Fat Charlie the Archangel Files for Divorce
A story
The Archangel Charlie was looking through a stairwell on the main yard. To his surprise, and the surprise being that the time of year wasn’t even winter, someone had turned on the snow, so it was drifting and collecting along the main rectangular office block. He loved it when the seasons got a little jazzy here.
Of course, it probably had the usual origins in pathetic fallacy, that some sad-sack eternal in a back office had sensed another thousand years of heartbreak looming and decide to demonstrate it metrologically. Yet he knew that one’s sense of sadness, one’s sense of sloping in and out the room, was always felt more acutely personally than it was perceptible to others. Even at this late stage of proceedings.
He had come for a cheeky vape – tho it wouldn’t have been cheeky TBH, it would have inclined to the glum – but really he had come out just to think about why it had all gone wrong with Tabitha. Was ‘think’ even the right word? More to feel through the emotions again as they gradually became established biographical facts.
It had gone wrong though, that was undeniable; what had been posited as an enduring union had fizzled out in a matter of years. He had the feeling it was, tho they said that it was mutual, tho who knew what she said in the more obscure group chats, and he knew that the chats went deep, and also she had instigated it, he had the feeling tho that it was somehow entirely his fault and that if he’d just been a little slimmer and a little more senior amongst the heavenly host she wouldn’t have packed up her bags one day and left. Wouldn’t have left him starting again after his happy ending had apparently been secured.
She'd looked back at him from the taxi, flecks of white in her hair, and held up her own vape; that's how they'd met, vaping. She'd told him that her own heavenly existence had left behind nothing more than a clear craving for toffee and they'd laughed and gone to the orchards to sit by the river and drink wine. She'd told him about some of the workplace abuse she'd witnessed and she’d made the argument that angels should unionise.
He hadn’t taken long to fall in love.
The thing was that relationships in the afterlife really could last forever. There really could be that eternal unceasing ride off into the sunset, you could just keep living and living together. Sure, there was often the odd century or two which counted as a ‘rough patch’, and the childlessness of angel marriages posed a constant need for their reinvention but still, there was no real reason that a union between two celestial beings couldn’t last forever. He knew of a pair of seraphim on the sixty-seventh floor who even after seven hundred years and an ill-advised season in hell still shared a hot chocolate every morning.
But for his part – and to be clear the elusive, unmeasured nature of heavenly time made it hard to ascertain exactly how long they had been married – Tabitha and he had barely lasted any time at all. Given that fluid nature of heavenly life, decisions didn’t even have to be made at any time soon – you could take a year, five, even a decade of something being bad – even in those most generous of circumstances he had not proven a tolerable husband.
There was cold in his mouth, mixed in with cherry vape, as he puffed and thought.
She’d left him for someone else, a young red-eyed engineer who lived in the Milton Complex, tho there’d been problems long before her departure, with sex, conversation, and accomodation; her decision to embrace a new relationship was in a way only the decision to flip a switch that had long been flippable. Tabitha and the young Ishim – he hadn’t even been named yet – had been making a point of holding hands at the Sunday community event, unceremoniously snogging in the soup queue. He bet the sex was good.
Angels still fucked, tho it had been a while for Charlie. He’d been to an orgy or two but ended up feeling sad and just sat playing the harp in the corner, pushing the steel strings hard into his calluses. There were a couple of cherubim pissing on each other in the corner, one’s mouth open and the other tinkling gleefully away, and someone had invited a demon with a massive cock. It transpired that the demon was a complete sub and so six ruling angels tied him to a Doric column and took turns pushing pins into his thighs. Demons were so often submissives; it made sense given their professional lives.
Charlie looked at the drifting vape smoke and the twirling snow over the courtyard. They’d be starting to get back into it at the band rehearsal, maybe the first person would be asking where Charlie was, maybe the inevitable cocaine joke was being made. They’d need him back swiftly to get this march nailed down ahead of the weekend’s festivities. Even the time for melancholic introspection had to be limited for a hard-working mid-ranking angel. Funny; you’d think it would be different, that heaven would be via contemplativia all the way.
He had been working-class, Charlie felt sure, a long time ago. You could put him in laurels and sparkly shoes and a white gown but you couldn’t get the poverty out of how he felt. That was his theory anyway – they didn’t tell you what you’d been when you get here, only that you’d been good enough to get here at all. It was like arriving at an elite university with only your school grades to go on. Not even the subjects.
Anyway, class somehow explained how reluctant he felt to genuflect before the dignitaries when he passed them in satin-skirtboarded corridors. What did he really care if you’d been a medieval Pope?
And also he felt fat. Really fat. Despite all this finery; the big gold-leaf anchovy rolls on his shoes, toes like stuffed capers within, his gown of freshest silk falling down over his shoulders, the wings aquiver at the back. He had a halo for God’s sake. And yet despite all the regalia – Charlie now folding his vape shut and popping it back in the jewelled box he reserved for it – he still felt every one of the flabby wobbles of his obese form, felt every tremble like a sign of his own defeat and divorce. He knew that she had left him because he was fat.
And so Fat Charlie the Archangel had, much to his chagrin, filed for divorce. He was thousands of years old and up to his nose in girl trouble; could life really, he thought, have been all that worse before Heaven?
This story is inspired by the lyrics of the song below. From Paul Simon, ‘Graceland’ (1986)