Guardian Angel

There he was. The pastor’s son, in all his gentile righteousness, filled the very front pew of the church. His seemingly luminescent pale skin, his pale, white-blonde hair—the only thing out of place were his muddy brown eyes, and even those were wrought with Christ-love. His smiles made all the girls weak at the knees and a certain boy in the back of the church go mad in the heat of teenage lust.

“Pay attention, boy!”

Chris winced as a pamphlet made unexpectedly stinging contact with the back of his head. With a quick check of the back of the head with his fingers, Chris looked over at his grandmother and melodramatically rubbed the site of impact.

“Granny, what the hell?”

Another blow to the head.

“Don’t you dare, child.” Granny asserted forcefully.

Chris pouted and turned back to the object of his affections. Far too long had he had to sit in the back of the church with his grandmother, trying to pray away the deep burning he would constantly feel in the center of his chest every time he caught a glimpse of the flame-white hair which had stoked the fire of his desire for so long.

“Christian Matthias Moses, you sit up straight while you’s in church!”

Chris scowled and straightened his spine.

“Show me some teeth or you’s goin’ ‘cross my knee when we get home.”

Chris bared his teeth for only a moment before a gnarled, mangled hand slapped him across the freckled cheek. Chris hissed and cupped his hand over the red spot now forming on his cheek.

The pastor stepped out on stage and began the sermon. Chris knew he was in for a boring one, so he naturally turned his attention to the flaxen-haired angel in the front row. Chris had never spoken to this boy and he didn’t plan on doing so until he was positive he’d be able to resist the urge to pounce on him and sex him up.

Then the word “homosexuals” caught Chris’s ear, causing the boy to perk up and pay attention to a sermon for the first time in fifteen years.

“Our homosexual brothers and sisters are just deterring from the path to righteousness. This does not make them bad people; it makes them very confused and frightened individuals. We must remember that we are not to cast the first stone. We are to help them back onto the path through the teachings of Jesus Christ. Christ has given us the strength, now it’s our decision: Do we use it or let our blessings go to waste?” This was met only by silence and a powerful nod from Granny.

“That man knows homosexuals ain’t fit for our help, like we’s undeservin’ of Christ’s help.” Chris watched as Granny bobbed her head like a five dollar bobble headed dog.

“Let us sing our psalms.” the pastor said as the organ in the back began playing. As the congregation rose, Chris’s eye caught the pastor’s son go about his weekly routine of escaping to help set up the post-sermon refreshments. For years this act had intrigued Chris, and today he decided that he would give into temptation and follow the pastor’s son.

After making up a quick story about a full bladder, Chris made his way out of the very same door through which the pastor’s son had gone. This led him to a hallway that, in Chris’s opinion, had no business being that white. Despite this firmly-held belief, Chris followed the labyrinthic hallway until he came upon a door which, by the sound of it, appeared to be weeping. With extreme caution, Chris twisted the door’s handle and pushed it open. The source of the weeping shocked Chris, as Chris’s presence did the weeper. Chris, in his infinite wisdom, said the first thing that came to mind.

“You have something on your neck.”

Indeed, the pastor’s son was standing on a stool with a rope around his neck. If Chris tilted his head he could see the rope’s other end fastened to a bar in the upper region of the closet. The pastor’s son gave a waterlogged-cough and averted his pink, bloodshot eyes.

“What are you doing here?” The blonde asked. Chris didn’t want to admit his borderline stalker story and so looked at the floor.

“I was looking for the bathroom.” he lied very softly. The pastor’s son nodded and looked up at the rope above him. Chris could see the boy’s pulse going in the hollow of his very pale neck.

“Son of a bitch…” the boy muttered.

“You don’t have to explain if you don’t want.” Chris said. “But I’d really like it if you didn’t hang yourself.” The pastor’s son looked back down at him and fixed his muddy brown eyes on Chris’s light hazel ones.

“Why?” he asked.

“Well,” Chris began. “I don’t want to be a witness to your death and I don’t think your parents want a dead son.” The pastor’s son ripped the rope from his neck and sat down upon the stool in frustration. Chris kneeled down next to the pastor’s son and swallowed the urge to hold the boy in front of him.

“What’s wrong?”

The pastor’s son looked up, gorgeous muddy eyes puffy and red from crying, with a confused look on his face.

“What did you say?” he asked.

“What’s wrong?” Chris repeated. “What happened?”

The pastor’s son stood, took Chris by the hand, and led him down the hall and into a small, cramped, shag-carpeted, wood-paneled office and shut the door. Very cautiously, the boy before Chris looked up through his eyelashes as though searching for something only known to him. He reminded Chris of a frightened puppy. A puppy who’d just had a noose around its neck.

“Can I ask you something?” Chris found himself prodding. The pastor’s son nodded, as if dreading the question he knew to be coming, and mentally prepared himself for the emotional blow.

“Where did you learn to tie a noose?”

The pastor’s son looked up at Chris, muddy brown eyes now murky with confusion, and cocked his pretty head.

“I’ve been a boy scout since I was six.” he said. Chris nodded, assuming the conversation was at its natural stopping point, and proceeded to take in the small details of the office.

“You’re not even going to ask me why?” came the indignant response. Chris looked back at the now enraged blonde and shrugged.

“Aside from blatant homophobia, I think the Boy Scouts is a fine—”

“Not about the Boy Scouts!”

For the first time since kindergarten, Chris felt like he was going to piss his pants. How could someone with such delicate, angelic features be so goddamned scary? Chris hopped up on the desk behind him and rubbed the back of his neck.

“Whatever it is that possessed you to try, it obviously upsets you.” he concluded aloud. The pastor’s son narrowed his eyes and folded his arms.

“So, someone tries to kill themselves—”

“Himself.” Chris corrected. “You’re only one person.”

“And all you can do is ask about Boy Scouts and correct their grammar?”

“His grammar,” Chris corrected quickly before continuing. “I don’t see the point in discussing whatever it is that upsets you.”

“What is it with people?” the blonde muttered. “Don’t you think someone listening to what I have to say for once would help me?”

“How was I supposed to know that you needed to talk to someone? I don’t even know you!”

“I’m the son of a pastor! My parents don’t listen to me; Jesus is supposed to do the listening! But you know what? Jesus’s love does nothing for you when you’re an atheist!”

Chris blinked before bursting out into a fit of laughter. The pastor’s son did nothing, just cast his gaze down at the orange shag carpet and leaned on the old wooden door. Chris clapped his hand over his mouth and took a few deep breaths before removing his muffler and looking at the blonde before him.

“I’m sorry.” he said. “What do you need to talk about, son?”

The blonde shakes his head and looks up to the heavens before speaking.

“What’s the point?” he asks with tears in his eyes. “Everything I do is wrong. Everything I do has to be fixed into some psychotic frame. ‘David, why can’t you be like your brother? He’s out in Papua New Guinea showing people the light. What are you going to do in college?’ Every day it’s the same thing.”

“David?”

“Yeah?”

Chris met the deep brown eyes once more, all the while his heart keeping the rhythm of an impossibly fast song. David. His eyes, David’s eyes, didn’t seem to have the same ‘muddy’ quality they’d possessed that morning. His boy, his angel, finally had a name—an identity.

“What’s happened?”

These words seemed to have a profound affect on the blonde. Within seconds he’d slid down the door and placed his forehead on his knees, rendering Chris helpless as he let out body-wracking sobs.

“He found out.” David muttered between diaphragm spasms. Chris kneeled down next to David and placed a cautious hand on the blonde’s shoulder. David feebly grasped the olive hand in his pale, freckled one, taking a few moments to calm himself.

“Who found out what?” Chris finally asked. David wiped his nose on the back of his free hand, more of a habit than a necessity, and took a deep breath.

“My dad.” he said softly. “The sermon today was directed at me.”

“How do you know?” Chris found himself asking.

“Because,” David began. “I—He found me out. I was looking at porn on my computer the other day when he walked in, asking if I wanted to hear his sermon that was meant for today.”

“What was it on?”

“I never heard it.” David said. “He just stopped talking to me. Everyone in the house stopped talking to me.”

“And that gave you valid reason to kill yourself?”

David sighed and put his head on his knees again.

“Oh, God… Please don’t cry.” Chris pleaded softly. “Look, it’s rough. No one’s saying it’s not. You just have to be bigger than them. They were probably just surprised. They don’t want you dead.”

“Easy for you to say.” David muttered. He then looked up, one eyebrow cocked in a skeptical fashion and continued. “You’re not gay.”

And with that, Chris plunged through the ice, laying a soft kiss on David’s rough, chapped lips. The two remained like that for a while, the only movement present being the pale hands of one party twining into the roughly chopped black hair of the other party.

David pulled back from the boy before him, this stranger he’d maybe seen once or twice after a service, and locked his gaze upon those stormy eyes that had been torturing him ever since the closet door had been wrenched open. He was about to open his mouth, about to blurt out anything to break the silence, when someone else had taken it upon themselves to perform the task.

“Christian!” came the voice of an elderly southern woman. The stranger broke their gaze and looked at the wooden door.

“Fuck…” he muttered and looked back at David. “Do you have a phone on you?”

David shook his head, remembering the conversation he’d had with his mother not a month earlier about the materialism that came with a cell phone, and untwined his fingers from the stranger’s hair. In turn, the stranger rifled through the desk opposite him and pulled out a yellowed sheet of paper and a pen.

“Christian Matthias Moses, get’cho hide out here! I’s missin’ my stories!”

The stranger shoved the sheet into David’s hands and tossed the pen aside.

“Please call me if you need to talk.” he said. “I have to go, but I’ll see you next week.”

David stood, allowing the stranger full access to the door which he’d until recently been blocking and looked at the paper before looking back up.

“Christian?”

“Chris.”

And just like that, he was gone. David, however, couldn’t help but smile as he looked at the paper. This stranger—his angel—had a name.