Angels they fall first, but I'm still here.-"End of all Hope"
His first memory was when he was only two or three years old. He’s not quite sure why he remembers such a faint memory. He’s ashamed of it, really. A memory that actually remembers him in his innocence as a child. He buried it under his life, his spells, and learning. But nothing can hold back a thought. Nothing.
The children, his servants as he called them when they played grown up games like the King and I, were dancing. A wild crazy dance. He looks back on it now. How peculiar that his earliest memory could predict what his life was to be. A wild crazy dance. How peculiar.
One of his “servants” had fallen into the mud.
This was Tom’s first experience with falling. He had watched his servant fall, high up on his chair made of plastic, the one they had dragged outside when the rain had stopped just to seat him, the King. The boy had started to cry. It was fascinating to Tom to watch the puddles form on the ground below the boy’s feet and the apparent displeasure it caused the boy. This was Tom’s first experience with falling.
He used this falling to punish his servants, but only his servants, until he was four.
Tom never tried to make one of the grownups fall. Perhaps, they seemed too sturdy for him, too wrapped up in their lives outside of the orphanages, to actually have time to fall. It was only till he was four, till he found someone who looked like they could fall.
Tom despised the nun. He never knew her name, and he supposed she never knew his, for she only called him angel. She was the picture of illness, liver spots covering her hands and always coughing an endless stream of spit into her wrinkled hands.
She came each Sunday to give the “tortured souls” of the orphanage some guidance about heaven and hell.
She told Tom, when he was forced to pass out the papers of God dying on a cross, that he was going to heaven. Not like your parents, she had told him, they are going to go to hell for the bad thing they did, leaving you here to die.
To Tom, this statement did not make any sense. How could he go to a place that no one could see, or touch, or have any knowledge, but by word, that it existed? But he was silent, for he knew that if he objected she would go into a disgusting coughing fit before a long lecture that the word of God was the only proof needed.
The workers at the orphanage thought Tom was slow because he rarely spoke a word to them. But perhaps, if they ever asked any of the children they would have smiled at the thought of Tom being quiet could be.
The threats he whispered when he was only three, seemed to echo around the children’s brains like a set noisemakers inside of an empty hallway. None of the children that were in his age group ever turned out right when they grew up. Some were too quiet and others talked too much with shifty eyes at an image no one could ever see.
But Tom never knew this, if he had he may have whispered incessantly more "un heavenly" things to the children…or maybe he wouldn’t. With angels you never knew.
The nun was always telling them how their parents should go to hell for whatever reason it was. They grew used to it over time and they completely believed her. Even Tom, the one who never trusted someone else’s word believed her. But for some reason he hated her. Something put him off when she faithfully came every Sunday, when she called him angel, when she coughed just to have a reason to sit down… something. He wanted to make her fall, to show her what her angel really was.
He had stolen a girl’s toy.
It was a duck train. It made an idiotic quacking noise when he touched it or moved it. It had an imitation of a mother duck, followed by her preppy "duckies" all connected by the plastic made by Fisher Price.
He somehow got the ducks under his seat.
The nun was having a lecture on the horrors of hell. Tom stared blandly ahead, wondering if he could make a nun fall.
His memory blurs here. All he knows is somehow he got the duck train out from under his seat and just a millisecond before she falls it starts to make a quacking noise.
Tom learned something from that day. Grownups, or maybe only nuns, fall gracefully.
No one told on Tom. The girl who owned the ducks actually confessed to tripping the nun with ducks. Tom didn’t think that the grownups believed her, but it was oddly satisfying to hear the tall whale like woman try to make the small girl try to explain how she got the ducks all the way across the aisle, when she was sitting two rows away from the incident.
The nun never came back. She actually died seventeen days after her fall and her last words were said to be “I see an angel.” Tom never knew nor cared what happened to the sickly woman.
The education of religion was not continued. Tom liked to think that it was his fault that it was not continued. But only one thing was responsible for her majestic fall.
It was an angel.