What was happening to his head? This was something never before experienced in the history of all time. He cried out, for that was the only logical course of action – to thrash and writhe and scream like a little baby, so new of this earth and helpless. But the sound that he could make! He could certainly make it, a loud and grinding and ungodly sound, and he used it as he could. He knew the sound was from somewhere out of reach, way down at the bottom of his throat. 

“Dude. Open your eyes, man!” 

“Hey, you’re alright! It’s okay.”

More sounds from all around and all too familiar. What were those voices? They were impossible to touch, far beyond the horizon. But he could understand them. Yes! He grasped something warm and clung to it with all his might. It was a lot of might – could it be that his strength was returning? Maybe he would even be able to-

“Agh!” 

His eyelids wrenched themselves open, but a blinding light forced them closed shortly after. He was no wiser as to who his guides into the world were. 

“Holy fucking shit!” That one was a screamer like him, only those screams were somehow coherent. 

“Should we call an ambulance? Really feel like that’s what we should be doing right now.”

“But he’s not even hurt. What the hell are we supposed to tell them?”

“The dude just fell out of the fucking sky! How can he not be hurt?” The screamer again. 

“He definitely doesn’t have insurance.” 

Four distinct voices indeed. And surely he had one too, if only it would form words instead of pitiful yelps. But it was lessening and, all too suddenly, it was manageable. Hands wrenched the arm from around his face. The figures had color, it turned out, and lots of it. The white light dissolved into green and red and stripy shoes against the gray. The arms pulled him upwards, up into the world and he did not go back down. What are those grasping claws, two long things that protrude from his being and seem to balance him partially. Well, that was new. He’d seen them before, of course, but never attached to himself. Only to the beasts he was charged with protecting. Beasts like the four surrounding him, holding his limbs so that he could not fall down again. How kindly they were. 

“Here,” one extended a softened cloth toward him. “You should really put some clothes on.” 

Ah, clothing. It’s not acceptable for them to be nude, he gleaned, looking down at his own freshly pink existence. He had chosen to be one of them, so he should learn and abide by their customs. Reaching forward, he took the fabric and held it between…fingers. More claws, and they grasped so well. In awe of his divine creation, he keenly misremembered how it was they dressed themselves. This cloth was not a shawl, it seemed. Shawls didn’t have so many holes. 

“Oh man, come on. They’re just sleeves.” 

“Like this, huh,” the longest of them placed the jacket around him, contorting his spindly arms so they fit through the cloth’s holes. It was warm. 

“What about pants?” 

The four sets of eyes stared pointedly downwards. 

“I know Mrs Langdon said to be charitable, but I am not giving my underwear to some crazy, homeless dude.”

“Ski, that’s so classist.” 

“Don’t act like you know what that means.”

“Like you even know what classism is, dude.” 

“He doesn’t smell homeless,” the longest, who still held a grip on his arm, observed as if their new companion was not present.

The smallest, the screamer, Ski was what they’d called him, produced a black square from his jacket’s incorporated satchel. At once, he breathed life into the thing, the face of it lighting up in all the colors he could see around him. 

“What is this?” He asked, reaching for the flattened brick in the boy’s claw. He was met with quizzical and confronting glares, while Ski snatched the brick out of his reach. 

“Look, don’t try and talk, man. We’ll find you some pants and get you to the shelter.”

“Nuh-uh,” the one wrapped in red fabric grunted. “I have to be home by 6. Dad’s letting me take the truck out.” 

“Could you imagine the extra credit we’d get for helping a citizen in need? You’d never need to retake social again.” 

They deliberated among themselves for a long while. The others had told him this kind liked to argue. The others! They were still up there, in…in heaven! That’s what it was called down here. Oh how he longed for that sacred place. They’d warned him not to come here, but his inquisitive nature got the better of him. What better way to study and protect the humans than as one of them, he’d thought. How wrong he had been. Now the humans had to assist him. 

“There’s a Goodwill on Charlotte,” Ski informed them, returning the magic brick to its place inside his clothing. 

Finally. Some good will and shelter was exactly what he needed. 

“Can you walk?” The longest asked. 

Could he? He could, as it happened, and he demonstrated it with wildness, breaking free from the boy’s hold and walking across the gray. So this was what it was like to walk on two feet in the dust. Quite jarring, not particularly stable, and unpleasant on the soles of the foot, but my Lord was it efficient. He’d almost reached the swinging contraptions on the far side of the expanse by the time they caught up to him. 

“Woah! Wait up. It’s this way, my guy.” 

* * *

Goodwill, as the sky letters read, was not at all what he’d expected. The building was nothing like the temples of worship they were prescribed to build, though it was not used as housing either. Through the shining exterior he could see it was filled with nothing but more cloth. So enraptured was he with this conundrum, and the ever-lasting conundrum of the infinite stone floor which seemed to allow their abundant contraptions free movement, that he did not hear the boy’s attempt at his attention. 

“Hey! You with me? I said what’s your name?” The longest, and thus far most consoling, asked of him. 

“I…I don’t have one. Those are for you,” he told the two boys where they sat on a raised plinth of gray. They shared a short glance between them, before capitulating. 

“Alright. Well, I’m Jackson,” Jackson told him, placing a hand to his puffy exterior. “And this is Ratman.”

“Rat man?” He asked, electing not to join them on the hot stone. Other humans pushed metal cages past them and shouted at each other. 

“It’s not my real name,” Ratman readjusted his headpiece so that the flap was facing backwards. 

“I dressed up as Batman for a halloween party in like, sixth grade. We weren’t like…rich or anything, so my mom picked a costume up from another thrift store. Whoever had it before me was even more in the shit than us, because rats had chewed completely through it. You wanna know where they chewed through? Straight through the crotch, obviously.” 

“It wasn’t even a small hole, that shit was clean through,” Jackson covered his mouth with his water container to disguise his smile. He did a bad job of hiding it. 

“I swear, man! Those rats were looking for something,” Ratman explained, now only in conversation with Jackson. “So yea, then the teacher said I was more like Ratman.”

“And you fucking cried! I mean Jesus Christ, man.” Jackson doubled over, hitting Ratman on the knee. 

It looked as if Jackson was in pain where he wiggled, lying on his side on the stone. Were it not for Ratman doing nothing but turn red, he would have been duly worried about Jackson’s health. Instead, they boy returned to his sitting position and stared straight at him. He returned a smile, not wanting to give the impression that their tale had been inadequate, even if he couldn’t quite understand it. 

“Those two in there are Ski and Toby. Got it?” 

Just then, Toby whistled from across the stone, drawing their attention. He and Ski were caught in a half-run toward them, both with gleaming smiles on their lips. 

“Did you get the pants?” Ratman asked, increasingly unable to tear his eyes away from their companion’s bare behind. 

“We got all that and more coming up!” Toby said, producing what looked to be a twig from his jacket and almost instantaneously replacing it. 

“Oh shit!” Ratman said, flicking his hand in an extremely violent manner. 

Following the four boys behind the building, hopping on alternate legs while he forced his new extremities into cloth holes, he found himself confronted with some large and foul-smelling containers. He would have gone nowhere near them if Ski hadn’t pushed him behind one, so that they made a wall around their little group. 

“What do you have from the Goodwill, Toby?” He asked, ever curious. 

“This, my friend, is the devil’s lettuce.”

“Ah!” He shrieked, cowering away from the smelly cylinder of paper. It was just his luck to be lumped with humans who communed with the devil. Perhaps…perhaps they all did. Perhaps he had been right to come here after all, to teach them once again the ways of the light. 

“You can’t. You mustn’t!”

“He’s so suss, oh my God,” Ski peaked over the metal walls tentatively, but appeared to pay little mind to his teachings. 

“I thought they were meant to be into this stuff?”

“Hey man,” Jackson turned to him, placing a hand on his new jacket, on his new shoulder. “We’re trying to do something nice for you here. It’s just a jay, it’ll make you feel good. Watch.” 

Jackson took the jay from Toby’s outstretched hand and placed it between his lips. They both grimaced as smoke filled the boy’s mouth, before it reappeared again and faded into the sky. Oh no. What would happen to Jackson? Would he transform in a puff of black smoke to a hound of hell, ready to snatch the souls of other humans? Would he writhe and convulse and convert into a demon, prepared to drag them all to the depths? Would he simply keel over and die, right here on this very spot? Just when he expected the worst, Jackson burst out…laughing. Then, they all did. All of them, but not the evil, maniacal cackles he’d expected from devil worshipers. Just small giggles, not unlike those of an infant. 

“Your turn,” Jackson said, as if half his voice had been stolen. 

Well, if he was going to put a stop to this devil’s lettuce he was going to have to know what it did. Why on earth would the devil want his minions to be happy? There was, unfortunately, only one way to find out. He plucked the jay from Jackson’s fingertips. 

* * *

Salt had been a genius addition to this celestial body. It came from rocks! How marvelous. And an even more genius addition to these potatoes. 

“Forgive me Lord for I am to take your name in vain,” he said to the boy-filled booth around him. “Jesus Christ, these are good.”

They laughed and he smiled at the sound. How musical it was, how invigorating. It filled him with an energy so that he should always hear that sound, and always and forever he should be in attempt to elicit it. 

“Been a while since you ate that good shit, huh?” Ski said, not looking up from his meat and bread. The shortest of them was, for some reason, now all the more willing to accommodate him. 

Around them big humans and little humans sat on all manner of stools and cushioned benches, eagerly enjoying such abundance as he had never seen. They disappeared and reappeared through a myriad of swinging doors, and behind one was where all the salted delights came from. One of the pink ladies who delivered the sustenance now produced a huge font, filled with something halfway between food and drink in the most vibrant colors he could imagine. On top was a cloud with a small red heart. The girl who received the font squealed in delight, waving her arms and kicking her legs. Her mother held up the same color-brick that Ski used to find Goodwill. 

It seemed, in his estimation at least, that everything had come up good. The higher orders would be pleased to hear it, given that they were always complaining about something the humans were, or often weren’t, doing. Life was pretty sweet. 

“Actually,” he said, sampling the edge of a pickle, “I’ve never eaten.” 

Although he had only been here a short time, he had surmised that when humans did not immediately follow speech with more speech, something was wrong. Judging by the horrified silence among his new brethren, this had very clearly been the wrong thing to say. 

“Okay, I gotta ask,” Ratman said to a chorus of sighs. “We found you completely naked and high as a kite but then you screamed when we lit one up, and then you threw up a load of black shit when you took a hit. Now you tell us you’ve never eaten. And oh, y’know, you fell out of the sky! What the hell is your deal, dude?” 

“Whatever my deal is, it certainly is not hell,” he informed them diligently. “I am an angel. I’m told you know of our kind?”

Another silence fell upon the booth, broken only by the rhythmic sounds of chewing and the chink of metal around them.

“Angel dust more like,” Toby chuckled after a while, throwing his hand in the air. 

At his gesture, the pink girl who had earlier brought the feast appeared again. This time she produced a fluttering slip of paper covered in small, black strokes. Jackson eyed the papyrus, then looked up at him. 

“I don’t suppose you’ve got any money?”

“Mun-ee?”

“Hah!” Ski scoffed. “How’re you gonna be an angel and not know what money is? Isn’t that, like, all anyone ever prays for?” 

* * * 

Jackson had claimed this to be the best spot in town, and though he had not seen much of it, the angel could not help but agree. It was the best place on earth, in fact. High above the tops of the buildings, higher even than some of the birds, they sat and looked out upon the land. It was the sky that held his attention. In an explosion of orange, the sun was moving through the space so quickly he could see it happening before him. The color was thick enough that it filled the air around them, dancing between his fingertips as he waved them about. As it got lower and lower, the sun changed, got more intense so that it stained the clouds a sweeping pink and they broke up in awe of it. He watched without blinking until his weak, human eyes could pry themselves open no longer. The sun fell behind the earth, only a golden sliver behind the point where he had come to them this morning. And then, it was gone. Just like that. 

A tear rolled down his cheek. 

The boys exchanged knowing glances, a little more used to their strange companion.

“It’s a good one, no?” Ratman asked, but continued to talk before the angel had even begun to find the words needed to describe the sunset. “My sister said it gives you like…energy and shit.”

“Good vibes,” Toby agreed. 

The five of them said very little to each other as the twilight engulfed their perch. Once it was dark though, the boys filled the fresh air with chatter about many things, to which he listened intently. He learned of the game, football, that seemed to him very dangerous, even if it did spark great passion from Toby. At one point, the boy leapt into the air to proclaim his allegiance to some buffaloes, and the angel wondered whether he had lost the thread of this particular conversation. Then, he was informed of the newest games box, on which football was not played but many other things were. It would cost a lot of that money. The boys were calmed when Ski told them that his cousin would be in receipt of the box from his aunt, who had a lot of money. 

“Is that your weird cousin or your gay cousin?”

“Dude, it doesn’t matter how much I wanna play Halo. I’m never talking to your weird cousin again.” 

“Why is it that you think your cousin strange?” The angel enquired of the newly quieted Ski. 

“I don’t know, man. He eats raw bacon and hates women,” Ski explained, clearly not wanting to continue this chatter. The rest of the boys, however, found this very funny. 

“You probably think everyone’s weird though, right?” Jackson directed the attention at him. 

The angel shook his head vigorously. 

“On the contrary, I think you are dazzling examples of the far-reaching and thunderous joys of creation. If His Grace could see you, see how far the thing has come, well, His Holiness would simply weep with joy. In fact, after the welcome you have bestowed upon me, I feel inclined to do so just now.”

“Yea alright, my guy. No need for that,” Ratman patted him on the knee. 

They guided him down the mountainside with light from their color-bricks. Phones, as he had just learned, were quite the useful contraptions. Nowhere near as useful as the motorized carts so beautifully named cars. This one had been called for by Toby, and it waited patiently for them just where the boy had prophesied it would. 

The angel did not know where they were taking him next, though he trusted with his whole being that it would be somewhere good. It was good – there was grass outside, and flowers. He swore he even spotted some small beasts bounding through the fields on the edge of his vision. Every now and again there were huge sky letters that heralded more eateries and ‘insurance’. One in particular caught his attention. 

Is it your turn to go? The sign spoke to him. God allows all who repent into his kingdom. 

“No,” he said aloud, but the four sleeping figures around him paid no attention. 

“I think I shall stay here a while.”