Mother preached from her book that to be loved is to be eternal—and that angels, the most beloved of God’s children, could never die.
“The Lord loves them so much,” she told me, “that they live to grow wings.”
Like a bird? I had asked.
For the mistake of interrupting, she rapped my knuckles with a fig branch. Then she told me an angel’s wings, so splendorous, are such that they must herald mortals with a single message:
Do not be afraid.
I was fourteen when I’d seen my first angel, my fingers stripped to baby newness, deep in my mother’s orchard.
#
Fig-picking was how Mother marked sinners in our home, for Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge and Mother resented how much I knew.
She was my God, my Holy Spirit of cigarette smoke, who spoke not in Psalms but in the crow of a broken bird—this was her, she-God, seeking my naked obedience. I was never to call her Mama, only Mother, for she could never be called Father in our church. From the mouth of her single subject, the Son, Mother was her consolation.
Mother never ate our figs, for she was no sinner and the figs were always sold once their stems were free of my profane hand. Until every tree lay flayed of its fruit, my fingers throbbing, sore and scraped, I was to pay my penance. But if I were to be a sinner I’d best play the part as well. After all, Mother was a woman who saw fig trees for their trunks, not their fruit.
I’d spent years eating from the Tree of Knowledge—but this was the first, and last, time its fruit would teach me.
I laid the plump purple body between my teeth, goring the semisweet juices from its skins. I was partial to the ones half-fermented by sun, seedy strings of flesh just rotten enough that I could drink their insides and pretend it was sugar. But when the sweetness wormed into my nose, I learned that my fig was not the only thing rotting between the trees.
It came from the fence line, slinking white feet through Mother’s soil; the thing, so thin and pale, I could have mistaken it for a fig trunk—except it bore a face, bore arms, legs, pearly, clean skin. In the dark it seemed to emit a light which cast onto nothing else—one white thing against the dusk.
Human in shape, nude, it did not walk. Its form suspended in the night air—its arms hung at its sides, its ankles dragging perfect, still toes. Plastered to its head, its face lay frozen, bleached pale—mouth so wide its lips nearly touched its ears, as if pulled and needled back into its scalp. Its jaw hung limp, and the thing sang a soft, recondite warble; a creaking, wordless aria.
The wind swaddled me in a wineish stink. The thing did not shiver; its spine was poised tight in a crescent, head craned towards the sky, as if it could not help but stare toward the Heavens.
I fell to my knees before the path of the angel, for I knew that was its nature—I knew when it bobbed forth and I could see that behind it sailed wings, just like Mother had told me. But they were no dove’s wings.
They bore no feathers—they were simply long banners of rippling, pulpy flesh.
The angel’s airborne body brushed slow through the trees. It did not look at me, not even when it was so close, its dirge whistling into my bones, where I could have reached out and taken its perfect white hand. Its fingers were fatless, dehydrated, sagging with watery, disintegrated muscles—but its skin, smooth and fresh, like an infant’s. A living, moistened shell, stretched canvas-like over a cadaver. A body forever putrefying, cooking inside its Heavenly peel.
Too beloved to rot.
Its curdling stench bloomed heavy from the angel as its hand drifted close, so close, I could spy the sealed, ichorous pores in its skin. Its limp fingers blew outward—pushed, perhaps, by the breeze.
Perhaps reaching for me.
I could feel it, that I was supposed to take the angel’s hand, conquer my fear that its palm would squelch and burst beneath my touch. Felt it as its mucked, louring eyes kept themselves pinned to Heaven, never seeing me. As its song swelled between my ears, as its vertebrae distended from desiccated tissue, long-browned and withered into nothing.
As it flowed and its skin-wings grasped dumbly at the sky, and as I realized the wings were not limbs themselves, but the undone flesh lining the angel’s spine—a sheet, split in half from its nape and left dangling, bisected down its sides and I realized then that the angel's holy, mournful croon did not creep from its mouth.
Instead, the song trilled through holes in the skin of its wings, notes slithering from its perforated flesh.
I only said one thing that night in the orchard: Tell me. Tell me, do not be afraid.
I waited. I wanted, desperately, for the precious syllables to reach me through the flute-voice of its shucked dorsum.
I watched the angel pass. Unspeaking, merely singing its song through its broken back.
#
When I told Mother I had seen an angel in the fig orchard, she asked why I had not taken its hand.
Mother was swept in her images of the Filament, in thoughts that I would have been welcomed, cleansed, made into something idyllic; undying, in a place where all is forgiven and beautiful, basking in the splendor of God’s love.
She knew best, after all, my Mother, my Spirit, my God, nestled deep in her orchard church, far more bird than the winged corpse among her figs.
“By His wounds we are healed,” she said as she wrapped my fingers, angry and pared by fig bark, in cloth, and it was then that I understood that my mother had never seen an angel herself.
~~
Mei Backof is one of Santa Clara University's two Canterbury Fellowship-awarded scholars of 2025. At the time of writing, she is developing a horror short story and essay collection entitled "Bitter-Milk Drunk." Her previous works have been published in Blood+Honey, manywor(l)ds, Poets.org, and the engine(idling.
