I stood like a black stain against the white garment of the kingdom of Shemayim, the place the flesh call ‘Heaven’. The eyes of the other angels seemed to urge me to leave lest I start to set. 

Though they might have disagreed, I had been invited. I’d found the shriveled pieces of fruit, like figs, or plums tossed outside of my den . The fruit had been thrown over the bottomless breach that separated Sheolum from Shemayim. It had not happened once or twice; like most things in scripture, it came in threes. My only clue on who delivered it was, if they were from Shemayim, it was a hell of a throw.

I had only to look a hundred or so cubits to see where the fruit had been plucked. The Tree of Life burst with plump golden fruit; I could see beside it, the line of saints, hungry for this season’s portion of immortality. 

Until this moment, the angels had been content with staring at me. But now, as though with a single voice, their opposition escalated into speech. 

“That’s far enough, demon!”

I had always considered it an unfair moniker. But it was accurate. I had long ago traded my figurative halo for figurative horns. 

My six wings and several arms I received to serve in Shemayim. My soot and armor I received after choosing poorly during the Great Rebellion. Chains and hooks ran over my shoulder and down my right arm. On my head was a helm crafted from the skull of a buzzard. Beneath that, sat my smirk.

Three—always three—gathered around me. They were cherubim class and not even permitted to wield a sword. They were creatures created for worship—that made four of us.

“State your business,” one called. 

“I was summoned here. I assume to talk.”

“I meant what is your name? Are you a demon of Wrath, Sloth, or Complacency?”

“My name is Azrael Abaddon,” I braced myself for their reaction. 

They didn’t disappoint.

“The Destroyer?” they said in unison. 

Every word means something. In Shemayim, you have to know your Greek, Hebrew and it doesn’t pay to be a slouch in Aramaic either. Don’t pay attention to the meaning and it will get you in trouble every time.  

“Technically, that’s the translation,” I said. “But I haven’t destroyed anything in a long time.”

Another angel fluttered down. This one I knew. He was called Zayin, meaning ‘sword’, if you’re interested. His looks matched his name as he had multiple arms shaped into long, sharp tools, and a winged head which looked suspiciously like a fancy hilt. He folded his other four wings behind him and the image of him as a flaming scimitar came into focus.  

“Begone, Azrael,” Zayin said. “I’ve had a demon-free week so far and I’d like to keep it that way.”

“Then one of us isn’t doing his job,” I said. He was already in a bad mood—it didn’t help.

His eyes pierced the shadows in me, telling me I was a moment away from having his sharp limbs turned against my hide. 

“Disarm,” he said . “If you do have business here, you’ll leave your darts.”

“I don’t have any,” I said. In my defense, it was true.

“This one doesn’t need weapons,” another angel shouted from further up and further in. “Let him in.”

The angel’s name was Taleh. He was jovial, friendly, and everything the flesh would want an angel to be. If I liked any of them, it would be him. 

“He says he was invited,” Zayin said. “Taleh, do you know anything about his demands?”

Taleh made no motion to move closer, but the kindness in his voice gave him a disarming amount of intimacy. 

“Only that he has a right to them,” Taleh answered. “Let him up.”

Zayin and the others prepared to launch a rebuttal but turning towards the blinding light of the kingdom of Shemayim seemed to make them a little less self-righteous.

Taleh did not draw a weapon or cross his many arms. Instead, he shook his mane of long, flossen wool that mostly covered his face and let pure gold light pour from his seven eyes. 

“We’ll surrender him to your custody,” Zayin said proudly, steam emanating from his body as I walked past him. 

“Who are you here to see?” Taleh asked me.

“I’m going to the garden,” I said as I began to hike up the dirty hill covered in amethyst and garnet until I reached Taleh. Standing beside the angel, I succeeded in getting a better view of the expanse of Shemayim.

The ‘Celestial City’, as John Bunyan described it, spread out, separating us with its twelve gates and jasper walls. The city of gold lifted upward to reach even higher into the sky on which it already sat. 

Outside of the city, on the edge of the firmament, were the seven angels of judgment. The impossibly large monuments each held their bowls of plague and punishment above Eretz, the great experiment called Earth.

Each of the angels was specific to their place. At the appointed time, Krysis, the chief judgment angel, would lead the others in pouring out disaster upon the globe. His bowl would cover Eretz’s population in festering sores. Tiamet and Nahar would turn the seas and rivers to blood, respectively. Ayelet would pour out his bowl of brimstone upon the sun and scorch Eretz with fire. Erebus would then bring darkness upon Eretz while Parat's bowl would bestow a substance that would dry the River Euphrates. Eolic would serve the final blow, wiping out the major cities of Eretz.

Most of the demons agreed that Eretz didn’t need the help.

“They ever get a rest?” I asked.

“I don’t think Krysis would take it if we gave it to him.”

At the heart of Shemayim sat the Throne, where rested Elohim the Almighty. Around Him the cherubs danced, surrounding El as if to beckon me back to my position of endless worship. 

Close to the Throne there was a space the angels refused to allow themselves to pass or to occupy. The space was not marked by a platform, a pedestal and certainly not a cloud. The air about the position seemed permanently molded to the figure of the one who held it. To rise above it seemed seditious, to take it seemed self-indulgent. 

The angels refused to speak of that station, that axis, where the Morningstar, better known as the Devil, had performed. It was no mystery why the Morningstar rebelled. If a flesh couldn’t keep from pocketing change from a register or skimming a few hundred thousand here and there, then it was unavoidable that Shemayim’s leader of worship would eventually want his cut.

The Almighty should’ve seen it coming.

 “Are you ever going to fill that position?” I asked Taleh, even as I knew he wouldn’t bother to answer. 

He fulfilled my expectation by responding with silence.

I pointed below the Throne to our destination. There, it was impossible to tell whether the Tree of Life flowed up or whether the base of the Throne turned into the long-spreading branches and descended toward the middle of the garden: Eden’s final resting place. 

“Do you know who it was that summoned you?” Taleh asked.

“I have a good idea,” I said. She could’ve thrown gems or gold bricks, and no one would have missed them. But she took a risk sending me a token that meant something. It could only mean she was in trouble.

“Uh, huh… I can’t just let you talk to one of the redeemed. We can’t allow them to be tormented.”

I looked around and saw Taleh’s point. What danger could she have possibly found herself in? What darkness could lurk in the Celestial City that I had not brought with me?

I deflected him. “And what torment do I look fit to give?” 

“No more and no less than any other thing that crawls outside of Shemayim’s wall. And isn’t that enough?” He didn’t condemn me—he spoke only the truth. “I once heard the Devil himself destroy a life with a sentence.” 

“Oh, don’t tell me you’re one of those angels, Taleh. Do you blame everything on us? I’m sure the Morningstar only presented an idea—the flesh burns itself.”

We came to where leaves of jade and emerald marked the edge of the green. The forest was a transplant, a redeemed and uplifted Garden of Eden. We marched through, finding as much underbrush as memories in the age-old glen. 

“What does the Throne have you doing now, Taleh?”

He didn’t answer. 

“That’s not very polite for an angel of the Host,” I said. “I heard you were on guardian duty. Stationed in a slum of a city in Northern America…watching a nobody.”

“Nobody is a nobody.” Taleh smiled. His smile was genuine, heartfelt and it burned to look at it; I hated it.

“You brought down the left flank at Babylon. You were in the Upper Room. You touched the coal to Isaiah’s lips. What did you do to screw up so badly?”

He laughed like he didn’t understand anything I said. “I don’t think Shemayim rewards the way Sheolum punishes.”

We continued walking as the brush separated into a clearing. She sat in the middle, bare skin in the dirt, tending to God’s garden. Behind her, the Tree of Life stood like a column of white marble.

Taleh held out one of his seven arms to stop me. I let him.

“You may not need your darts, but you do overcompensate.” He smiled as if his strong-arming of me wasn’t literal. “And you do like to lie.”

I opened my wings and dropped my armaments. My bolt shooters clamored in the gem-laden dirt.

“Thanks,” Taleh said.

I took one step into the garden, and I could already hear the buzz of Zayin and his cronies as they swarmed to catch up. I knew Taleh would hold them off—I didn’t know for how long. 

The woman saw me and turned her shoulder blade towards me in a show of apparent rejection. She waited until I was only a handful of cubits away to finally acknowledge me.

“Don’t come any farther.” She pinned me in place with her words. I had to obey her. It was how He commanded it. “I don’t have any locks of hair to give you or toenails or whatever else you want to sell in Bethesda’s little icon shops.”

“I didn’t come for any of that,” I forgot she’s more than just a woman to many of the denizens of my district. She’s the first. 

 “Really, then who sent you?” Eve said in a hushed whisper that made her blonde hair ripple away from her shoulder. Her skin shone with the afterglow of innocence; it was a new look for her.

“You did.” My demonic nature allowed my patience to slip. “Or did you simply aim wrong when you were tossing the fruit of the Tree of Life.”

Eve’s head turned and she peered at me from over her shoulder. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

It was my turn to smile. I knew a lie when I heard it. But then I remembered where we were. “I thought you called me to say, ‘thank you.’”

She looked at me quizzically. I decided to help her along.

“Why are you hiding, child?” I said. 

Her reaction was instantaneous; her face distorted into disgust. 

She remembered.

***

“Children? Children, where are you?” The Almighty had asked.

He was bigger than creation; it seemed hard to believe He couldn’t see both Eve and her husband hiding in the shrubs off to the right. 

The man must have known this. He stood first. 

“I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so, I hid.”

And He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”

One child tattled on the other and I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing.

The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”

From my perch it seemed as if she would bite him, but her fear kept her from further indiscretion. As she trembled before the Almighty, she looked cold.

Two fawns grazed in the cool of the evening. I took out my sword and I killed the first living creatures. I don’t know if I knew what the blade would truly do to living flesh, but I knew from my experience in the rebellion it was unlikely they would be able to trot away after I skinned their broken forms. With only a few folds and a quick tie, I made clothes for both the man and the woman and laid them outside the garden. 

The couple collected them. I like to think if they had not been encumbered with tragedy they might have smiled.

***

“That was you?”

I nodded; my modesty had been burned away long ago.

“I had named them,” she said despondently.

“Would you have preferred tortoise skins instead? 

Now, millennia later , she allowed herself to laugh. “You’re right, I should have thanked you.”

“So, how’d it go?”

She looked at my soot-stained and black-winged form. “A little better for me than it seems it did for you.”

I shrugged. “I can’t complain. I’m free.” 

“Free?” She traded hiding behind her shoulder to hiding behind a smile. 

“Free. I can walk in Shemayim, Sheloum and Eretz.”

“But you can only stay one of those places.”

I didn’t let a beat pass. “How did the rest of your 940 years treat you?”

Her eyes dropped, going back to her glittering garden.

I didn’t let the silence stay. “Something I always wondered: how does the garden grow if the only dirt here is diamonds?”

“I think we’re done, don’t you?”

Zayin saw she wasn’t talking to me and started marching our way.

“Cain misses you.”

Her eyes turned back in an instant; she was finally done pretending.

“He remembers me?”

“Some would say that’s the problem with Sheolum; he can’t forget.”

Zayin was only steps away, but I said it anyway, low and under my breath. “Would you like to talk to him?”

Her eyes grew wide enough to swallow me.

“Alright, you,” Zayin said. “Why don’t you get back to Sheolum?”

Colloquially, he was telling me to go to Hell.

“Can you tell him to take a number,” I asked Eve.

“Go answer a prayer, Zayin,” Eve fired back.

Disgruntled, but obedient, Zayin left, stopping when he was fifty cubits away—even he would struggle to hear the rest of our conversation. We continued in hushed tones.

“Cain can’t come here,” she said.

“We could do it over there,” I pointed to the cliff that overlooked Sheolum and, incidentally, my den. The overlook was called the Bosom of Abraham by the locals, though I can’t imagine Abraham himself was too fond of the slang.

“So, you can do it?” Eve said, dropping all pretense of not calling for me. This is what she wanted all along. I just didn’t know why. 

“Yeah. I can do it,” I gave a side-glance to the Throne of the Most High. “It’s a tall order. I’ll need something to grease a few palms.” 

I started walking backwards with only my memory to guide me. I prayed, snickering as I did, that both Zayin and the Almighty would be blind to my movements.

“You have something in mind?” she asked.

The bark of the Tree of Life burned me as I backed up against it. It was a familiar feeling. My talons reached out as I stretched my wings to hide them. My claws plucked a piece of fruit from the tree. 

She gasped. Her eyes traveled immediately up the trunk to the Throne. For a moment I expected all of Shemayim to erupt in fiery swords and shouts. 

But it didn’t.

I tossed the glowing fig behind my back and clutched it to my spine with my wings. 

Eve let out a sigh. “What are you going to do with it?”

I knocked my head back towards her Keeper. “Better if you don’t know. I’ll come back to tell you when to meet Cain. In the meantime—don’t think about it.”

“Okay,” she said quietly. 

I turned with the intention of bumping shoulders with Zayin as I left, but she called out. “Why would you do all this for me?”

I didn’t answer. 

***

Adam was a work of sloppiness: a top-heavy specimen of crude misshapen words overlaid with perfunctory elements. He was obscene in his cut corners and embarrassing in his simplicity.

The addition of Eve, however, made it seem as if all of Adam’s misshapen crudeness was purposeful. 

“Have you seen the flesh?” Taleh had asked me. 

“Of course I did. I watched the Throne create the man. In fact, I stood next to you as He did.”

“But did you see what the Throne is making out of the man?”

“Another man?”

“A woman, Adam calls it.” Taleh’s voice was full of wonder. 

I look down at Eretz spinning below us. “I know it takes creativity to know creativity. But that doesn’t sound original.”

“That’s not the point. You have to see her.”

It, too, was a new concept. “Her?”

***

“I don’t know,” I lied in answer to Eve. “Why do you want to see Cain? It can’t be easy to remember him. I thought Shemayim was the cure for all of life’s pains and foibles.”

Her eyes broke contact and she stared down at the gems in the dirt. 

“Not love, apparently.”