Angel

My best friend got beat up at school today and i was freaking out so I wrote to feel better. If something sounds out of place its something my friend said to me.

He was like a deer on the highway.

He was one of the “lucky” ones.

He was like any other one of his kind. His heart was unusually light, he was always dashing around making everyone happy.

When one day, while crossing a highway, he stepped cautiously onto the road, there were no cars so he turned to see if they were going to follow him. When a wolf jumped out and knocked him down, tearing a chunk from his leg. He lay there writhing in agony with the wolf’s jaw locked firmly around his foreleg. He didn’t fight, cry, or scream but simply asked if he could go back to class.

Suddenly, the wolf jerked up his head and scampered away. His family, he thought, they were coming to save him. He struggled to lift his head, but instead of seeing his family to save him, he saw two hot beams of light like lasers in the dull dusk light. Then his head was thrown back into the asphalt with waves of red hot pain. He opened his eyes to see his family grimacing and looking away when they step away from his body. He bleated out as to say, “What about me?” His mother looked back, her eyes like coal and dismissed him with a flick of her tail so as to say, “That’s your own fault! Now how are you supposed to get a wife! Now who will be my heir!” She said this disregarding her son bleeding out on the highway. She looked on at the oncoming cars with a bored expression, not caring at all that her son was about to be squashed to a pulp, and joined her remaining family.

He lay there his body convulsing as car after car hit him.

His entire chest burned out of malice.

Blood dripping from his mouth and nose, his stomach black with bruises.

Dragged into a bathroom and beat up till he couldn’t breathe.

Called up to the office for things that are never his fault.

Covered in ketchup during lunch while everyone laughs and stares.

Laying in a hospital bed throwing up blood.

Back covered in horrible gashes.

His eyes stare up at the sky, bright like the moon, like a frozen lake, like ice crystals, like snowflakes, like rain. They stared up, he looked almost happy, yet if you stared enough, the sorrow and pain that you found was staggering. So full of pain and loss, they were like two black holes.

I, seeing this entire ordeal, felt a sharp piercing pain in my chest. I was astonished, after everything I had witnessed, this broke my heart like no other. I touched my hand to my chest, to the billowing white folds of silk that flowed around me. I brought my hand back expecting to find it red, covered in blood. As if I was the one being run over by car after car after car. As if I was the one that had my leg eaten off by a wolf. As if I was the one whose life was falling apart.

I floated down ready to cradle his broken soul in my arms when-

“Stop- I’m-- not ready.” Taking a breath he gasped out in my mind, “Leave me-- I need to- do this.”

My heart soared. He was alive! My heart shattered into a thousand, no a million bazillion pieces, like sand, like dust. He… was… alive! Alive! After all of that! How could he possibly be alive after that? The pain he must be in. I shuddered inwardly my heart crying out.

“I can help, I can take the pain away. I can make it better” I said swallowing down the lump in my throat, the sobs, and the tears.

He squirmed, “No, don’t.”

“Doesn’t it hurt?”

“No, it feels great.”

I could have laughed any other time. After all this and he still has that light humor in him.

“Why?” I asked him.

“There’s this doe,” he said, his eyes flashing.

“Ah, yes,” I thought to myself, I remember seeing this beautiful young doe always lusting over and following this one buck. And I also remember him looking on in heartbreak, his head down slowly loping behind them. The buck in front turned around to glare at the desolate outcast. He reached out to the doe with his pleading eyes like fresh rain. She looked away flicking her white tail in embarrassment.

I didn’t have time to stay for long, I had other things I had to be doing. However, when I had to pass back that way I saw him limping home, one of his antlers broken and his head matted with fresh blood.

“She’s stuck-,” he said bringing me back to the highway, my dress whipping from the cars zooming down on the other side. “She’s tangled in some human’s shoelaces in the forest. But I wasn’t good enough” he wailed.

“No, no stop it,” I said my hands twitching wanting to stroke what was left of his pretty little head. I stopped though, I would only make it worse. When he breathed his last, his last effort to go on, his head slumping to the black relentless road, I stayed there, I stared at what was left of him. A bloody streaky lump. I stayed there, my eyes like clouds. Then, like water in a dam, my eyes overflowed. Rain pummeled down, washing away the blood, the pain, the tears and the dirt.

When suddenly I turned to look at the rustling to the right under my feet. I caught a couple glimpses of flashes of white. I looked closer and saw a young doe prancing up.

“It’s that girl that he liked,” I thought my heart warming, she’s come to lament over him. When I saw a buck following behind her nuzzling her side. She returned the gesture and playfully ran away, teasing him. Before he dashed off to catch her, I saw something tangled in his antlers which I didn’t see before. It was long, white and thin.

It almost looked like-

Shoelaces.