I have decided to launch into my fifth novel. . .
In bright autumn morning sunshine, Noal descended stairs from his little apartment. The daily street-level traipse of nine blocks brought him through a few downtown streets of the Blue Ridge mountain town of Ultramont. To Inland Press he would traipse, and his office desk, from whence he would conduct business that would change the world, or at least he liked to think so. A journey of a thousand miles, or a thousand years, has to start somewhere.
Walking past that familiar old white clapboard mansion, Noal paused for a moment to ponder, for the umpteenth time, the soft stone face of an angel.
A hundred or so years ago, Elizabeth Finch—enterprising lady that she was— had been supervising the arrangement of her life-project, Mountain Aire Homestead. She had instructed the gardeners to place the angel in the yard, in front of her little mansion project.
Whenever Noal would amble by the angel, he could not help but retrieve in his mind some age-old memory. Whether the flicker was his own imagination, or some ancestral snippet, retrieved from some person, place or thing of long ago, maybe even far away , he had not yet determined. But hey, who knows about such things? Maybe someone, somewhere, understood. He was still trying to figure it all out.
Maybe the angel, or the idea of an angel, had drifted down from heaven. God forbid that it might have trummeled up from the nether regions.
Noal had never seen a real angel anyway, so how could he know? He was not even certain that such a thing as an angel exists. I mean, he had been taught, from an early age, that there was such a thing as an angel. It was known to be the celestial being that had stood, with its angel-twin, just outside the gates of Eden after Adam and Even had been banished because they had screwed up when they heeded the counsel of that frickin’ ole serpent who had been hanging around trying to stir up trouble, before he finally managed to bust through the Elohim hegemony with his apple trick.
The guard angels, outside the garden, had been assigned from on high.
Their duty--or so it was written-- was to prevent Adam and Eve from getting back into the special venue, wherein they had been birthed into the physical world, but then later ejected, in a time so long ago and so far away. But this is a delicate subject.
Yes, 't'was so long ago, and so far away, in a garden far, far away from this place. Moses had, back in the day, given an account of it. Noal would be perplexed to find the manner in which he would—or even could—contemplate the ancient account of what had had happened in times past. Furthermore, how, now, could he find, or carve out? a niche of his own in this present arrangement. . . as he was strolling to work that fateful morning.
(to be continued)
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