Tag: Angels

Just Enough Rain by P. H. Lee

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Just Enough Rain by P. H. Lee (Giganotosaurus, 1st May 2021)1 opens with an arresting first line:

I wasn’t surprised when God showed up for Mom’s funeral. They’d always been close.

After the funeral service is over, Annie goes over to talk with God and they have a long and wandering conversation (His friendship with her mother, His sending angels to remove the sarcomas produced by a previous bout of cancer, etc.) before God tells her He is thinking of bringing Annie’s mother back to life. Once He ascertains that Annie has no objections (expected inheritance, etc.) there are sounds of movement from inside the coffin.
This opening passage is followed by a short second chapter which tells of the parable of Honi the Circle-Drawer (Honi asks God to provide rain, and then the correct amount of rain when there is a flood) before the rest of the story settles into its groove, which is that of Annie’s love life. This latter begins with her resurrected mother telling Annie that she wants grandchildren:

“You know,” she’d say, as if I hadn’t heard it a hundred times before, “one of my great regrets was dying without getting to meet my grandchildren.”
“Mom,” I’d say, “you’re still alive.”
“Only because of a miracle, dear,” she’d say, “and we mustn’t count on miracles. What happened to Brett, anyway? I liked Brett. Good Jewish boy. And a doctor!”

After more of this kind of thing, and some of Annie’s backstory (a vision she had at 15 about saving monarch butterflies from extinction), Annie’s mother calls her and says that she has phoned God and had a word with him about Annie’s love life. Annie later experiences the result of this intercession in a hilarious passage:

I was on the Blue Line, reading The Guermantes Way–the new translation–when I noticed him–her? them?–sitting across from me, beautiful.
It was their skin, I think, that caught my attention. Strong, muscled, but still soft as a feather. I sucked in my breath and, without thinking, bit my lower lip. There was no question of going back to The Guermantes Way. I just sat, and looked at them, beautiful, God they were beautiful.
Then, just as we left Elmonica/SW 170th, they stood up–tall, broadshouldered, the slowest curve of their chin–and unfurled their wings of holy light, almost the length of the entire train car.
“Oh no,” I said, but I couldn’t look away.
“HARK,” they said, their voice filling the entire railcar. “BE NOT AFRAID, FOR I AM A MESSENGER OF THE LORD YOUR GOD.”
Some people were fumbling with their phones, but most of them just gawped, open-mouthed. I felt the cold-warm rush of embarrassment and I wanted to hide under my seat almost as much as I wanted to keep staring.
He’d sent an angel. Of course He’d sent an angel.
The angel turned to a slightly paunchy man–nice curly hair, though–in glasses, khakis and a polo shirt. “DAVID ELIAS RUTENBERG,” it said.
David blanched and looked for all the world like he’d just had a dream about taking a final exam in his underwear. “Y-yes?” he finally managed.
The angel pointed to me and I tried my very best to blend into the seat cushion. “THIS WOMAN, ANAT BETHESDA MEAGELE, IS SINGLE. SHE HAS A GOOD JOB AND SHE’S EMOTIONALLY MATURE AND READY FOR A COMMITMENT. YOU SHOULD ASK FOR HER NUMBER. SO SAYETH THE LORD.”
David stared at me and swallowed hard. His face was covered in sweat.
“TAKE HER SOMEWHERE NICE, NOTHING TOO FANCY, IN THE $20-30 RANGE,” continued the angel, just when I thought that this couldn’t get worse. “ARGUE ABOUT WHETHER TO SPLIT THE CHECK BUT THEN PRETEND TO GO TO THE BATHROOM AND SECRETLY PAY.”
David, still sweating, gave me an appraising look that made me instantly aware of every wrinkle and sag. “She’s, uh” he started.
“YES,” said the angel, turning their magnificent gaze upon me. “HURRY IT UP.”
“She’s a bit old for me, isn’t she?”
The angel snapped their gaze back to him. “WELL YOU’RE NO SPRING CHICKEN YOURSELF, DAVE.”
Dave looked like he’d just swallowed a toad. “I-is that also the word of G-G-God?” he managed.
“NO, DAVE, THAT’S JUST A SIMPLE OBSERVATION THAT ANYONE COULD MAKE. YOU’RE NOT EXACTLY GOING TO LAND A SUPERMODEL.”
“Uh, well,” said Dave, and pulled the emergency brake.

Annie subsequently phones God and tells him not to intercede again, before asking for the angel’s telephone number. God phones her back with it, and Annie and the (monomaniacally dull) angel subsequently go on a car crash date. Worse, he then pesters her with a series of texts asking to see her again and, when those are unanswered, another series asking what went wrong.
Annie (bearing in mind her mother’s comments about being too quick to judge) eventually agrees to another date with the angel. This one works out better, even though their dinner conversation spans an eclectic range of topics (the semiotics of the translations of Remembrance of Things Lost, Korean Food, angelic languages, etc.). By the fourth date they are having sex, or whatever word you would use to describe congress between a woman and a being who, unclothed, has a distinctly inhuman form:

Their human guise–clothes, but also skin and eyes and everything–lay in a pile beneath them. What remained was a great cloud of a thousand different hands, in each hand a different eye, in each eye a different name of God, all wreathed in light and holy fire.
“THIS IS ME,” said the angel, with a voice that seemed to come from everywhere.
I stepped forward, took one of the hands, and kissed it. “You’re beautiful,” I said, and meant it.

Eventually, and after sections that detail Annie’s conversations with (a) her mother about the parable of Honi the Circle-Drawer, and (b) the angel about the unpublished Rimbaud translations in her notebooks (the story is fairly discursive throughout), Annie phones her mother to tell her that she is pregnant. The story ends with, among other things, a discussion of God’s likely reaction, what Annie intends to do with her child, and what happened “last time” (i.e. with Jesus).
This is not only an original story (the idea of a slightly bumbling God manifest in the world is relatively novel or at least underused in genre fiction) but also an amusing, and sometimes hilarious, one. It is, however, slightly more sprawling than it needs to be (the ending is a bit wafflely, for instance) and some tightening up would have benefited the whole piece. That said, I enjoyed the story’s various diversions—the parable, Annie’s butterfly vision and whether saving them was God’s purpose for her, the discussions about Proust’s Remembrance of Things Lost, etc., etc. These gave what could have been a piece of froth some thoughtful heft and, at times, made it a wise and reflective work.
Well worth a look.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 9,550 words. Story link.

1. Giganotosaurus pays $100 for its stories, which is about 1 cent a word for this piece. I’m surprised this 2022 Nebula Award finalist didn’t end up in a better paying market.

When God Sits in Your Lap by Ian Tregillis

Posted on by Paul Fraser

When God Sits in Your Lap by Ian Tregillis (Asimov’s SF, September-October 2020) starts off in what I assume is hard-boiled/noir detective style:

I was jammed to the gills in the City of Angels the night some dumb onion started a war in heaven. And I was still piffled, a few hours later, when it ended.
I’d been weighing down a stool in my favorite gin mill, chewing face with a bottle and trying not to leave a puddle. A geriatric air chiller slowly lost its fight against entropy while the happy lady fumbling with her client in the corner gave us all a case of the hot pants, so the tapster barked at them to scram. They did, but not before pausing in the open doorway to let a devil wind rifle our pockets for loose change. (It got no business from me. You’d keep your cabbage in a shoe, too, if you’d ever lost a sawbuck to a Cherub’s grift.)

It keeps this up for a handful of pages until it moderates into a more normal style (although one still peppered with the likes of the above), during which we learn (a) that the “war in heaven” is an anti-satellite shooting war and (b) see the narrator, Philo Vance, approached by a man who wants him to check on his very rich mother (who seems to have cut him off after marrying a gold-digger).
The rest of the story mostly takes place at the woman’s mansion. Philo visits, sees a crashed car, and eventually manages to talk to someone at the house who has blood on his cuffs. Simultaneous with these events, Philo sees messages in his cigarette smoke and in water vapour—someone or something is trying to contact him.
The rest of the story is quite strange and, at one point, involves Philo departing our plane of existence to talk to something called the “Power”, which is concerned about something called METATRON running amok. This latter section, and previous hints, seem to suggest that Philo is an angel, although not from the sort of Heaven that we normally think of, and that the Power and METATRON are divine forces (possibly God and the Devil?).
Eventually (spoiler), and after various adventures at the bar and the mansion, we find that the mother’s disappearance and the behaviour of METATRON are connected, and matters resolve in the mother’s underground bunker—for both Heaven and Earth.
I’m not I entirely understood what was going on here, but those readers who have read Tregillis’s novel Something More Than Night (described as “Angel Noir” in the Asimov’s introduction) may fare better. As for the rest of us, there is probably enough sense here for it to be rated as okay. It’s more style than substance though, and it becomes a bit wearying.
** (Average). 8,200 words.