text: When I was young my father told me to be afraid of angels. They spend their time lurking just beyond your sight, wearing beautiful faces that are overflowing with deadly demons teeth. He told me, once, that everyone meets an angel at least one time in their life, and then he looked at my mother with suspicion in his pale celery coloured eyes. I always hated celery, but I love my father dearly. Mother would always shake her head and scoff when he spoke of angels. You could always see it in her face when she looked at him that she loved that crazy man more than life itself. She told me that she could have the whole wide world, all its sweets and riches, but they were nothing but ash were he not there at her side. Tasteless and dull, ceaseless monotony worth less than the gravel under your shoes. She told me that when I asked if she loved him. Never quite had the courage to ask if she loved me. Some days I get real close to asking. Others... Well, I guess I just knew. I got my answer in the end. Sixteen years ago on the twenty first of May... I was still just a happy kid. God, I'll never forget the hot reek of blood in my nose. The damp warmth of the day clinging to my skin like a muggy film. It had been raining a lot, and the first clear day in over a week was a hot one. Authorities claimed some wild animal had done it, in the end. My father had been meaning to fix the back door for eons. The paint was chipped and peeling away, the rich colour of dark chocolate being ripped away by time, and the thing squeaked like you just stepped on a mouse. I walked in the front so I didn’t notice right away that the old back door had been torn from the house as if it were nothing at all. My focus was the strange, heavy, coppery smell. I remember calling for my mother clear as day and I swear I heard her call back to me. This sweet little hint of sound, strong and bold in ways I could never be. “I'm in the kitchen!” Now, her hands always shook a little, as far back as I can remember. My memories are fading now but her voice was always clear as a crystal glass. A little high-pitched and sweet as fresh fruit. The sound of her laugh gets fuzzier everyday. Fainter. Like she's leaving me behind even in my thoughts but to this day I know I heard her to me. “I'm in the kitchen!” So I kicked off my shoes and threw my favourite hoodie a little to the left onto the first step of the stairs. It usually smelled of cigarette smoke, yet never once in my life and I even held a cigarette. Somehow that sharp twisting smell remained stuck to the fabric. Angels, my father said. My mother scoffed, that sound only she could make into a gentle, loving embrace, and she told me; “It must be that boy that you hang around. Ernest? Aaron?” It was funny that he didn't smoke either. None of my friends did. We were never cool enough for that. In the end it doesn't really matter much. Doesn't stop me from walking into that kitchen and it doesn't take the memories away. Not even time could dull this day. The walls had always been this wretched shade of green. Sort of watery, almost yellow and almost tan but somehow not. They were solidly green, you couldn't call them anything else, yet they also weren’t really green. But that day they were painted anew. That day I saw them dripping fresh crimson in all of the places that there weren't holes. As thick is my wrist and more than a hand deep these gouges ripped through the walls almost clean to the other side. There wasn't anything left of my beautiful mother's throat. Her body was cold and stiff where she lay over what was left my father. He was hardly even recognizable anymore outside of the gold feather shaped pin on his jacket, and a single shining ivory orb betraying one of those familiar celery green eyes. There was love still gleaming from my mother’s glassy baby blues. It was that day, almost that very moment that I saw my first angel. Our back door was in the kitchen and through the hole left behind I saw a monster. Hunched over, with bones too sharp and muscles too thick, it's body wasted away like it was staving. Skin the colour of stolen dreams. Around it’s almost comically small head was a halo of horns. Golden daggers longer than my forearm arching upwards from its bare scalp. Scaly shoulders protected non-existent ear’s sloping downwards into too long limbs... Great webbed Wings, each bearing a single 'thumb' with a claw longer than one of my father’s old beer bottles. Each of its legs was longer than I was tall, thick as a saplings tree trunk and dyed a sticky scarlet that ended just inches above its knees. Gargantuan clawed feet arched away from the ground... Never did see its face. I called the police not long after, stuttering so badly I didn't even know what I was trying to say. Tears on my cheeks felt so sticky I was sure if I looked they be the same hue as the kitchen walls. I wonder what they thought walking into that mess. I tried to tell them what I saw on the yard. The one officer, a woman with almond-shaped eyes and hair darker than the night sky, told me I was in shock. She said she was very sorry for my loss. They couldn’t explain to me the bloody prints on the grass, two perfectly human looking footprints, two much larger, and two partial prints that were each tipped with four holes the size of my head. You know it's kind of funny. We never did find that old door.