Meghan O’Toole

Awe and Wonder and Delight

First Runner-Up of the 2024 American Literary Review fiction contest, Judged by SJ Sindu

I found the angel in Alaska.

It was the beginning of my seventh season up north. I had moved around a bit but wound up back in Timothy’s RV with the same job every summer. Salmon season, the cold rush of water. I never did any fishing, just the sterile work of parceling fresh bodies in styrofoam and ice before they were shipped out to every finger of the country.

Salmon are so much meaningless repetition. Generations upon generations follow the same cycle: egg, alevins, fry, parr, smolt, adult, and kelt. It would be easier to think of the fisherman as an interruption of the cycle, but we are simply part of it. Everything gets enveloped into the fold. In this way, each fish lives forever.

Timothy and I were waiting for the haul, which was due the next day. He was back at the trailer speaking to his flask, and I was taking a smoke down by the water waiting for news from the fish team. The air was quiet, silence for miles. I leaned against a boulder and looked down into the water, and there in the dark were two bright eyes staring up at me.

The eyes were peculiar in a way that’s hard to place, like rocks at the bottom of a clear mountain lake, but iridescent and pearly in the whites and rich and alive in the irises–golden and green and brown, all the colors of claybound earth. And the pupils, so deep, so dark. The pupils were like holes that burrowed deep into the mantle of the earth, down to that hot cavernous space. I had a sense they had been watching me for some time.

I held my breath and froze for what felt like forever, and then the eyes blinked, and it was like time started anew, like it had never really been running until that moment. And then she reached a hand. I did not think before I grabbed it.

Pulling her forth from the water was like pulling a great creature from the sea, a slimy heavy thing wrest of a shell, and I pulled, and whatever was attached to the hand felt heavy and great, and I thought, for a moment, that the weight would pull me into the water, that I myself would never be able to let go of the hand, that we would drown, or I would drown and the thing would watch over me while my soul slept in that clear water.

I do not believe in God. I have not believed since I killed my brother.

When the angel came out of the river, she didn’t have a name. And she was just a girl, a child. Small and cold, but unshivering. A face open to the world as she looked around, raking those bright harsh eyes across the landscape, the boats, the hazy gray-blue smear of mountains and the rusted pickups and the bleak slate of water and the hyper shocks of purple fireweed in the ditches and finally, on me, who could not raise a hand to wipe the tears from my eyes. But the angel stepped forward and touched my cheek, and her thoughts thundered through me: I fell to earth and landed in Alaska. I burned all the way down until I became so small that I was just a seed. I saw the story of the world whip past me. Single-celled eras and the cosmic economy of energy, the birth and death of stars, and the free galloping hooves of wild horses. I fell into a pile of springtime snow, white and crumbly and delicious with cold, and when an elk stepped through it, I woke and remembered everything there was to know about the world.

I felt her words and pictures as I tumbled through them; I was so startled I had to step back. I told myself I’d imagined it, the electricity she put in my blood. She had my tear on her fingertips. She tasted the salt with a flick of her tongue. I imagine it tasted something like blood.

I knew right then she was an angel, and that angels are far beyond anything the Bible says. An angel is gravity embodied. An angel is mitosis. An angel is a cosmic motion.

I blinked, finally, and spots in the shape of her eyes were burned into my vision as if I had stared too long and hard at twin suns. Then, I began to cry.

These were the same tears I cried years ago after driving and driving north until I ran out of gas and stopped in a field and lay there with my bloodied clothes until the image of my brother stilled in my head. Body-heavy sobs that hurt my back. My lungs tripped over themselves and it was hard to take a breath.

I stared at the angel and she stared at me. The world and all its wonder crashing in on me.

I breathed in. The wildflowers and the trees. I quickly took off my coat and draped it around her, though she did not seem bothered by the cold or her lack of clothes. I called 911 right away, or tried to, but the guys had taken the satellite phone and my call did not go through. Then I looked at the angel, or girl–now that time was passing, I couldn’t tell if I’d had a moment of craziness– and I said, “What were you doing down there?”

She coughed once and spit a mouthful of misshapen plastic into her palm and looked at it curiously. It was about the size of a golf ball and made of many colors, bits of plastic compressed together in the mold of her mouth.

Then she said, “I was waiting.”

***

When I used to picture Jesus, I pictured my brother limp on the cross, and it made my heart ache to see every crucifix in homes I passed through, repetitions of suffering strung up on walls.

River’s favorite places were the lumber yard, the riverbank, and the middle of an open field: “I want to die in an open field lying next to someone who loves me.” He was the one who raised me, worked at the window factory while I went to school.

I wed disappointment at all stages of life. Me and my buddy pulled a prank at school that got us expelled: churned the football field to mud with an old tractor. Coming home to tell River before the night shift was one of the worst blows I’ve dealt. He wanted me in school because he believed I could do better than anyone else in our fractured line of family. All the belief got so heavy over the years.

Dad would have been mad. River was heartbroken. He didn’t say a word, just went outside to smoke a cigarette and watch the wasps build a nest in the door frame. So, me and the friend started work at the window factory the next week. The three of us worked together for almost a year.

In Alaska, the air smells like water and cold, but more than that, it smells like shapes and colors. I shared an old RV with three other guys who worked in the industry. Two were fishermen, so they were gone for long stretches of time, and the other guy, Timothy, was responsible for packing the fish after I sorted them. We shipped them to a place that would cut their pink bodies open and prepare them for restaurants and shelves. Wild-caught Alaska fish. People paid extra for that. By the end of the season, I was the only one not sick of eating fish, the buttery bodies so fresh and unlike the food back home.

The RV was small. We tacked foam and heavy blankets against the window to keep it dark, even during the sun that stretched its hand into night. In summer it smelled of mildew, but in winter the air was heavy with the kerosene that fueled the roaring heater. I loved the sound that heater made, like one long breath of a large beast.

The other guys were all right. Gruff, quiet types, or too loud and always drunk. I liked Timothy best. He kept a flask that no one, not even himself, was allowed to drink from and said he kept a demon in there, and half the time he seemed to really believe it and sometimes even whispered to it when he thought he was alone–but he liked to keep warm, so the RV was always warm. Well-insulated, caulked against drafts. The RV was warm enough that I could sleep in just a white tank top instead of the flannel pajamas I bought my first winter here. There were two beds in the trailer, the bed at the back and the sofa along the windows, and we had installed a plywood board and a thin mattress over the two driving seats of the RV to make a third, but that meant Timothy and I had to share the big bed at the back when the other two were there because the other two were worn from the boat and needed their own space before they went out again. And we were the youngest, anyway, and during those weeks when the fishermen were gone, we sometimes shared the bed anyway. If we were drunk. If we both wanted a good sleep. There were lots of reasons. It depended.

Alaska with its armfuls of wildflowers and soft licks of cloud and hush-rushing water, the vast sky, the flats below the mountains. Alaska, where the world was like a hand about to close over me.

***
When I looked at the shape of my life, it felt inevitable that I was the cause of my brother’s death. Up here, surrounded by water, I think of River and all he wanted for my life and his plain ambition for his own. I had watched the salmon run each year. I handled their bodies. River was as much part of that cycle as I was. He had been dead a long time, and I had killed him twice: once back home and then again in the way I carried myself after.

The angel didn’t say another word when I brought her to the RV. She just watched us. Me and Timothy fed her hot soup and gave her a good wool sweater that hit her past the knees, and we didn’t know how to braid her hair properly. I handed her a pair of my socks since we didn’t have shoes for her, and I had to show her how to put them on. She wouldn’t touch the soup.

Timothy tried to repeat a call to the police, but it didn’t go through. She could be a regular little girl who’d gone through something terrible. We didn’t know if she had a home. I didn’t dare say aloud she could be beyond human. Time alone up here can drive you crazy, and sometimes I felt like Timothy rubbed off on me too much. We tried to start the pickup truck and take her to someone who’d know what to do, but the engine didn’t turn over. Someone had left a light on in the cab and the truck was dead. We couldn’t jump it with the RV because the RV hadn’t been started in years, but I rooted around in the gear trunk and found a solar charger. I hooked it up to the battery, and Timothy and I watched for a moment while the battery did the slow work of drinking up the light. Part of me was relieved it would take so long.

While we worked, the angel turned her attention to the gravel at her feet. She picked up chips of stone one by one and kissed them before setting them down precisely where she found them. She must have felt our eyes on her because she stopped her work and stared at Timothy like she was looking through him. He turned away sharply and scratched his ear.

Timothy looked me in the eye. The corners of his lips dug down into his face. He was unhappy. “There’s something off about that kid.”

“She’s probably been through hell.” I did not say anything about our exchange by the water, and Timothy could not tell I had been crying because I’d splashed cold water on my face to bring down the swelling before taking the angel to the RV.

“I mean something else.” He licked his lips. “I have a headache. I think she’s trying to talk to me.”

We asked the angel questions–her name, her home, what she was doing in the water–but she just stared back at us with those burning eyes. I sat by the heater in the trailer shivering and drinking hot instant coffee and soup, so cold after the water. But the angel just sat there unspeaking, hair still dripping like it didn’t bother her one bit.

In summer, the sun sets late as far north as we were. Timothy and I ate dinner, and then I heard him at the back of the RV, whispering. He often spoke to his flask at the late hours of night, his murmurs inaudible, his voice hushing like water sounds.

The angel stared into the shadows at the back of the RV and watched Timothy intently. She broke her gaze briefly to make eye contact with me, and her irises lined up perfectly with the two bright spots in my vision.

“Tomorrow,” I called out to him, “we will drive her to the nearest tribal law station.”

Timothy shuffled over to me. “I don’t think they’ll know what to do with her.”

“Well, we can’t keep her here. She must have a home.”

Timothy argued with me for the first time. “It might be better to leave her, put her back where you found her.”

I was ticked off even though I didn’t want her to go and I knew she wouldn’t go. “A hospital. We can take her to a hospital.” There was something about her that did not belong indoors.

For a while, Timothy said nothing. Then, he set his flask on the table and said, “Ok.”

I poured both of us another cup of coffee and a small portion for the angel. She took it in her hands but did not drink. Her cheeks were bright and warm, and she did not shiver though the water had been cold. I have not spent time around kids except for when I was one. I did not know how to take care of her, and the thought swimming laps in my head was that my brother would have known just what to do. I sucked my teeth and asked her again, “You sure you’re not hungry?”

The angel stood, socks pooling around her ankles. She reached her damp pinkish hand and grabbed the flask off the table. Timothy stiffened. “Give that back.”

But the angel tapped the side of the flask, shook it a bit, and then, looking him right in the eye, she uncapped it and tipped it into her mouth. As long as I’ve known Timothy, I never saw him open that flask, not even when I woke up in the middle of some night to the sound of him whispering to it.

Nothing came out. The flask appeared empty. But the angel made a pantomime of swallowing a great mouthful before she closed the flask and handed it back to Timothy.

Timothy’s face was gripped with nausea. He peered into the flask and saw nothing. His lips went white, sweat across his hairline. He paled to the color of fish and gripped his clothes tight. Abruptly, he stood and exited the RV. The door slammed behind him and shook the whole camper.

“Why did you do that?” I whispered as I took the empty flask from her hand. I didn’t want to try to explain the importance of the flask to the girl. I had no understanding of it myself. As long as I had known Timothy, he had carried the flask, and the one time I asked about it, he’d told me he trapped the very demon he made a deal with and that they had an understanding.

“I was hungry,” said the angel.

I stared out the front window where there was a gap in the blankets. The sun drew a slow arc across the sky. I don’t know how much time passed, just that my throat suddenly hurt, and I realized I had been singing and the angel had been holding my hand. I stopped. The angel sat down again, and Timothy still hadn’t come back, so I put on my jacket. “Wait here.”

I didn’t have to go very far before I found him face down in the fireweed. I turned him over. He was too cold to be alive, but I checked for a pulse anyway. I stood over him for a while, not sure whether to leave him here or put him in the trailer.

I reached for some kind of feeling. I had known Timothy for years. But after all the crying, there was nothing left in me, and I don’t think there ever would be again. I think the angel ate it all.

All around us, trees, and the world was walled in by mountains and water. I didn’t want an animal to get at him before the truck would be charged for tomorrow, so I grabbed him under the arms and hauled him over to the truck. I couldn’t see what had killed him. There were no marks on his body, and his face was set in a neutral mask. He looked at peace. I put him in the bed of the pickup and covered him with a tarp, but then that felt wrong, so I uncovered him again so he could watch the sky.

The angel was waiting outside the RV for me. I wasn’t going to say anything to her, but then she spoke: “I didn’t hurt Timothy.”

“Course not.” I scooped her up from the ground and hugged her close. Her hair smelled like lilies. “You’re an angel.”

Her fingers curled around the fabric of my shirt, and she held on. “I’m an angel,” she said. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I held her hard, did not let go while she repeated over and over in a whisper pressed to my ear, “I’m an angel.”

***
Summer. It sops you up like syrup. The heat all those years ago was blinding and heavy. I would have done anything to escape it, the heat and home, so I got in my truck without cleaning my brother’s blood from my clothes and drove north and north until I hit Alaska.

We were installing a new piece of equipment at the plant. I don’t remember what the damn thing was, just that it was heavy. Someone sat me down at the crane and told me which button to push. I still don’t know what I did wrong.

All I remember is the crash and the stillness. The sound and the shaking of the building. How everyone froze for a moment and then started running. How I thought they were running towards me.

Then I saw the hand, and it struck me how familiar of a hand it was. Then my friend was pulling me into a tight hug and hauling me back, and I thought I was falling backward from a great height.

The next thing I remember is lying in the open field, River’s blood darkening the white stripes of my t-shirt. I don’t remember how that happened. When did I touch him for the last time?

It was dark when I started driving. North because cold feels clean. Alaska where the water was pure and the world big, the sky crushing, and the earth like jaws trying to eat you up.

I carried the angel over the gravel and to a wide sprawl of fireweed. She eased her grip on me, and I set her down gently.

As I thought of River, the angel seemed to hear me. In the bright nighttime sun, she looked just like a girl.

“Why are you here?” I asked her.

“To end things,” she said. She pressed a hand against my ear, and I felt her again: So many small delights. Water vapor catching light. The utility of chalk. How the body echoes the ocean so it can carry life. The unopened buds of flowers, potential. A thrill of wind. Rushing water, water running, the terrible weight of water in motion. I felt the beauty of it as it was meant to be felt, and all around it there was the terror of losing it, the tiny swirls of plastic in the oceans, the grief that follows extinction’s sweeping hand.

She ends things. It comes as a relief to hear. A true interruption of these tired cycles.

The angel showed me a kindness by tugging my hand until I lay down in the tall flowers and found myself looking up at the sky. I was lying in an open field as my brother wanted to die, and I realized too late I was supposed to repent all these years not by carrying my guilt on a chain, but by keeping his consciousness alive in the action of my life. I was lying in an open field, and I saw that it was the perfect place to die.

The angel knelt beside me. “How will you end things?” I asked her.

The angel made the world go dark. I felt the warm dampness of her childlike hands as she gently pushed my eyelids down. I felt my lashes cling to her brown skin.

I think, when she shut my eyes, I was imagining I was River, still alive.

Meghan E. O’Toole is from Illinois. She was the 2021 fiction winner of the Ploughshares Emerging Writers’ Contest and the recipient of LitMag‘s Virginia Woolf Award for short fiction in 2018. She received her BA in English from Elmhurst College and her MA in literature from Western Illinois University.