Small Miracles

by Olivia Atwater

“I never learn. Ought to know better than to play cards with the Angel of Gamblers.” “I am not the Angel of Gamblers,” Barachiel protested. “I can’t help it if they keep praying to me.”

Gadriel had never liked excitement very much, even before her Fall. Once upon a time, she’d worked for Barachiel as a guardian angel, moonlighting on the side as an Angel of Small Miracles. She’d always delighted in the tiny banalities of existence—the lucky coin on the street; the butterfly that lands on your shoulder; the bread that bakes perfectly on the first try. Somewhere along the way, Gadriel had decided that yes, small pleasures like plucked daffodils and bits of chocolate were more important than pleasing the boss. This decision, it seemed, had been enough to turn her into the Fallen Angel of Petty Temptations. But while God’s angels had since become very fond of smiting the fallen, they rather had their hands full with the louder, angrier rebels like Lucifer and Beelzebub; none of them could really be bothered to visit divine judgement upon someone who spent their time tempting mortals to eat just one more crisp.

“But weren’t you dating someone?” she asked. “His name was, er… John? Jeremy? Jacob?” She was almost certain it had been a J name. “John was a bigot, Jeremy yelled at waiters, and Jacob had two secret children,” Sara said, listing off the men on her fingers. “If I find a man named Jingleheimer Schmidt, I’ll have been through the entire children’s song.”

Cats are responsible for 33.8% of time wasted on the Internet yearly. Indeed, cats are more efficient at temptation than most fallen angels are; a single well-placed cat can derail an entire online meeting in five seconds flat. This is especially infuriating to certain fallen angels, given that cats seem largely indifferent to their own powers of persuasion.

Believe me, plenty of people claim they love someone because they get the warm fuzzies around them—but love is something you do. Quite often, it’s something you choose.

The thing is, the dead don’t need anything from you—not love, not forgiveness. Those are things you offer because you need them.

In truth, the entire scene felt… warm, and homey. It was comfortably cosy—rather like his knitted vest. Gadriel couldn’t help basking in the sheer normalcy of it all. His mind drifted inevitably back to the early days. Things hadn’t always been rosy for him as a guardian angel, of course—but it was easier just now to remember the good parts, with families all gathered up around the hearth and children chasing each other around. Why, he wondered, were there so many Rules concerned with collecting virtue and so few concerned with collecting moments like this one?

For a guardian angel, a job well done means that their charge lives well and passes on peacefully, surrounded by loved ones—at which point, the angel is then assigned a new human being to watch over. All guardian angels, therefore, are fated to say endless goodbyes.

“You should come by for dinner, at least,” she said. “I have so many biscuits to get rid of, Barry, it’s ungodly. I have to practise a new recipe every time I get home from patisserie school.” Barachiel smiled at Gadriel. “I suppose I can make time for biscuits,” she said. Gadriel finished off her hot chocolate, setting the glass back down against the table with a soft rap. “My dear Barachiel,” she said, “what else is time for?”