“Oh, my goodness!” Meadow Saffron threw herself backward in the sky, a hand across her forehead. “I thought we’d never do it!”
“It was a fight to the finish from the start,” Sweet Pea agreed, flipping flower petals around her.
“Gotta remember that joke,” said Bluebell. “Hey you! There’s a joke about a girl whose privates bits could sing the national anthem? Have you heard it?”
“No,” said Primrose, flying by upside-down.
“You must have: it’s the Star-Spangled Banner!” This punchline provoked peals of laughter, al of them from Bluebell.
“I cannot believe she ever played an angel,” Primrose, still upside-down, remarked to Unfirom. “She’s so pretty!”
Meadow Saffron came up from behind Unfirom to pull his hair. “How will it come out now, Wingshoulders?”
Unfirom shrugged. “Oh, they’ll shock their children.”
This called for squeals and high fives, some of which involved feet and buttocks. Unfirom looked away, scanning the park. “You have also changed the lives of several women running around the track,”
“Hey!” Bluebell kicked his ear. “If you’re so powerful you can see the future and stuff, why can’t you just do this job and let us chew our toenails?”
Undiron’s head tipped back. “If it was a matter of holding back that statue before it fell on someone, I could do it. But I lack the touch for delicate work.”
“Oh, well, that’s right.” Bluebell zipped away, slapping her heels together. “Yer way too big for delicate stuff.”
“We’re dainty,” Primrose agreed.
“We’re experts at daintiment,” Meadow Saffron chimed in, swirling in a midair pirouette.
“Dibs on that ice cream!” shouted Bluebell, diving past the other two for a puddle on the sidewalk.
“I saw it first!” shrieked Primrose, zooming to cut her off.
“Wait! Wait! There’s angels here! We have to share!” Sweet Pea dropped from the air to sit with a splash in the pale puddle, and then launched herself back into the air. “There! Now everybody can lick it off!”
Unfirom raised one hand to her with thumb and forefinger extended, as if to catch hold. He thought better of it, and turned away. As he strode across the grass, the phronik were singing
Sister Susie’s cause was folks with icy legs,
So she spent all her dollars making darning eggs;
But everybody laughs today at fixing socks
So now she lives on Plum Street in a cardboard box!
Percolator, coffeemaker,
Subaru and Studebaker:
All ya got is all yer gonna get,
Waddya bet?
The angel moved across the grass. He mourned again that his powers were limited to the reasons couples got together, and not whether they did at all. He might have been able to do some real good, instead of serving simply as a guide for the phronik.
He paused at the side of a bench, looking over the woman with the handmade sign leaning top down between her ankles. She pulled back a sleeve to check her watch. Unfirom knew her as well: she was another Griese Park regular. And she was always early.
Today, there was more amiss than earliness. She slumped back on the bench. She was rather a slumping individual at the best of times, a bit heavier than was considered the current fashion. Also neither up to current fashion, nor quite suitable for the weather, were the heavy, baggy clothes she always wore to the park.
She checked her watch again, and then checked left and right along the sidewalk before turning her eyes again to her sign. Her shoulders dropped in toward each other. Unfirom could tell without any recourse to reading her thoughts, that it wasn’t so much a matter of her being early as everybody else being late.
She had fought hard to keep the fight against the passive park idea visible. She had helped people compose letters to the right people; she had led marches. She had been, perhaps, a shade too diligent. Her followers counted on her to keep doing the majority of the work. It looked as if she would be marching alone today.
No purpose in materializing to march with her this morning. If by chance someone took a picture of the march–or if she remembered to take a group photo herself–he wouldn’t be able to make his image register. This would make her crusade even more difficult.
She stared at her feet, or perhaps the burger wrapper pinned down by the pole of her sign. She shifted. This might have been a coincidence, but Unfirom felt sure she had spotted the words ‘BIG BOOTY” staring up from the greasy paper. But perhaps he’d been listening to the phronik too long.
Still invisible, he took a seat on the bench, keeping a safe margin between himself and the mortal. He raised one hand, palm pointed at the side of her face. It did not touch her, but the energy radiating from it did. The woman blinked. Unfirom listened in on her thoughts.
Yes, the first thing he needed to do was turn her eyes away from that wrapper. In her brain, she had connected her less than elegant form with the untidy nature of Griese park; she was wpndering whether both weren’t simply unnecessary to the town. He needed to find a way to turn her thoughts to the larger picture. This was not, as he had mentioned to Bluebell, his forte.
He sorted through her thoughts for the ideals and memories that had led her into this crusade. Lots of movie scenes in there, many of them dealing with young lovers in parks and meadows. He tried to ease these to the forward of her consciousness, pushing back her awareness, more bitter though no less sharp than his, that there were no pictures of herself as part of a pair in a meadow anywhere.
Her eyes came up to the runners on the track, and the tennis players. Unfirom brightened her memories of couples and green grass just a bit, and then retreated from her brain. She needed to do the rest by herself.
The chin wrinkled. The eyelids came closer together. The pole of the sign poked a hole through the burger wrapper as she rose.
At the same moment, Unfirom spotted the woman with the stroller. Nodding farewell to the crusader, he marched back toward the fallen ice cream.
“My turn!”
“Is not! You had two turns in a row! Probly seven!”
“Whee!”
Apparently they had decided to argue about who got to sit in the ice cream instead of who got to eat it. Unfirom reached in, took a pair of wings at random, and pointed the owner at the benches which lay across the softball diamond from the ice cream.
The woman with the stroller was taking a seat on the righthand side of the righthand bench. A man in a tight blue suit was already sitting on the leftmost edge.
“They’re the ones, hmmmmm?” inquired Primrose, the owner of the wings the angel held. She kicked a drop of ice cream from one tow toward the benches.
“They’re the ones.”
Bluebell was apparently paying attention. She sped across the park to peer down into the stroller, and then at the paperback book on the diaper bag. She squealed.
“Who is it?” Primrose demanded.
Bluebell swung around, drew herself perfectly upright, and with hands folded before her, sang
I have a favorite author:
Her name is Judith Krantz,
Because in every book of hers
The folks take off their pants.
“Oooh!” Ice cream streamed from Sweet Pea’s elbows and knees as she zoomed across the park. Unfirom let go of Primrose so she could join the others. Meadow Saffron did a loop around his head before completing the group. Despite starting last, he reached the bench before three of the phronik, and pulled Bluebell down to listen as he held the rest back.
“These two will get together at a party eight months from now. They won’t remember each other from the park because they have hardly noticed each other.”
“You want us to make it so they notice each other,” Bluebell stated, trying to pry his fingers from her ankle.
“If you would,” the angel replied.
“Why?” she demanded, kicking at his fingers with her free foot.
“He won’t learn about the baby until afterward,” Unfirom replied, “And he will say the wrong thing at the wrong moment. The woman will buid this remark and make it go further than it should, which will lead her to suicide on a rainy street less than twenty=-four hours later. When the man hears of this, he will be so stricken with guilt that he will spend a great deal of money trying to adopt the baby, who will, naturally, be awarded to an aunt and uncle instead. He will stalk the family for four years, until finally the uncle shoots him down on another street on another rainy night.”
Meadow Saffron stuck an index finger into the dimple on her chin. “Kind of exciting, really.”
“Oh!” cried Sweet Pea. “But the gun will wake up the baby!”
Meadow Saffron frowned. “There is that.”
“Well, I like working with babies,” said Bluebell, who know had both arms and one leg wrapped around the angel’s thumb. “They throw their food.”
“Yeah!” said Sweet Pea. Her colleagues joined her in front of the bench as Unfirom let go of Bluebell. The angel shrugged. Whatever worked.
Blogsy Babbles 