Angel

Light hit the floor before the feet did. An angel stood in the doorway, wing and halo, the old messenger, a face too calm for the news it brought. People put down what they were holding. They kept an angel gift in the chest, a brightness that did not ask to be liked. It returns in angel playing cards that pale the rest of the deck, in an angel notebook opened to a page that wants the true thing written, in an angel postcard of the wing and the quiet face. The door shuts. The light does not.