were real and that God existed. She’d accepted these ‘Facts’ in her infancy and rejected them in her teens. Rejected when she’d finally been able to see beyond the blind faith of a child and see the truth. Angels weren’t real. God existed, maybe, but in an abstract way. Not in the tangible sense her mother had believed. No one else had believed the way her mother had, and as youth faded, AG had seen all too clearly that the mother she’d idolized wasn’t infallible and her word was not truth. She’d seen her mother was human, was flawed. And in seeing had realized the life she’d been raised to follow was a prison. A prison made of fear and zeal and religious fervor. A prison based on a fantasy. The same fantasy that had driven them apart for so long. That had created this distance she’d now never be able to bridge.
At eighteen she’d walked away from a life spent hidden behind doors and windows inscribed with “magic” symbols. Walked away from the mother who had whispered spells beneath her breath like prayers and who’d held secrets never spoken. She’d left behind her home, left her mother with words of anger and rebellion, words, that even now years later, she regretted with her whole heart. She’d run away from the prison of her mother’s making, rebelling not just with the need of youth, but the need for a freedom that had always been denied her. She had run away from the fear her mother’s religion had placed on her. Far, far away.
Now she was a twenty eight year old woman with a career of her choosing, a life of her own making. A life where she was in control. And it meant nothing because her mother was dead.