Blind Faith, by Michelle Valois

The Wounded Angel, by Hugo Simberg (Finland) 1904

Blind Faith
            
She slouches blindfolded and barefoot on a wooden gurney; white flowers in one hand; bloodied wings on her back. Two boys carry her. One, in brown, stares at us. The other looks straight ahead, determined to bear the weight. He is dressed in pallbearer black. But the angel is not dead, merely wounded, as if merely were a small thing where wounds are concerned.
 
The boys think they will save her. They do not understand what has wounded her, but they look kind. Can the angel trust their kindness? She is at their mercy, blindfolded and borne. You would not want to be at anyone’s mercy. Anyone can humiliate you. Anyone can betray you. Anyone can say I love you and not mean it.
 
Can the angel trust the gurney on which she is seated? The earth below her feet? If the angel took off the blindfold, what would she see? Kind faces? If she looked up, what would be there? The sky from which she fell? 
 
You want to take the angel in your arms and rock her. You want to tell her to keep trusting, though god knows you could not bear the blindness. You would want to see the faces of the strangers who bore you and, still, that would not be enough.
 
The not-dead angel, blindfolded and bloodied, holds white flowers, holds the bars of a gurney, always holding on. She is at the mercy of strangers whose faces she cannot see, as if seeing made any difference.
 
Michelle Valois
 
Michelle Valois lives in Massachusetts and teaches writing and humanities at a community college. Her work has appeared in magazines and journals including The Massachusetts Review, Brevity, Palooka, The Florida Review, TriQuarterly, and others. Her book My Found Vocabulary was published in 2016 (Aldrich).