Angel

Today, I swam with angel fins.

Today, I grinned into the water madly happily and burstingly, and couldn’t suppress the spill of my teeth even when I came up to breathe.

Today, I didn’t notice the bird droppings and insect shells.

Today, I shimmied out of the pool with a song in my heart.

Because, today, I swam alongside a G-shaped angel.

I can’t wait for tomorrow

***

“Angels have fins?” exclaimed my poor friend. It must hurt to not have an imagination.

“Well of course they do”, said I. “They have fins, and gills, and third eyelids, and webbed toes, and horns and scales and powerful tails; wings, and more than four limbs and tiger stripes and leopard spots and toad warts... “

At this point I paused for a breath, and he quickly saw his chance to pipe in.

“What happened to blonde hair, blue eyes, celestial tiaras, halos, harps and plain old dove wings?” he smirked.

Said I: “That’s a very narrow Caucasian anthropomorphic view of angels. Plato said that the true form of anything exists as pure latent potential. And somewhere, really powerful angels must be able to be angelic to every kind of being, mustn’t they? If squids had invented paper before us, we’d be praying to giant ink squirting, water lurking angels for salvation. Na?”

“Stands to reason”, he mused, easily won by the lucid logic of my retort. “You should say something about saving the Earth, you know. Something meaningful about latent potential and multiple perspectives… and species. A common inheritance and such”.

I shook my head sadly “I tried.”

“And?”

“And nothing. All I could come up with were a few rancid opinions on George Reisman’s views. I became too bilious and wretched to think anymore”.

“Never mind” he said kindly, putting an arm around my shoulders. “Let’s get a cassata. And maybe watch tadpoles in the gutter?”

Such an angel. But I didn’t say it. He mayn’t like to see himself like that. Anymore.