27 Aug Angels Aren’t Real

Frank Delaney didn’t like shopping on Saturdays, but his wife Martha had asked, and he’d put it off long enough. The local grocer was busy, though not unbearable. He parked near the entrance, took one of the rattling carts with the stubborn front wheel, and unfolded the list Martha had written out for him in her neat, looping script. Eggs. Flour. Milk. Apples for pie. Mouthwash, the green kind.

He checked the list twice before heading down the aisles. The place smelled faintly of disinfectant and fruit. He preferred it in the mornings when the shelves were still full and the staff hadn’t yet grown tired of answering questions, but this would do. He moved slowly, favoring his left hip, placing the items into the cart one by one.

He was reaching for butter when the sound of squealing tires cut through the low murmur of the store.

The crash came a second later.

The glass entry doors shattered inward. A blue sedan lurched through the opening, its hood crumpling as it struck metal and tile. Frank barely had time to turn. The bumper hit the front of his cart, folding it in half, and then carried through into him. The impact knocked him off his feet. The breath left his body before he could draw a sound. The ceiling lights reeled overhead. He tried to reach for something—anything—but his arms didn’t respond. There was a shout nearby, then another, distant and muffled, like voices through a wall. He thought he heard his name. Then the pain became unbearable, and the store fell away.

* * * * * *

He hovered above the wreckage, watching it all as if it were happening to someone else. Paramedics had arrived already, moving with practiced precision. A young woman in an apron stood near the coffee kiosk, both hands over her mouth. The jar of olives he’d placed in his cart rolled in a slow circle on the tile, unbroken.

The body on the floor was his. He could see it clearly, the torn jacket, the blood at the temple. They cut away the fabric and began chest compressions. One counted out loud while the other worked the airway. He watched them with an odd calm, detached from the urgency.

Then he realized he wasn’t alone.

A figure stood at his side, taller than him, close enough that he should have felt the brush of a shoulder. She was a woman of flawless symmetry, with features so even and striking that they pulled at his eyes before he could think to look away. Her skin was dark and smooth, without a single imperfection. Her hair, black and straight, fell to the middle of her back, catching the light in clean, sharp lines. Her eyes fixed on him with an expression that was neither stern nor gentle but certain. Black wings rose behind her, folded but immense, each feather distinct, the edges holding light without giving any back.

She spoke his name once, just once. It was enough.

He knew what she was.

“Am I dead?” he asked.

“Not yet,” she said.

He looked down at the floor of the store, at the shape of himself surrounded by strangers and wires. “It sure looks like I am.”

“They’ll bring you back,” she said.

He shook his head. “I don’t want to go back to that.” He nodded toward the body. The skin already looked pale and worn out. “It’s broken. I felt the way it gave out. Why put me back into something like that?”

Her eyes stayed on him, calm and confident.

“I could stay here,” he pressed, “with them.” He glanced toward the brightness behind her, where he’d seen his family waiting, whole and smiling. The warmth of it pulled at him. “I’ve done my share. Seventy-two years. Why isn’t that enough?”

“It isn’t your time,” she said. “There is still work left for you.”

“What work?” His voice sharpened. “I’m a man with bad hips and worse lungs. What could you possibly need from me?”

“The fate of the world depends on you,” she said matter-of-factly.

He stared at her, trying to make sense of the words. “That… That doesn’t make any sense. I’m not—”

“You’ll remember what you need to do when the time comes,” she said. “I will assist you.”

Behind her, the space opened up. It wasn’t a tunnel or a light, but a place. He saw his mother at the stove, his father in the yard, his brother as he’d been before Vietnam, a dog that had been buried under the oak tree forty years ago. They were whole, and waiting.

He wanted to step into it. He moved forward, but the woman shifted, and the wings filled his path.

“Not yet,” she said.

He felt himself pulled downward, back toward the shouts, the chest compressions, the oxygen mask. The brightness of the place ahead narrowed, then vanished.

“No!” he protested. He meant it. “Please, don’t send me back!”

Her expression didn’t change. “I told you, it isn’t your time.”

Then the floor struck him again, and with it came pain.

* * * * * *

The next thing he knew, he was strapped into the back of an ambulance. The world jolted around him, harsh and noisy. A paramedic leaned close, repeating questions. Name. Age. Where he was. He answered what he could.

They wheeled him through the emergency department. He caught the scent of antiseptic and stale coffee mixed with something heavier. As they passed the nurse’s station, Frank’s eyes caught on a man strapped to a gurney. The patient’s head turned in a slow, unnatural arc, eyes wide, mouth moving. The same two words fell from his lips again and again, flat and even, like a recording:

“Underneath. Underneath.”

The nurse at his side hushed him and tightened his restraints. And yet he continued repeating the words, steady and mechanically.

The gurney rolled past. Frank tried to ask what was wrong with the man, but the words caught in his throat.

The orderlies pushed him into imaging. The air was cold and reeked of machine oil. Above him, the fluorescent light stuttered once and then recovered. He thought of the woman with wings, standing confidently. He thought of what she’d said and how sure she’d been.

The fate of the world. Him.

Then he was gone again.

* * * * * *

Frank woke to a ceiling the color of paper and a beeping that never stopped. His chest burned, his leg was in traction, and every shallow breath felt labored. Tubes ran from his arms. His skin itched from tape. The world had narrowed to bedrails, plastic curtains, and the odor of disinfectants.

Martha sat at his side. She gripped his hand as if holding it there could keep him tethered. Her eyes were red and swollen.

“You’re here,” he rasped.

“I am,” she said.

He waited until he could swallow again. “I saw her.”

Martha leaned in. “Who, Frank?”

“A woman. With black wings. She told me it wasn’t my time.”

Martha’s thumb brushed his knuckles. “It was the shock, Frank. Or the medicine.”

“No. She was real.” His voice cracked. “She said the fate of the world depends on me.”

The smile she gave was tired and indulgent. “Let’s get you through this first.”

His son Alan came the next day, tie still tight from the office. He listened without interruption as Frank described the angel. When his father finished, Alan set his hands on his knees.

“Dad, it was a hallucination. They’ve studied this. People see tunnels, lights, loved ones, and angels. It’s chemicals in the brain. Nothing more.”

His daughter, Lydia, visited in the evening. She was softer about it. She listened, held his hand, and said, “If it gave you peace, then that’s good. But you can’t expect everyone to believe it happened.”

Frank saw the doubt in her face, no matter how kindly she phrased it.

By the end of the week, he’d stopped telling anyone.

* * * * * *

Lydia had given him a notebook. “Write it down,” she said. “It’ll help you process.”

So he did. Each night he scratched out what he remembered: the wings, the voice, the warmth of the place behind her. At first, all he could recall were fragments: a gesture, the tilt of her head, the sound of certainty in her words. With time, details returned. He wrote them all, filling pages with careful block letters.

He clung to the sentence the angel had spoken as if it were carved in stone: The fate of the world depends on you.

It frightened him more than it reassured.

* * * * * *

Three weeks into rehab, he began noticing things about the others.

Mrs. Hartmann had always sat near the lounge windows, knitting. Now the yarn sat in her lap untouched while she stared at the wall, smiling faintly.

Mr. Kelly, who had spent every meal complaining about the food, no longer spoke at all. He sat with his tray in front of him, utensils untouched, eyes glassy.

Charles, the patient with a hip injury who always smelled of aftershave, had greeted Frank by name every morning in therapy. One day, he passed him in the hall and looked through him as if he were a stranger.

“Charles,” Frank said. The man paused only long enough to tilt his head, then continued walking, steps oddly even, left and right in perfect rhythm.

Later, Frank asked a nurse about it. She offered a gentle shrug. “Some patients decline fast. Confusion. Dementia. It happens.”

But Frank had seen Charles before the change. His eyes had been alert then, and sharp. Now they were vacant.

One evening, he lifted his dinner plate and found a triangular, folded piece of paper wedged underneath, its edges stained with gravy.

He checked the hall, trying to discern its origins, but found it empty. He unfolded it with shaking hands.

They walk below, it read. Three words. No signature.

Frank stuffed the paper into his notebook and wrote the date at the top of the next page. He copied the words carefully: They walk below.

He didn’t tell Martha about the note the next time she visited. She sat beside him, chatting about the garden and the leaves turning on the maple. He forced himself to smile and nod at the right times, to pretend. When she left, he opened the notebook again and wrote a single question under the sentence:

Who?

* * * * * *

The strangeness grew harder to ignore.

In the therapy room, two patients spoke the same phrase in the same tone, a minute apart, as if rehearsed.

In the lounge, one woman laughed at a nurse’s joke. A second woman across the room laughed an identical laugh, with the same pitch and rhythm.

During dinner, Frank heard three men answer, “Manageable today,” when asked about their pain, the words falling in unison.

The hair at the back of his neck prickled. These weren’t coincidences. They were imitations, repetitions, like people acting out prescribed roles, poorly, and on autopilot.

That night, he wrote in the notebook: They are being replaced.

The thought chilled him, but he couldn’t shake it.

* * * * * *

The next morning, he struggled down the hall with his walker. As an orderly passed him, pushing a cart of linens, Frank noticed the man’s eyes. They were blank, the sort of look you’d expect from a mannequin, not a living worker. The orderly moved past without acknowledging him, even when Frank muttered, “Excuse me.”

When he looked back, he saw the same man at the far end of the hall, pushing the same cart.

Frank’s grip tightened on the walker until his knuckles whitened.

He returned to his room and scrawled in his notebook until the pen ran dry.

* * * * * *

The second note turned up in a place that made no sense.

It was early morning. A nurse delivered breakfast, set the tray down, and poured water into the pitcher. After she left, Frank unscrewed the lid and discovered a damp slip of paper clinging to the underside. He peeled it loose, smoothed it flat against the blanket, and read:

They meet below. The door is not on any map.

The handwriting was tight and slanted, with letters that appeared to have been carved instead of written. A small symbol sat beneath the words: three circles inside a diamond. He stared at it until his eyes watered. He didn’t recognize it, but something in him recoiled from it.

He dried the paper with a napkin, slid it into his notebook, and copied the latest words down carefully.

When Martha visited later that day, she brought pie from home. She fussed with the tray, straightening the cups and containers until everything was lined up. Frank watched her.

“You’re quieter today,” he said.

She didn’t look up. “You’ve been through a lot. I don’t want to wear you out.”

“You couldn’t,” he said.

Her smile was warm, but something about it seemed forced.

He wrote about that, too.

* * * * * *

The third note came hidden in a bandage.

He woke in the middle of the night, skin itching at his hip. The tape had lifted. He peeled it back, expecting to find gauze. Instead, he found a slip of paper cut to the same size and pressed flat against his skin. He read it under the bathroom light.

Petrovic holds the key. He comes from a dark place.

He whispered the name. It meant nothing to him, not yet. Still, he wrote it in the notebook, then underlined it twice.

The next afternoon, he overheard two residents talking outside his room. “He’s with Petrovic right now,” one said. “Tall, gray at the temples. Croatian. Worked war zones before he was hired here.”

Frank leaned forward in his bed. When a tall man in dark scrubs walked past the door, Frank knew. He carried himself with the calm, arrogant demeanor of someone used to being obeyed. The staff deferred to him without hesitation.

Frank wrote one sentence in his notebook: Watch Petrovic.

* * * * * *

The changes in the other patients were no longer subtle.

Mr. Kelly disappeared for two days. When he came back, his hair was combed differently, and his bracelet had been replaced. He spoke in clipped sentences, smiled without moving his eyes, and never mentioned the pudding they used to trade.

Mrs. Hartmann’s knitting bag sat untouched. She folded her hands in her lap and said nothing for hours at a time.

Charles walked without his usual limp, his arms swinging in perfect counterpoint. The therapist called it a breakthrough. Frank saw it as something else entirely.

The repetitions multiplied. Patients in different rooms responded to the staff with the exact same words, with identical intonation. One woman laughed in the lounge, and another echoed it two beats later with precision.

At night, Frank wrote: They are not the same when they return.

* * * * * *

It was during therapy that he saw the process itself.

He had slipped on his walker, his hand catching on the knob of a door leading to an adjoining room, and the door had swung open. Inside, two nurses worked calmly. Beside them, an elderly woman lay strapped to a bed, wrists and ankles tied. Her mouth hung open slightly, eyes wide. One nurse adjusted a syringe feeding into her arm. The fluid inside was dark, but not black, and it slid like oil, catching the light in ways that evoked the image of broken glass.

The woman convulsed, and her chest heaved. A sound rose from her that wasn’t speech. The nurse at the cart kept writing in a logbook, while the other pressed the plunger steadily. Then the woman’s body stilled, her head rolling side to side as if she were testing the hinges of her neck. Then she closed her mouth and smiled.

“Welcome back, Mrs. Jensen,” the nurse said evenly.

The woman replied in a flat voice, “Manageable today.”

Frank stumbled back. His therapist caught him and led him out, murmuring apologies for the unlocked door. Frank couldn’t speak.

That night, he drew the syringe in his notebook and wrote until his hand cramped.

* * * * * *

Alan visited on Sunday with crossword puzzles and noise-canceling headphones. He spoke about recovery rates, podcasts, and the importance of maintaining a positive outlook. Frank let him. It was easier than trying to put the latest events into words.

When Alan left, Frank saw two women in the hall carrying matching vases of carnations, identical down to every last detail. His skin prickled.

That evening, Martha called. She promised to come tomorrow. Her voice lingered on the last syllable of “tomorrow” just a fraction too long. He wanted to ask why, but didn’t. He wrote it down instead.

* * * * * *

The fourth note came under his pillow. He found it when he lifted the pillow to shake it. The crease was aligned perfectly with the seam of the pillowcase.

They want you next, it read.

He folded it, slid it into the notebook, and wrote the words again in careful block letters.

He sat upright in the dark, hands resting on the blanket, and listened to the familiar sounds. Nearby, nurses walked past, a cart rolled down the hall, and somewhere down the ward, two people laughed one after the other, like an echo.

He didn’t close his eyes for the rest of the night.

* * * * * *

Frank had grown tired of waiting. He had filled his notebook with sketches and lines of block text until the paper rippled. He had enough observations to convince himself, but not enough to act. He told himself he needed proof, not only for his own sanity but because the angel’s words still clung to him. The fate of the world depends on you.

The choice came late one night when the hallway fell quiet. A single cart rolled by, its squeak fading. Frank swung his legs off the bed, slipped his notebook into his robe pocket, bit down against the still-present post-accident pain in his ribs, and took up his walker.

The service elevator was at the far end of the wing. He had watched orderlies use it. A keycard slid into the slot, the doors opened, and they disappeared down. Tonight, the panel hung ajar. A flat tool, like something for opening paint cans, sat wedged in the seam. Frank pulled it out, pressed it into the slot, and heard the lock disengage. The button lit red, and the doors slid open.

The ride down was unexpectedly long. He attempted to count the floors, but stopped when the number no longer matched the descent. All the while, the air grew colder and damp, tinged with copper.

When the doors finally opened, the corridor stretched out in bare concrete. Here, he saw none of the typical signs or notices about hand-washing, only pipes sweating in the ceiling and the echo of water dripping somewhere out of sight.

The sound of chanting reached him almost at once—dozens of voices in low unison, repeating words he couldn’t place, in an unsettling, robotic cadence. He hesitated momentarily before pushing his walker forward.

The basement chamber had once been storage. Now it was a theater for something else. Beds had been bolted into a circle, each linked with scaffolding and tubing. Patients lay in every one, strapped at the wrists and ankles. Frank knew their faces—Mrs. Hartmann, Mr. Kelly, Charles, and others who had once walked the halls above. Tubes ran from their veins into a column of metal and glass at the center. The liquid inside was neither blood nor any fluid Frank could identify. It pulsed with a dark shimmer, crawling with veins of lightless color that moved as though alive.

The patients moaned in unison, their mouths whispering the same chant he had heard in the hall. Their bodies jerked at intervals, but their eyes were wide, conscious, and aware. They followed movements in the room that Frank couldn’t see.

They weren’t gone after all. They were being used.

Frank’s stomach turned, and he gripped the walker tighter.

It was then that a calm, accented voice cut through the chant.

“Steady the flow,” the man said.

Dr. Petrovic stepped into view. He wore dark scrubs with no coat, and his voice carried the same authority Frank had noticed upstairs. He circled the column, eyes flicking to the monitors. The staff around him obeyed without delay, adjusting valves and checking syringes.

“The vessel must be prepared,” Petrovic said.

The chant rose, and the column pulsed brighter. Frank backed toward the wall, heart thudding, his heels scraping concrete.

A hand touched his shoulder, and he gasped and turned.

The angel stood there.

Her wings were folded but filled the space, brushing the wall. Her eyes locked on his, perfect, flawless, and certain.

“You see now,” she said.

“They’re still alive,” he whispered. “You said I had work left. This?”

“They serve,” she said, “as you will serve.”

“You lied to me,” he replied.

“No,” she said. Her expression didn’t shift. “I told you the truth, that the fate of the world depends on you. And it does.”

Frank shook his head. His throat felt tight. “You said I’d remember what I needed. This isn’t—this can’t be what you meant.”

“You’ll understand when the time comes.”

Petrovic turned, scanning the chamber. His eyes passed across Frank as though he weren’t there at all. Then he raised his hands, speaking words in the same language as the chant. As if on cue, the patients screamed, their bodies arching, and the liquid in the column surged.

Frank stumbled back toward the elevator. The walker rattled loudly against the concrete. Still, no one turned toward him. No one stopped him.

The angel’s gaze followed him until the doors closed.

* * * * * *

Back in his room, Frank pulled the notebook out and filled page after page. He described the column, the tubes, the faces of the patients, the way they looked at things that weren’t visible. He wrote Petrovic’s name again and again until the ink bled through the paper.

At the bottom of the last page, in thick block letters, he wrote:

THEY ARE NOT DEAD. THEY ARE USED.

When his hand cramped too severely to continue, he let the pen fall and sat in the dark. He thought again of the angel’s words, and of her confidence. She hadn’t warned him. She had guided him. Every note, every detail, had been leading him here.

And she had kept her promise.

You’ll remember what you need to do when the time comes. I will assist you.

She was helping, but not to save anyone, especially him.

* * * * * *

They came for Frank the following night.

Two orderlies entered his room without preamble. They didn’t bother with explanations. They lifted him from the bed, strapped him to a gurney, and wheeled him out. His questions—”Where are we going? What is this?”—were met with silence.

He craned his neck to see the notebook under his pillow. It didn’t matter now. The words were his, but the book would never reach anyone.

The service elevator doors closed around him. The ride was the same—too long and too deep. He tried to count floors, but gave up when the numbers meant nothing.

The doors opened to the basement chamber.

The beds still formed the circle, and the patients were still strapped down, whispering in unison. Tubes ran into the column at the center, which was taller now, its surface crawling with black veins that pulsed and shifted. The liquid inside boiled. The room reeked of copper and sweat.

Frank’s stomach lurched when he saw their eyes. The patients—people he knew—were aware, trapped inside their bodies and exploited, functioning like batteries. Their mouths moved without pause, feeding the chant.

One of the orderlies unstrapped him from the gurney and hauled him onto the last open bed at the head of the circle, where they tightened straps across his wrists and ankles. A leather band buckled around his chest. He pulled against them uselessly.

“Why me?” he cried, his voice cracking. “There are dozens of you here. Why me?”

Petrovic stepped into view. His tone was calm and steady. “The vessel is chosen. Everything in your life has led to this point. She”—he gestured toward the angel—”brought you.”

Frank turned his head. The angel stood near the column, wings half-spread, her flawless face set in grim certainty.

“You said I had a mission,” Frank said. “That I was needed.”

“You are,” she said. “You’re perfect, and we thank you for your service.”

“No,” he protested. “No! I didn’t ask for this!”

Her voice was quiet and even. “It was never about what you wanted.”

* * * * * *

The chant grew louder. The column split down the center with a tearing sound, not mechanical but organic, as though reality itself had been torn asunder. Tendrils of liquid darkness poured out and traversed the floor, finding the tubing and running along it.

The patients screamed. Their bodies arched, every muscle straining. The sound of their agony folded into the chant until the two became indistinguishable. The tendrils spread from bed to bed, binding the chain tighter, forcing the energy inward.

Then they reached Frank.

The first tendril struck his chest. White-hot fire tore through his ribs. He gasped, his body jerking involuntarily against the straps. Another tendril slid into his mouth, choking him, filling him. His vision blurred. His bones felt like they were splitting apart.

He tried to fight it, to hold onto the memory of the place behind the angel, the warmth of his mother at the stove, his father in the yard. To Martha’s handwriting on a grocery list. But the weight proved too much.

Petrovic raised his arms, and the chant peaked, the column pulsing frantically, rapidly rising to a crescendo.

Then, the straps snapped. His arms rose of their own accord, joints moving with alien strength. A presence spread through him, immense, ancient, and patient. It pressed outward, stretching his body until he thought it would rip in half.

The angel stepped closer, until her wings framed him. She touched his face with one flawless hand. “Hush,” she whispered. “Through you, the world is remade.”

Aboveground, in the waiting room, wholly unaware of the ritual going on just below their feet, Martha sat with Alan and Lydia. A doctor approached, clipboard in hand, his expression solemn, bearing bad news. “I’m very sorry,” he said. “We did everything we could. He didn’t survive the night.”

They wept together.

An orderly wheeled in a covered gurney. The body beneath was still, a toe tag hanging loose. The doctor pulled the sheet back just enough for the family to see Frank’s face. The skin was stiff and pale, already taking on a wax-like appearance. They clung to one another in grief.

They never questioned it.

Below, the real Frank writhed as the entity took root in him.

The chain of patients thrashed against their restraints, every scream feeding the ritual. Their bodies remained intact, but their minds were trapped, forced to serve as conduits. The energy funneled into him, piece by piece, voice by voice.

Frank’s thoughts splintered under the pressure. His last shred of self clung to the memory of Martha, the maple tree, and their backyard. Then even that slipped away.

The angel folded her wings around him like a curtain closing. When they drew back again, something else looked out through his eyes.

The chamber shook, dust rained from the ceiling, and the column burst open, spilling that impossible light into the room. The patients screamed one last time in unison before falling silent, their mouths still moving, their bodies still feeding the chain.

Frank’s body—no longer his—sat upright, veins glowing. The presence within him stretched and spread, reaching upward toward the world above.

The angel smiled.

The vessel was ready.