#The guardian angel | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

hannahssimblr · 3 months ago

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I wander through the food stalls in the late afternoon once I’ve inevitably lost the others, and join a long queue for food. Chips. This seems to be ninety percent of my diet these days. Chips and the kinds of sweets from the corner shop that burn the coating off my tongue. I pay for them and some sad, limp looking hotdog and wolf them down before hopping into the queue for the bar. I get three beers, all with the lids confiscated. Necking them all is the only way to avoid the inconvenience of carrying them upright for several hours, and while I do it, I wander through the festival in a relatively aimless search of a familiar face.

The festival is in a field, or several, somewhere. I really have no sense of where I am according to a map. By the edge of the campsite, a path meanders into a small wood decorated with ribbons and hanging lamps in the foliage overhead. Acoustic melodies drift down the winding path as I pass couples in hammocks and groups of friends seated in the shade among the wildflowers.

There is a smaller stage here, wooden, with a tarp hung overhead, housing musicians who play a lazy tune to a crowd on the picnic blankets and cushions scattered across the grass. A group of people in weird clothing dance in a circle, doing the type of moves people only seem to do when they’re familiar with the bong. Swaying, arms loose and hair, (because they all have long hair,) swishing across their backs. I seat myself on the grass in the dappled shade of an oak tree to finish my last beer, watching them as I let the alcohol slowly take over my body with that familiar, hazy weight.

Eventually, one dancer sees me. Our eyes meet across the clearing and I feel embarrassed for looking at all. She smiles this slow, tranquil smile and begins a slow dance in my direction.

“Fuck sake.” I think. “Why was I looking? Now I’m going to have to speak to this weird hippie-”

“Are you joining us, or are you just having a look?” She has a country accent I don’t recognise, but since I’m ignorant of all that exists outside of Dublin city, this much is not surprising.

“I’m just, uh, I’m just looking, I suppose.”

“You seem a wee bit glum.”

“Right well, I’m fine, so.”

“I assumed you were looking over at us because you felt like a dance, but were feeling shy.”

I hack out a laugh. “What? No. No, I don’t dance like that.”

“‘Like that’? Like what?”

I peer over to the others behind her, one of which appears to believe he’s floating through time and space. “I’m not even nearly stoned enough, to be honest.”

“Ah, well, easy fix there. You could be stoned.” She sticks her hand into the pocket of her big patchwork skirt and offers me a rolled joint, but I shake my head and push it away. “Look, thanks, but I don’t smoke.”

“Do you do anything else?” she rummages through another pocket.

“Not right now.”

“What’s wrong with now?”

“It’s about four in the afternoon.”

“It’s a festival. We don’t currently exist under the constraints of society. You don’t have to wait until it’s dark to do pills here, or whatever it is you think. You can be a free man, anybody you want to be.”

I shake my head. “You’d only be wasting them on a stranger. Don’t.”

She plonks next to me in the grass. The smell from her clothes is like the health food shop in town, where Jen buys those enormous bags of sesame sticks to munch with deliberate obnoxiousness in the middle of religion class.

She says, “You seem forlorn. I have this sense that you ought to be happier.”

I regard her for a moment, her red curls wild, the sun catching a halo of frizz around a circular face. “Look, if you’re coming over here for some other reason, like, you know… if this is about you wanting to-”

“I don’t fancy you, or anything like that.” She says, then, after I pause, she adds, “sorry to shock you, but I’m not interested.”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you offended?”

I hesitate. “No.”

“You’re hardly making an assumption because I’m a girl doing something nice for you, are you? This doesn’t mean I want something more from you. You get that, right?”

I shrug.

“Because that’s what boys do. They’re only nice to girls they think are hot.”

“Speaking from experience?”

She sighs, a great, long sigh of something like satisfaction with herself for having figured me out. “See, you would have been quite mean to me in school, wouldn’t you?”

I survey her for a few moments, then decide on cautious honesty. “Probably.”

“I’m healing at the moment. I’m seeking empathy for the kinds of people who I feel resentment towards. I thought I’d come over and offer you, and by extension every sporty, slightly ignorant boy from my secondary school…” She pulls a small baggie out of that skirt pocket and her face lights up with surprised delight, “ketamine! See it as a peace offering.”

I ignore it until she puts it away.

“You actually remind me of my friend.” I tell her.

“Interesting.”

“She’s got the same hair, whenever she doesn’t straighten it, and stuff, it’s kind of curly like yours.”

“Ah, and is she also a massive babe?”

I pause.

“God. I was joking. You can say that she’s pretty without slipping up and complimenting me, too. Don’t worry, I won't get the wrong idea.”

“Yeah, Alison’s pretty. She doesn’t really, um, wear the clothes you wear, or anything, there’s just something about your hair, I suppose, and parts of your face that remind me of her.”

“Is Alison here today?”

“No, she’s in Dublin. I… yeah.”

The girl grins and bites her lip impishly. “So this friend, is she just a friend, or do you love her or something?”

I’m rendered momentarily speechless by the strangeness of this conversation. Who is this person, this Alison imposter? I shake my head. “No, it wasn’t like that with us. She’s a friend.”

“But you want more.” She prompts, and I furrow my brow. “You’re fairly nosy. Did you know that?”

“You’ve just started telling me this. I’m only listening to you.”

“Fair enough. I don’t know, anyway, maybe I wanted more at a certain time, but I’m just kind of like that with a lot of girls, like, I just get, like, feelings about them. It’s the main thing that’s wrong with me at the moment.”

“Explain that to me some more. Do they not feel it back, or?”

“Well, that’s not the issue, usually.”

“Ah,” she says, “You’ve got other, deep dark, brooding things going on, then.”

I lay my empty beer bottle on the grass. It tips over and rolls down the little incline where we sit, out of reach. I leave it there. “I suppose.”

Someone in the band has whipped out a sitar, sending psychedelic sounds over the crowd, and I sort of feel like my body is ascending to another realm, transported right back to that time Jen and I did mushrooms in a carpark and all the vehicles started looking like big weird bugs. It's dreamlike, transcendent, like I’m not real, and nothing I say holds any weight. I’m just a soul in the woods with a ginger girl in fairy clothes offering me bags of pills.

“So, are you sad about Alison?” She says.

“That’s part of it.”

“And the other parts, are they related to women, too?”

“Everything’s related to women a bit, isn’t it?”

“I’m very curious about what’s wrong with you.”

I let out a short, self-conscious laugh and pluck a blade of grass from the ground.

“You don’t have to tell me. I just wonder what has you sad and alone in absolutely glorious weather, on the first day of a festival.”

“That’s why you came over, is it?”

“Yeah, in part. I’m saving you the same way I’d save a baby bird chucked out of its nest.”

“You look like you’d do that,” I say derisively, “and you'd disrupt the entire hangout so you could call the SPCA.”

She doesn’t flinch. “Yeah, ‘cause I would.”

“Okay, well, you could be working on me for a while. I think there’s everything wrong with me currently, so.”

“Well, I’m high as fuck, and I’m not going anywhere.”

“Right.” I concentrate intently on the grass in my hand, folding it, knotting it, then breaking it apart, centimetre by centimetre. The girl, Not Alison. Weed Alison, sits there patiently as I repeat this process, plucking grass, fiddling with it, breaking it, flicking the bits away.

There’s a chance, I realise, I am becoming a weird man. A man who does things like this, who sits with a person he has never met before, and begins telling her private things about himself. Next thing I know, I’ll be fifty-eight years old and doing this to college girls on the bus as they try their best to ignore me and look out the window as I miss their every signal. The outlook isn't great.

This girl is asking questions because she is overly interested in other people’s lives and sees me as something amusing to be played with. Intellectually, I know this, yet there is a part of me that believes she has genuine concern for me and my wellbeing, like I really am some rejected baby bird. I experience a wave of momentary anger at her for confusing me until it becomes suddenly clear that I am angry at myself for the things that I feel.

Still, the truth, having been given permission to emerge, rises in my stomach like bile.

I’m horrified to feel emotion swelling behind my face, and wait a long time to speak, in case my voice cracks and humiliates me. “I think I’m in love with someone.”

“Oh, right,” she says, like this piece of information is not as astounding as I assumed it would be. “Someone other than your Alison friend.”

“Yeah, someone else.”

“Another she? Or a he, this time?”

I huff out a laugh. “A she.”

“Have you mentioned it to her?”

“God, no.”

“Do you plan to?”

“It’s pretty obvious to me that she’s better off not knowing.”

Her face lights up. “Ah, because she’s together with somebody else. Your friend, right? Your best friend.”

“Why are you making this into a soap opera? She’s not with anyone else... I don't think. It’s just, logistically. It’s not right.”

“So you’re kind of… not following your heart.”

“Fucked if I know what I’m doing, to be honest.”

“Well,” she says, leaning thoughtfully onto her elbows, “What would happen if you told her about what you’re feeling?”

I glare at her in outrage.

She blinks. “Well, don’t you think she might like to know?”

“No, it’d be the worst thing possible. I’ll ruin her.”

“Maybe it’d be worse if you didn’t tell her.”

I have to stare at her for several seconds while I formulate a response. “It’s best for us both that I say nothing.”

“You have to tell her. What if she feels the same? What if she’s just waiting for you to say something? What if you’re both afraid for the same reason? What if you miss your chance and never get another?”

“It’s more complicated than that.”

“Have you ever kissed her?”

“No.”

She gasps, eyes dancing. “You must. What if it’s fab?”

“That’d be worse than not doing it at all.”

She cocks her head, “I don’t understand you. What about this love you supposedly feel?”

“It’s just a summer thing. I’ll get over it.”

A sigh. “Okay”

“I always do.”

“Until you don’t.”

I narrow my eyes. “What’s that mean?”

“It means you do until you don’t. I thought that too, once, and then-”

“Eimear!” One of the dancing hippies calls out to her as the melody changes again, to something lively and upbeat. “Are you bringing your little chavvy friend to dance or not?”

She looks at me, and I shake my head firmly.

“No,” she calls back, “He's decided against it.”

The group boos me heartily as she climbs to her feet, making such a scene with their disapproval that others turn to have a look, and to smile at me in that sympathetic way that you do to a child that is failing to fit in with his peers. I am a spectacle in football shorts among the harem-pantsed congregation.

“Let yourself experience love.” Eimear says in parting, as serenely, she drifts towards her friends, twirling in a meadow of dog daisies.

“Right, yeah.” I say, and get up to wander back the way I came, wobbly on my feet as the full force of the beers I necked in one go hits me all at once. And as I leave the strange, hazy dreamland behind and reenter the grungy reality of the main arena, I reach into my pocket and discover something that wasn’t there before.

It’s a baggie with three pink, pressed ketamine pills.

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#lucky boy 2010 #i ran out of images lmao!!#there was a pic at the end of him walking away but I didn't like it as much as any of the others #so I'm leaving it out #anyway here is Weed Alison #the guardian angel #her name is pronounced E - Mur btw #tw: drugs

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acepumpkin · 1 year ago

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The Guardian Angel

A young man lays in a dark alleyway. His eyes snap open as he jolts awake. Sitting up quickly, taking in sharp breaths as his hands clutch at his chest where a dark red spot has formed.

Looking down at his hands he thinks; is this my blood? Suddenly, he noticed a slight burning feeling in the front right pocket of his jeans. Reaching down to feel in the pocket, he pulls out a folded piece of paper. It was glowing! Shocked and confused, he decides to open the paper. As the glowing suddenly stops, words come to view. But what do the words say? As to clarify in his mind he reads the note out loud, "Ace Woods. Deceased." I'm dead? Reaching again to his chest he thinks, maybe that's why there's blood on my chest! The note begins to glow again, as new words appear. "Ace, you are now a guardian angel to many people. Notes will appear when a person is in trouble. You will be given the person's name, date and exact time they will need to be saved. Your journey of redemption begins now."

After Ace reads over the note, he left the alleyway and started walking around the town. A couple minutes later he felt another burning sensation on his leg. Another note. He his hand into his pocket and pulled out the paper. Ace started to read it out loud, " Katie William. Age: 5. Black hair. Central Park. Red Ball. Twelve-o'clock. Save from getting hit by a car." The note ends.

"How am I supposed to know what time it is?" He says out loud. Just then, Ace feels something cold on his right wrist. Looking down, he moves up the sleeve of his shirt to see the silver face of a watch, with a leather band wrapped around his wrist. "Uhm, thanks?" Ace whispers into the air.

Quickly he checks the time. Ten-o'clock! He has two hours to get to Central Park. Having never been to Central Park, Ace starts quickly walking around looking up at street signs trying to find his way to the park.

Finally, after an hour and a half, he finds the park. Looking around, he spots a bench close to the edge of the park near the playground. Walking over to it, he heavily drops down on the bench. Sighing, Ace reaches back into his pocket and takes out the piece of paper to study the note. Black hair, and five years old. Not very descriptive, he thinks sarcastically. Another thirty minutes passed by slowly. At the exact time Ace spots, a red ball rolling out into the busy street. He then noticed a young girl chasing after it, and blue sneakers on her feet.

Quickly, Ace realizes that there's a car heading straight for her! In the distance, he can hear the screams of the girl's terrified mother. Bolting up and running towards the little girl, Ace closes the distance to the girl. Leaping forward grabbing the young girl, to move her out of the way, Ace rolled to the safety of the other side of the road with the girl tucked safely in his arms. At that time, the car screeched to a halt! Sounds of shoes hitting the asphalt coming closer, running to the two on the ground. Ace looks up to many teary eyes looking down at him.

Slowly Ace sits up with the child shaking in his arms. The young girl's mother finally reaches the two and falls to her knees. Shaking and eyes tearing up, she says with relief in her voice, "Thank you so much, Sir!" Not being sure how to handle the situation, Ace replied, "Your welcome Miss." He handed the frightened young girl back into the arms of her mother. The man driving the car, took a shaky step towards the group, spewing out quick apologies to the upset mother and Ace.

After many thank yous from the mother and big hugs from the little girl, Ace went on his way, heading down the street. A burning sensation came back to his pocket, and his walking came to a halt. Pushing his hand into his pocket, he pulls out the note. It was glowing again. At the bottom of the note it read "Accomplished." The glowing got brighter and brighter until the note exploded into ashes, falling from Ace's hand. Looking around frantically, wondering if anyone had seen the explosion as well. The many people walking around were busy and didn't pay him any mind.

In the days that went by, Ace saved two more people. A teenage boy hanging out with his friends, he would have drowned in a lake. A young woman hiking with her dog almost fell off the edge of the trial. She would have ended up in a coma.

Wondering around the surprisingly, quiet night of New York City, Ace had reached the end of the street he had been walking. Feeling a familiar burning sensation in his pocket, he quickly reached into his pocket and fished out the note. Reading it out loud Ace prepared himself for the news, "Kenny Loomis. Age: 30. Alleyway on Cater Street. Save from drug overdose." Ace pauses and reads the last part again. "I have to save him, he can't end up like me." He mutters.

Hastily stuffing the note back into his pocket, he starts running, searching for Carter Street. After an hour Ace eventually finds the street. Racing down the block looking in every alleyway ready to give up, Ace hears a faint sound coming from the alley he had just rushed past. It sounded like crying. Going back to the entrance he saw a man sitting on the ground. Slumped against the brick wall, the man moaned in pain and sorrow.

Silently walking towards the man, a large dark, ghostly figure blocks his way. stepping back, he looks up at the figure. In his mind, he can only think of one word to describe this......thing. Demon. It has dark, blood-like eyes that seemed to wetly run down its elongated face, dripping onto its sharp yellow stained fangs. Finally, adverting his eyes from the demon's grotesque face, he looked behind it to the man crying. He could see that the man was surrounded by these evil things. The demons were whispering darkness in the ears of the poor man. Taunting him and telling him to take the drugs. At that moment Ace remembered the reason he died. He had gotten into a violent fight with a man about drugs.

Ace was pulled back to the present by the sounds of the man's wails. He had to save him. But how could he get around this thing blocking his way? Getting his courage up, Ace sprinted toward the demon. Growling in an inhumane way, the demon tried in vain to reach out and grab Ace. Sliding down in-between the demon's legs narrowly escaping, Ace quickly made his way over to Kenny. Ripping and pushing the creaturs away, he pulled Kenny into his arms to protect him. In that split second of grabbing him, a blinding light emitted from Ace's body, burning the demon and turning them to ash.

The frightened man looked up at him, still caged in his arms, "Thank you so much." He said in a small, shaky voice. Ace just smiled fondly at him, "Well it is my job to protect those in need," he said "Just don't get into this life. It won't end well for you."

With those last words, Ace let the man go and started heading out of the alleyway. Just then that, almost comforting, burning feeling came back. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the glowing piece of paper, on it read, "Accomplished." The paper started to glow, much brighter than it ever had before. What's going on? Ace thought as a bright white light began to envelop him. Just as the light surrounded him fully, he heard a deep but rich voice say to him,

"You have been redeemed."

-The End-

~AcePumpkin~

#fantasy #short story #The Guardian Angel

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