WHEN THE ASS SAW THE ANGEL

Three times Balaam's ass saw the Lord's angel in her path, and three times she turned aside, panicked, no doubt, by its awful presence. Balaam, angered by her restiveness, struck her bluntly with his staff, each time harder than the last, until at last he drew blood. The Lord then opened the poor ass's mouth, allowing her to speak these words to him: What have I, your true servant, done to earn such cruelty? Balaam said, You made a fool of me! But before whom? This is what I wonder as I lie still, staring into the shadows, alone next to my sleeping wife, since he knew nothing of the angel standing there before him, sword smoldering, until the Lord opened Balaam's eyes to witness its full glory. The bright angel said, I would have slain you had your loyal ass not saved you from my wrath, as you are perverse before the Lord's sight. But why such rage? This I also wonder, alone with my sleepless thoughts and questions. Hadn't Balaam done as He'd commanded? Hadn't he spoken blessings, not curses? I close my eyes, replacing dark with dark while thinking of Balaam's mistreated ass, known by the world only for the beatings she took. And I think of Balaam, as well, who did as the Lord ordered him to do but who was still punished nevertheless. Whose world instructs itself with such stories as this, stories in which the seraphim, bearing swords rendered as useless as wax candles, blandly watch the beating of innocence? Not mine, I vow to both wife and darkness. No world of mine would forge such a low god.

REMNANTS

My mother's sister's husband started dying while tying his shoes. I was the first family there after his gurneyed body clattered down the gravel drive to take its patient ride. This was years ago, when I was young. We sat in silence my aunt and I, there in the thick-curtained cave of their living room, which would now be hers to live in all alone. It smelled of rubbing alcohol, latex, and last breaths.

As a girl in West Texas, she'd sold tickets at the picture show, taking money from sickly cowboys come to town to see the horse operas. Some strode up with buffalo nickels in their scabby mouths and spat them with a laugh into her palm, sharing their sores of impetigo, though she never complained, not in 1939.

As a long-haul trucker of freight and oil, her husband and his cab had been christened a vehicle of swift salvation by two wretched souls who snuffed out their headlights and surrendered themselves to his speeding mercy, helpless though he was to deliver anything on that midnight road but obliteration. Of this night he never spoke. And his eyes never again, not even once, raised the blinders of his shades.

It's sad that this is all of them that's stayed with me, but they were always so old—already married, in fact, and parents, by the time even my mother was born. I suppose we'll all be reduced to this, erratic bursts lodged in the memories of the youngest when we were at our oldest, the ones who barely even knew us. All the rest will have dissolved long ago. Then even this haphazardness will be no more.

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"When the Ass Saw the Angel" probably started because of memories of liking the title of Nick Cave's 1989 novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, though I never bothered to read it. Then there was that gothish band Balaam and the Angel from the eighties taking up space in my brain even though I don't think I ever even once heard them. Eventually, I turned to Numbers 22 in the KJV to read it myself, and then I wrote this, once again struck by the casual, capricious violence found throughout the Bible.