Dissecting Angels by Mason Koa

When hunting season started, my brother Isaac and I brought out the Remington and shot down angels by the creek. We’d descend the hill at dawn and lug back the carcasses in the evening. We bottled the blood for chapels and sold the bones for change to research teams on the black market. Whatever was left, Isaac kept in jars under his bed.

He taxidermied one for us as a Christmas decoration. He displayed it in the living room and prayed to it every night at ten. I dressed it in an old sweater and jeans I had fished out of the closet. He said it looked better the wild way.

“I’m a proponent of idol worship,” Isaac told me, touching the angel’s arm. “Gives me something to feel. Something to believe in.”

“Lord have mercy,” I said, starting to cross my chest before shaking my head. I think it was last year when we decided that we were done waiting for Jesus. We said that he could have resurrected and died about four hundred times by now.

“I know where that rogue is, right now. He works in a cubicle. Doing spreadsheets,” said Isaac. That’s why we live out here, he told me, because if he saw him in the workplace, he would blast the king of the cosmos’ brains out, right then and there.

Isaac replaced the stuffed angel’s eyes with 8-balls, black and cold. I thought it was kind of crude. It still looked alive.

Mom used to tell me to read the Bible. We were a Bible family. By the time she died, I had only read Genesis. It was Isaac who really read it, and when he told me that the Bible said to move down by the creek to hunt angels, I had no bones to pick. Even so, I thought a lot about Genesis, especially about Cain, tiller of the ground. I thought a lot about God, like why He praised Abel’s sacrifice but not Cain’s. I thought again about Cain, who bludgeoned Abel to death. Then I thought again about God, who banished Cain to wander forever. I think God should have forgiven Cain. Maybe Abel deserved it.

When we were younger, we ran out on the lawn and pretended to be the brothers. Isaac chose first and chose Abel, naturally. I was left with Cain, and I wadded the grass into my fists. I laid down the bundles on the tree stump while Isaac waved around a stick to guide his imaginary sheep. He frowned.

“A good shepherd has real animals,” he said.

I ignored him until, the next day, he placed a dead possum on the stump. I would not have assumed it was dead before I saw a dark pool form under its body. Isaac’s hands were twitching.

I relived the memory as I came over to the living room to set the table. When I ran out of knives, I put down the scalpels we used to dissect the angels. I retrieved two plates, the bread, and the wine bottle. I noticed that the wall looked empty. Then I realized that the stuffed angel was gone.

Upstairs I went to check up on Isaac, wine bottle still in hand. I heard a low groaning sound from the room and opened the door to find Isaac panting over the frozen angel on the bed, jeans strewn across the floor. With wide eyes, he stared back at me. The face of Cain flashed in my mind, and I gripped the bottle with both hands and brought it down shattering over his head. With wine staining the sheets, the angel poised unfazed at what looked like a murder scene.

“You and I, we’re family now.”

Quietly, I carried the angel back downstairs. I closed the curtains and whispered a little prayer. Over broken bread, I looked back to the taxidermied angel. It—she—with her dead 8-ball eye, winked.

Mason Koa

Image by Ingo Kramarek from Pixabay – Open bible flanked with lighted candles.