John and the Angel

John tugged at the hem of his mother’s warm red coat. The winter sun dazzled his eyes while the bitter Irish Sea breeze nipped at his tiny nose. Seagulls, fighting for messy tourist food scraps, distracted him from the terse conversation between his parents. At increasing intervals, their sharp words matched the squawks of the birds. It made John laugh. His parents paused and looked down at him. He looked up at them.

“Let him choose,” his father said to his mother.

John’s mother stared at him. Her tired gaze was a mixture of love, of sadness … and of something he couldn’t quite understand. Yet.

A brash seagull came pecking at the laces of John’s little shoes, making him giggle. The bird slowly walked away, stopping every few steps to look back at him. It was beckoning and John decided to follow, his hand lingering along the textured hem of his mother’s coat until his fingers were trailing in the chilly, lonely air.

The bird led him from the boardwalk and down the few steps to the pebbly beach. It didn’t stop. It kept walking towards the monstrous wooden pier where the cold sea was lashing at its watery forest of posts. John’s five year old legs had to run to keep up.

Under the shadow of the pier the bird suddenly stopped and faced him, its golden eyes shimmering in the damp gloom. The bird lifted its head up to the unseen sky and spread its silvery wings. Gracefully, it pulled one leg up to its body and brought its head down to its chest, seemingly genuflecting to John.

The bird began to grow.

Looming, larger and larger. Slowly. Deliberately.

John, standing in awe, unafraid, watched as the bird transformed. A warm, golden light emanated from within its breast. With purpose, it became a towering, benevolent figure, still birdlike, yet ... also, human? But with wings. Enormous, spectral, silky wings. They gently fluttered to the same beat of his heart, John feeling the movement of air like a shy kiss on his small forehead.

When he’d stay for long periods with his Aunt Mimi, John would often spend the rainy days in her front room and stare in wonder at the pictures of angels adorning her walls. Was this an angel?

“John”, it spoke, deeply, while looking down on him, “John. You have things to do.”

In the distance he heard his parents’ continued serrated words echoing and crashing with the waves on the stony beach.

“You have things to do.”

“John …”

“John.”

“John!”

“JOHN!”

It was his mother, calling out to him in a mother’s panic.

“WHERE ARE YOU, JOHN?!!”

John turned from the angel and started running to follow his mother’s voice, frightened that he was now in trouble.

He ran back to the sun-bleached promenade where his mother was calling, where the tension between his parents was still palpable.

“We’re going. You need to choose, John,” his mother ordered sharply.

He didn’t understand. Was he in trouble? He looked at her, quizzically. He looked at his father, who had bent down and beckoned to him. Instinctively, with a naive innocence of his very few years, he took his father’s hand. They turned to walk away from his mother who stood there, silently, tears stained on her perfectly made-up face.

John felt a strange hand on his shoulder, a warm whispering breath in his ear.

“John. You have things to do.”

The angel gently turned John around, unwound his tiny fingers from his father’s hand, and guided him back to his mother.

“You have things to do.”

Soft, invisible wings quivered warmly around his little face as he took his mother’s hand. He looked up to see a seagull circling right above them. As his mother quickly walked them both away, John looked back at his father, unsure of himself and exactly what he had chosen.

Mr Lennon sadly followed John with his eyes as he walked away from him, unsure himself of his son’s future.