I Saw an Angel Near the Fence

To be fair, it was the end of a long day and a large drink we called Screaming Jesus nothing more than watered-down vodka, grape soda, and a stalk of rosemary. We were dug in near a sandcastle at Ormand Beach. My skin shrieked against the heat, but all I heard were the angel's murmurs between the eternal slosh of loamy, gray-brown waves. Eyes salty with dehydrated sea, considering an impending trial separation, my anonymous angel said, "The keys to the kingdom are reserved for those with an appetite for interpretation." My husband had no idea what it meant. Even I still remain areligious, despite the evidence— the seraphim's calligraphy across hot sand, carved into my skeleton. We shed ten layers of epidermis that week, Ohio bodies exposed to a new slant of sunlight. Hotel housekeeping kindly hoovered up the sheets of our leftover skins. My husband still jokes about it, volumes of our DNA collected, discarded vacuum bags of vacationers rotting at the bottom of a Florida landfill, how I sat with an angel whose graygolden halo was a rusted-silver carabiner secured to a spike driven into the hands of heaven. "Commit to the bit," were the last words I heard before the horizon turned orange. Everything since is a hidden scripture, bewitched in red and yellow, fragrant as pestled ginger. A path of revised perspective, sifting sand through sunblistered fingertips until the memory of it settles— like a beachside angel on the fence, manufacturing meaning in her downtime for desolate humans.