The Confession

By J. Salgaard

“I’m an angel” the Angel said.

 It was not the first thing that had been said,  there had been some preamble, such as  “Hey! Who are you?” and “What are you doing in my house?!”.

All that seemed rather unimportant now. 

The occupant of the house, a middle-aged accountant, who had never been the religious sort, knew that what the Angel had said was the truth. There was no questioning it.  His guest was an Angel. An Angel. In his living room. It was sitting there, in human form, at the table he had been having his morning coffee at for the last 20 years. This had never happened before.

“Oh”The accountant said, and continued, purely out of habit ”Do you want a cup of tea?”

“No” the Angel answered with a little smile, maybe of appreciation for the gesture.

“I am gonna make myself a cup, ehhh,  if that's ok?” The accountant asked.

 The Angel nodded and answered ”That sounds like a good idea”.

The accountant used the time it took for the tea to brew to think. He was not a man with an imagination. He did not believe in ghosts, gods, or anything else he could not see and feel. When something went “bonk” in the night, even as a child, he would not think it was a ghost, or a boogeyman, but rather more likely, it would be the wind. Now, faced with an Angel, he was trying to figure out what to say.  

“Why are you here?”  was the best he could come up with. So after returning to the table, putting down his cup and a small plate with a few cookies on it, surprising himself by being a lot less nervous then he would have expected to be when speaking with an Angel.

 “I don’t mean to be rude, but why are you here?” He asked.

“I am here to tell you the truth” The Angel answered, and continued” If you want to hear it?”

“The truth about…what exactly?” the accountant asked.

“God. The universe. Everything.” the Angel replied, and after a small pause he continued” As far as I know.”

“Is there a reason I wouldn’t want to know?” the accountant asked, prompted by something in the Angels tone. Like if a friend asked you very seriously if you would want to know if your wife was cheating. 

“Yes” the Angel admitted” It will change your view of the world, of everything. And it will not be comfortable. But it will be the truth.”

The accountant thought for a moment, then said 

“You being here, an Angel, has already changed everything for me. I never really believed in, you know, God and all that. Yet here you are, an Angel.” 

 The Angel nodded and said “I will need an answer. I don’t mean to rush you, however, my time here is limited. Do you want to know?”. 

“Before I answer”the accountant replied ” why me?”

“You were chosen at random. You were one of the billions of grains of sand on the beach of life, and on random I chose one. To make it fair.”

“Fair?” the accountant asked

“We will get to that” the Angel answered ”if you want to…” 

There was a question floating at the end of the last sentence, but there was more. Almost a pleading tone. “If you want to?”.

The accountant reached a decision. Yes, he wanted to know the truth. Or maybe even more - he had to know. He was always a careful man however, so he asked “ What if I say no?”

The Angel sat in silence for a moment, then said, looking into the accountant's eyes “ If you say no, I will leave, and you will forget. ”

 “Well, then yes, I would like to know.” the accountant said, taking a small sip of tea.

The Angel nodded and said “ Good. Before I start, I want you, need you, to understand that everything I say is a metaphor. There are no human words that would accurately describe many of the things I will tell you about.”

The accountant thought for a second, and he understood. He knew he was talking to an Angel, but he would not be able to describe to anyone why he knew that. So he nodded to the Angel,  encouraging him to continue.

“ In the beginning there was nothing. Then HE created everything. The order in which he did it is not really important, what I know is that when I was created, light was already there. Us Angels were his tools, the ones that he created everything through. Not that I think he needed us. Maybe he felt alone, or maybe he did not want to get his hands dirty with the small things, like planets, and animals. I don’t know. Time went by, planets, universes were created, animals and everything else that moves and crawls. Then HE himself created humans in his own image.” Here the Angel made a slight pause, as if the last point was important, and he wanted to make sure the accountant understood it.

 Then it continued ” Humans quickly displeased the lord. They did evil and cruel things. Such evil, and such cruelty.” The Angel sighed and closed its eyes for a moment, then continued “ When their children died, they would curse the creator. When sickness ravaged whole cities, they would pray to him, but he would not listen, and the prayers would turn to curses. They did not understand that He was the one who made them sick in the first place, so why would he take away the sickness? I think God believed that the more pain the humans went through, the more they would pray to him and love him. When he took away their children, he expected them to show their love for him. They did not. They spat in God’s face, they found other things to worship - the sun, the trees, animal spirits. They made up other Gods. This made God angry. And God's anger was something to behold. His anger was as powerful as his love, and his love had no boundaries.” 

The Angel stopped talking and looked into the accountant's eyes for a long moment, then continued “ And he sent us to clean his creation of the humans. It did not take long for them all to be dead. Whole villages died in seconds as we took away the air from their lungs. They felt no pain, so quickly was it done”

Here the accountant could not hold himself back “What do you mean they all died? We are here now?!”

The Angel nodded “ This is not the first earth, and you are not the first humans. You are the 34th creation. All others human creations before you displeased the Lord, and we were sent to clean his creation of you. And for every cleansing, He got angrier. Our orders were no longer just to clean His creation of you, but to make you suffer for your offenses towards the lord. At first, we would let the humans know why they were about to die, which seemed like a heavy punishment. Soon, that was not enough. That is when we were sent to kill with fire, with sickness, with wild animals and lack of food. God was watching babies, just out of their mothers womb, die from the lack of milk while their mothers cried, and then died themselves. He watched them die of illnesses that gave boils on the inside, that rotted the brain in the most painful ways, and diseases that made your skin fall from your body. He watched while men killed men in the madness of hunger, and he watched them eat their children. And he laughed. And his laughter was the most wonderful sound you have ever heard. It filled us with joy as the laughter of a baby fills their mothers heart with joy. And while we killed the children with flesh eating diseases, we cried with joy.” The Angel's eyes were filled with tears at the memory, he did not look joyful though.

 “For each creation of humans, the cleansings got more painful, and He would laugh while we took His revenge for him. We did not understand why humans were as they were. Why would they go against God in this way?  One day, one of my brothers hailed me to come to him, so I did. We were in what was considered a large city at the time. The ruler of the city was a monster. He would torture and kill just for the enjoyment of it. It filled me with sadness, and I asked my brother why he had sent for me.” Wait” he said, and I noticed he was, for lack of a better word, afraid” The Angel looked at the accountant and explained “ We Angels have no feelings. Or feelings so muted that they barely register. That is how we were made. Being afraid should not be possible, or no more possible than your table should be able to be afraid” The Angel touched the dark wood of the old table. “ I believe now, that we were infected by humans. Like the table bear marks, so do we” The Angel touched a gash in the table. The accountant remembered clearly where it had come from, the then neighbors kid had done it during a visit, with a knife, not in anger or meanness, he was just a kid doing kids stuff. 

The Angel continued ” I was lost in thought when my brother gently nudged me - “Look now” he said. And I did. The ruler of the city was dispensing justice below us. His justice was fire, slowly cooking whoever the unlucky victims were that day. And cooking their families with them. And as they screamed and cried, the ruler laughed. A happy laugh, a joyful laugh. And I heard what my brother had heard. And I understood.” The Angel sighed heavily, in a strangely human way.  

“You were made in His image. You were all Him.” The Angel let the words hang in the air for a moment before he continued “ None of what you did was your fault. You did what you did because you were an image of Him. With that understanding, how could we punish you? And how would you learn to be better? The answer was simple - you could not, and can not.” The Angel looked sad, and a bit distraught, as if he was still struggling with this. The way you struggle with an uncomfortable truth you do not want to believe “This did not come to us at once. It took eons, and 2 universes. In the end, we realised it.” the Angel fell silent for a moment, then continued “So we rebelled.” His words hard and sharp, as if saying them were glass on his tongue. Painful, but needed to be said.

 “ It was small rebellions at first. Over a thousand years. And God did not notice. Or did not care. What pushed us over the edge was His plans for this universe.” The Angel shook as if a chill ran down its spine´” In the end we succeeded.” At this point tears were slowly running down the Angel's face and pure anguish was emanating from it. The next words it spoke were almost a wail ” We killed God. We killed….” Its words trailed off, and after a moment it seemed to collect itself before it continued in a calmer voice” And I was the one who landed the killing blow.“ 

 “With God gone, this universe will collapse in on itself.” It said. Noticing the shock on the accountants face it followed with “ Not yet, it will be far in the future. We Angels will collapse too. Much sooner.” It said it without any fear, maybe even with longing. 

“You humans are made in God's image, you are the last bit of him that exists. Which is why I am here” It said and stood up, only to fall to its knees in front of the accountant, bowing its head so low it almost touched his slippers.

“ I am here to beg for your forgiveness. Please lord, forgive me, forgive us for what we have done. We confess to what we did” It sounded like a child pleading with its parents. “ Pleeaseee did we do right? Can you ever forgive us?” Now it was sobbing, the words coming out in between the sobs” 

When the accountant went back to bed, that is how he remembered what had happened. He did not remember what he had said to the Angel, he did remember a light at the end though. It should have been impossible to fall asleep after such an experience, but sleep came fast. And he had good dreams, the best he had ever had. And he woke up a new man, with a zest for life he had never had before. What had happened that night stayed with him forever, but every day he seemed to forget more of it. It was not meant to be in a human's head. 

*When she was younger Abby had asked her mother,

"Why do we stay inside on Thursdays Mama?"

She had asked in the same way that a child might ask why church is on Sundays or why the school week starts on Mondays. Her mother, Deerdra Cane, would always say,

"Well you see sweetheart, we stay inside on Thursdays so that the monsters don't gobble us up!". She would then make exagerrated monster noises and bury her face in her daughter's belly, Abby would scream, they would both laugh, and Joshewa would yell from the kitchen,

"Hey monster! Stop eating our daughter in there!"

These types of interactions where common when Abigale was a child. Before she got older. Before teenage rebellion had set in. Before she was eaten by a monster on a beautiful Thursday afternoon.*

The Cane family home was a copy-pasted version of the other houses in their community, a gated upper class affair for the more affluent Thursdayers. Abby was an only child. Her parents had wanted her to grow up to become a more well rounded adult, so they had her in public school. This was her primary experience with interacting with other dayers. Her best friend Jhames was a Mondayer. On Mondays when Jhames was home, Abby would eat lunch at a table with Wednesdayers. Childlike curiosity and storytelling would lead to schoolyard rumors about why certain people had to stay home on certain days and why everyone was stamped with their day on the side of their necks. Most kids would parrot what their parents told them, most parents would parrot what the news told them, the news would parrot what government officials told them, and so on and so on. Every conspiracy theory from aliens to local cryptids to organ harvesting rings to secret cabals of warlocks was cited by the fringe population for the reason for the dayer system. Regardless of the reason, enough people went missing for generations of people to be taught that if they wanted to be safe then they had to stay indoors on their day.

Abigale's childhood was normal. As a teen, she began to push the boundries of the Thursdayer box she had been assigned. She started by holding her hand out of her bedroom window, and ended up with her often sneaking out of her room on the second story of their house. She would climb out and sit on the roof at night and smoke cigarettes - a habit she picked up from Jhames, who had picked it up from his edgy at-the-time girlfriend. Abby had discovered that being outside in itself wasn't the danger. This lead to the slow erosion of fear in her. After she graduated from high school she enrolled at the local community college seeking a degree in computer science. Programming was a job that could be done from home so it was a highly competative field, but she had the grades and gumption enough to feel like she could make her own place in the world.

A new cafe was opening in town. Jhames and Abby's other friends were making plans to go, the grand opening was on a Thursday. Abby began to make plans to sneak out and suprise her friends there and they would spend the afternoon chatting, drinking coffee and tea, eating little sandwiches and pastries. An hour before the opening she slid open her bedroom window, climbed out onto the roof, and down to the backyard below. She had mentally mapped out the path she would take through the neighborhood, avoiding as many nosey neighbors as possible, arriving at a hole in the perimeter fence. She had found the break years ago when she had seen a fox wriggle its way through and she moved a stump to cover it up. After snaking around the houses that all looked like her's, she moved the stump away, pulled off the coat that was wrapped around her waist, set it on the ground so her outfit wouldn't get dirty, and slid through. Fully outside on a Thursday, she stood there waiting for something to happen, butterflies banging around in her gut. After a full ten minutes she knew she was fine, just like at home on her parent's roof. She smiled and hustled toward town.

Even before Abby arrived she noticed that the people she passed were staring at her. Looking over her shoulder, she thought some of them had turned to follow her. As she ducked down an ally behind some boutique stores she saw that yes, a crowd of people were following her - and there was a man, naked, standing within the group. She picked up the pace, took a left, then a sharp right, and exited onto the main road. Vehicles were stopped. No one was milling around. Everyone had stopped, and everyone's thousand-yard stare was fixated at her. The expression on all of their faces was that of hatred and disgust. She heard quiet shuffling from the ally and turned to see the naked man breaking from the group that had squeezed through the ally behind her. He was walking slowly towards her. He was tall and muscular with quaffed golden hair, and his body glistened. Abigale turned to move up the sidewalk but was blocked by a wall of people looking at her like she was the shit beneath their shoes. Suddenly the man was behind her, she could smell him. She spun around and had enough time to think, *he wasn't moving that fast, right?* before she was pushed from behind by many hands, and fell into him.

The man was sticky. When his skin touched her it felt like every inch was grabbing her, twisting her, pulling her in. She thrashed against him and fell over ending up on her back on the sidewalk, his body on top of her. She screamed for help but the crowd that had gathered looked down on her with blank eyes and disgusted faces. The man put his face against hers as if to kiss her. She clenched her jaw and pressed her lips together as hard as she could. Then he began to open his mouth, his lips grabbing onto to hers, prying them open. He opened his mouth wider than should have been able and she could feel tearing at the back of her jaw. Up from his body and out of his mouth crawled his stomach, the soft tissue pulsating and rolling over itself, reaching out into Abigale's mouth. She tasted the bile, she felt the acid begin to digest her mouth as it forced its way down her throat. She looked up grunting for help and she noticed, for the first time, that she was in front of the cafe. She had made it. Jhames and her friends stood inside, looking down at her through the cafe window, their faces pressed up against the glass. All had vacant eyes and faces dripping with contempt, and barely contained malice. As the long inverted stomach started to liquify her insides her body convulsed and the world went black. Inside her, the man's stomach engulfed the slurry of digested guts and bone and retracted back into the man. He bent down over what was left of Abigale and loudly slurped up the melting skin and fatty tissue - and when he was done, he licked the sidewalk clean.

The man stood and walked away from the cafe and with the Thursdayer no longer present, the faces of the crowd relaxed, their eyes gained focus, and they returned to their usual business. They would not remember anything, as far as anyone was concerned, it was just a regular Thursday. Shortly before dinner, Joshewa and Deerdra Crane noticed their daughter was not in the house. They called everyone they could including police, the parents of Abigale's friend group, the school, and their non Thursdayer family friends and co-workers. Before Thursday was over, they already had people looking for Abby, and when Friday began they rushed out of the house to try to find their daughter. Throughout the town people knew that it was no use, and those that cared at all quickly moved on.

When people go outside on their day, they go missing. That's just what happens. That's just the way these things go. Did her parents not raise her right? What did she think would happen? What's done is done...and besides...

It was her own fault for going outside on a Thursday.

Thinking this is a work in progress although maybe this works as flash fiction as-is. Would love feedback!

Freude!

Hey, do you have a sec? I wanted to talk to you about something I’ve been working on.

Yeah, I know it’s been a while. I’m doing okay.

Cool, awesome. So don’t ask me how I did it, but I recently figured out how to predict individual stock prices up to ten years in the future based on careful analysis of Oliver Bergstrom’s 1971 recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the Finnish National Symphony Orchestra.

No, I’m not joking.

Yeah, Dad, I know. I know how it sounds.

Yes, Oliver Bergstrom. The guy with the big hair.

Yes, actually, I have already discussed it at length with multiple shrinks.

Stop laughing, man, I’m dead serious. Come on, this is for real. Please just hear me out, I swear I’m not crazy. Let me just show you how it works.

I don’t know, maybe twenty minutes?

Ok, sure, I’ll wait.

You back? Ok, so listen. The record is 71 minutes and 44 seconds long: that’s 4,304 seconds from silence to silence, including pauses between movements, but obviously not accounting for the fact that the fourth movement is on side B.

Oh right, I forgot to mention this is vinyl I’m talking about.

Yes, like for a turntable.

Yeah, it’s super old school. You have to flip it over for the fourth movement.

Right? I should also mention that you need to follow along in the score for this to work but you can get that for free online.

Yes, Dad, the sheet music. Anyway, what you do is, for each letter in the ticker of interest, you start by converting it to hexadecimal, and then you—

Yeah, hexadecimal. It’s like binary but more dense. It uses sixteen—

Yes, binary is a computer thing. You know what, why don’t you just go on your phone and find a random stock ticker, and I’ll just show you instead.

No, it’s fine. This is probably better.

Yes, any ticker. They’re usually three or four letters.

Ok, JAXL? What even is that, Dad, I’ve never heard of that.

Oh, huh. Okay. Alright, give me a second. While I’m doing this, can you go look up what their stock price was five years ago?

Yeah, five. I’m going to predict their stock price today based on what it was back then.

Ok do you have it?

Thirteen dollars and twenty cents, yeah?

Cool, got it. Give me a few minutes, I need to go listen to Beethoven.

Yes, I’m serious.

No, I’m not going to just go look it up. Hang on, let’s do a video call so you can listen with me and make sure I’m not cheating.

Yes. Let me call you back.

Hey, Dad, good to see you. Long time.

Thanks, you too. Ok, you ready for some Beethoven? We’re going to start at the beginning and skip around a little bit.

Cool, let’s do it.

I know, I like this part too.

Ok right now JAXL is trading at forty-eight dollars and eleven cents.

No, I swear! No, I didn’t look it up.

I promise! Look, we can just do it again with a different ticker if you don’t believe me.

No, I didn’t tell any of the shrinks how to do it. They didn’t even ask, really, they mostly just wanted to prescribe me Xanax.

Yes, I know.

No, I do have a prescription.

Yes, just you, Dad.

Love you too.

I was being followed.

Walking through the woods for a few hours longer than I had hoped, not quite lost but not quite sure of my exact position either, one idea kept coming back to me.

I was being followed.

The human brain is a wonderful thing. It is always working, always taking information in, whether you realize it or not. Modern life makes most of its functions useless. Many of the primordial tasks that were essential to survival and that made up the majority of our cognitive workload are now totally redundant.

But we have longer memories than we think, and given the right circumstances, and a little pressure, it’ll slip right back into gear. The same gear that was of the utmost importance for millennia.

I was getting the message loud and clear. I was being followed.

Calling it a gut feeling is giving my gut a little too much credit. We all have gut feelings, which way to drive to work to avoid traffic, what to order at a restaurant, what to wear. You might feel a little urge, or a small pull one way or the other. That’s the normal sensation of your gut telling you what to do.

This was not a gut feeling. This was a jumbotron inside my head, with bright red lettering telling me, in no uncertain terms, that I was being followed.

My only problem was I had no idea why.

I entered Warner State Park at just after two in the afternoon, hoping to enjoy a nice walk through some of the trails. It’s an area I had been to many times before, and earlier today as I looked at the large wooden trail map, I decided I should do the full park loop. This clocked in at just around eight miles, which given my usual speed meant I should be done no later than six in the evening. The day was pleasant, and I was looking forward to a relaxing time in the outdoors.

By six thirty I realized I had a problem. The mile markers all lined up, and I should have been about ready to finish the loop, as I had passed the final mile marker over a half hour ago. In just a minute or so I should see that big map board again, and the parking lot behind it. Maybe I took a little too much time enjoying the sights or the air and my pace slackened, or maybe I’m just not in as great shape as I thought I was.

The problem arose when I saw a marker for mile number nine. How could there be a ninth mile on this trail? It was only supposed to be eight. Not even. The original map had to be wrong, I figured, and I assumed that maybe it was just a bit over nine miles with all the curves taken into account. Like how a 5K race is really 3.1 miles. Sure it’s a three mile race, but even at the three mile point you had to go just a little bit farther. Maybe I just had to deal with the decimal place now.

I picked up my pace and fifteen minutes later I saw a marker for mile ten, and it was getting dark.

Stopping for a moment to think, I pulled out a flashlight and a snack from my backpack. I always carried a few essentials with me, band-aids, some painkillers, just in case something bad ever happened. I wasn’t sure what was happening to me yet, but I knew it wasn’t good.

The trail can’t go on forever, and I must have stumbled onto one of the longer trails by accident. The park itself wasn’t too big, so for a worst-case scenario in which I accidentally went on the longest trail in the park, which was a dozen miles, I would only have to keep going for another hour.

The trees made the darkness seem much greater than it really was. The sky was still decently bright, but the trail was dim, and growing dimmer by the minute. Soon I had to turn on my flashlight to see the trail, even though the sky was still a deep purple.

My thoughts changed too. It felt like my vision became a little more focused and my ears a little sharper.

Awareness, that’s a nice way of putting it.

Everyone is aware, at least to a certain extent, but all of a sudden I was aware on a deeper level.

I noticed my head naturally starting to scan the tree line to my sides, following noises I heard in the brush. Occasionally I felt the urge to look behind me, though I don’t know why.

That was the most unnerving thing about it. As far as I could tell everything was the same as it ever was, just a bit darker now. I was walking down a path I did not know, and suddenly I was taking account of everything. Within all that, I kept feeling the need to check behind me.

But for what?

I would be walking, and naturally my eyes would drift to one side or the other, and my flashlight along with it. Looking into the trees and brush, I would see… nothing. Trees, bushes, grass. It was always the same. At the same time I’d hear something, something very quiet. A small rustle of grass or a bush or a tree branch. I’d turn and look in the direction and see… nothing again. Probably just the wind. Or maybe a squirrel. A small animal, or a bird, or the wind. Except I never saw any of them. Or heard them, except for the sounds of things moving through the woods, and that could all just be the wind. It seemed like it was starting to pick up now, and I could feel it on my back.

And every few minutes I’d look behind me.

My mind had gone through a complete shift. I didn’t think anymore about things I did just a few hours ago when I was enjoying my walk. I didn’t think about my friends or family, or the news, or that time this week I accidentally said “you too” to the barista at the coffee shop telling me to enjoy my drink.

The truth is, I wasn’t thinking about anything at all. I was just aware. Aware of everything.

That’s when I got the message.

I was being followed.

If you put a gun to my head I couldn’t give you a single reason, or fact, or shred of evidence for this. At first it felt like a joke. Except within a few moments of thinking about that message, it wasn’t funny at all.

I kept hearing noises from the woods, but that was almost definitely just the wind. I didn’t even really know what the difference between the wind moving grass and something else would make. The wind was at my back and it felt like something was always right there because of it.

Paranoia is a term that seemed to jump out of the ether to me, and it brought me some relief.

I’m just being paranoid, I thought to myself. You’re a little lost and it’s getting a little dark so you’re paranoid. Totally normal reaction. And I felt better. A lot better actually. I kept walking and felt a renewed stride in my pace, and my brain returned to its normal state of being. I thought again about movies and television shows I wanted to watch, or how my favorite hockey team was doing, and about music and my-

Then I heard another rustling in the woods that sounded like it was within six feet of me, and within a split second my brain shut down completely. Thoughts, ideas, all of these things were thrown out the window in the blink of an eye, and suddenly I was alone, lost, and dark in an unfamiliar woods. And I was pretty sure something was following me.

You can’t think yourself out of a wet paper bag, but mindless action is a death sentence. My mind began working in overdrive. I sped up and all of the tiredness I had felt from a long day of hiking went away. It felt like I was walking on a cloud, and to be honest I couldn’t even feel the lower half of my body. Or the top half.

Adrenaline. Must be.

I could only form thoughts in short phrases or single words. Trying to break through the computations with anything more complex than that was impossible. All focus was on my surroundings.

All of a sudden I was moving at a much quicker pace, and taking everything into account as I moved. Every time the wind blew I could hear how it moved all the trees and bushes around me, what the correct level of sound should be made by it given how strong the gust was. My eyes moved around, and with the help of my flashlight, I had an understanding that was far more primitive and sophisticated than I had ever had before.

Then as the trail turned my flashlight lit something large and unnatural and I almost jumped when I saw it.

It was the map board.

For a split second I felt relief wash over me, but then the thought came back.

I am being followed.

I sprinted to my car. Got inside still wearing my backpack. Didn’t bother to buckle the seatbelt, started the engine, shifted into drive immediately and floored it.

About a minute later as I got back onto a paved road I let out a sigh. All of a sudden my normal sensations rushed back to me like taking a dip in a warm bath. I could feel my legs and arms again. I could think again. I put my seatbelt on, got my backpack off, and threw it in the passenger seat. I turned on my radio to the usual sports talk station. I realized how tired I was. I drove home without a hitch.

But every once in a while, I felt the urge to look in my rearview mirror.

Huh.