Vampire Angel Stands Her Ground

(Note: This short story was inspired by a post on my friend Laurie's blog.
it's a first draft, so I welcome critiques from writers. Most of all, I hope it strikes a chord...}


God will forgive me for choosing earth instead of heaven, but I don’t kid myself about becoming a vampire. He has no tolerance for angels who interfere with free will.

I miss heaven. But I didn’t know, when I volunteered to become a guardian angel, that loving a child can anchor a soul to earth, even one as full of light as mine used to be.

People have the wrong idea about angels. They envision us as mommies with wings, or as their own personal, cloned Virgin Marys. We’re more like data bytes, weightless and bloodless and moving to enact God’s will, not help teenagers lose weight in time for the prom or loved ones survive drive-by shootings. Although, once I did help Mikey find his dog when it dug a hole under the backyard fence so it could explore the neighborhood, and got lost three streets away. I smile every time I think of Mikey. I’m glad he’s in heaven now, although the way he died is the reason I became a vampire.

In heaven, the only emotion an angel feels is joy. You might think that, with no other emotion to counterbalance it, joy would fall victim to the law of diminishing returns and feel like nothing at all, the way the smell of orange blossoms in Florida is overwhelming when you step off the plane, but three days later is unnoticeable. That isn’t the case with celestial joy… it endures for all eternity, except for angels like me who volunteer to serve as earthly guardians.

When I arrived to look over Mikey I couldn’t feel anything at first. The absence of joy took a little getting used to. I thought he was cute, but I have to confess I wondered why he picked his nose so much. And what is it with little boys and guns? They can make them with their pointer fingers, even when they’ve never seen a real one.

It surprised me to realize that children suffer so differently from adults. They haven’t learned to judge or blame, so they assume that anything they suffer is part of them, like a finger or a knee or a daydream. Even when a child dies, it thinks the loss of life is its own doing. Mikey did.

When his father came home drunk he often beat Mikey’s mother. She was a well-meaning person, but after years of abuse from her own parents she didn’t feel any sense of outrage when her husband hit her. Still. How could she have hidden in the bedroom with a pillow over her head to muffle the sound of her son’s screams when he was beaten on the flimsiest of pretexts? His toys were on the floor. He didn’t want to eat his vegetables. He needed to toughen up because it’s a hard world with no room for loser crybabies. That’s how Mikey’s dad justified the beatings, just as his own father had justified similar abuse, and his grandfather and great-grandfather too, reducing the light of their immortal souls to the tiniest of pinpoints, leaving them at risk for slipping into a morass of antimatter. Or hell, if you prefer.

You might think I planted the idea in Mikey’s little mind that his dad didn’t really hate him, or that he was just acting out his own pain. No. There was no need for that. Mikey cried himself to sleep at night because he believed he wasn’t good enough for his dad to love him. He wondered what was wrong with him, and why he couldn’t figure out how to be better. So I only gave him comfort. I filled his little body with a sense of peace so he could fall asleep, and whispered that God loved him. After a while I began to whisper that I loved him too, because I did. I couldn’t help myself.

I knew the father hated himself more and more each time he beat his child. But not enough to stop doing it. Ironic, don’t you think, since Mikey loved his father with an innocence that would have healed him from the deprivation of his own loveless childhood, if only he hadn’t become too hardened to feel it?

Mikey was beaten to death with his father's leather belt.

Not even an angel can witness such a tragedy without succumbing to rage. I had forgotten what it felt like, actually. Heaven opened immediately to call me back before the rage possessed me, but I was already too heavy with it to ascend. It was another angel, not me, who lifted Mikey’s soul and guided him home. I kept seeing his frail ribs through the size 3T shirt he was wearing during the beating. I kept hearing his father lie that the beating was hurting him more than Mikey. I kept seeing his mother plead, “stop, stop,” without calling the police. I didn’t want to be an angel. I didn’t want to obey the will of a God who justified evil as integral to the process of free will. I wanted only to stop this child beater from hurting anyone else ever again.

While the ambulance was on its way, after Mikey had stopped breathing, I gathered my wings around Mikey’s father before he could pretend to himself that he hadn’t hit his son all that hard, or ask himself how else he could teach his son right from wrong, or claim it was an accident. I sucked all of his psychological defenses from him. Drained him dry. Feasted on them. With nothing to protect him from his past he remembered, for the first time in his adult life, how he felt when he was beaten as a child. He collapsed. By the time the paramedics reported his confession to the police, he was so broken I knew he would never again hurt a child.

See what I mean? I interfered with free will. The dad was supposed to grasp the futility of deflecting pain by imposing it on others, thereby healing his soul through his own efforts. I prevented that. I became a soul vampire.

There are many parents like Mikey’s. Men aren’t the only abusers… far from it. And for every parent who would steal a child’s capacity to love and be loved in return, who would destroy the trust that nourishes humanity, there is now a vampire angel who lays in wait. When I can, I drain away their numb ignorance in time to save the abusers as well as the children. But that isn’t always possible.

I wish I had faith that God won’t abandon me. But in a way, he abandons humans to their own free wills, don’t you think? Odd, when he could prevent so much pain by placing life within a more orderly paradigm. I just don’t get it. Meanwhile, as I stand my ground He keeps sending me the same message, over and over:

“On earth as it is in heaven.”

Right. Until then, I prey on parents who create hell on earth.