Love is Always Write Anthology Volume 7

sculpture's plinth read:
    Sariel Malachim
    Our Holy Protector
    The angel's face had been worn away by the years, and perhaps it had been crudely carved to begin with. Its wings stretched up and up, eroded like its face, until they met the buttresses at the apex of the apse and formed the foundation holding up the ground overhead. It seemed impossible that it hadn't collapsed.
    I wondered which angel Sariel was. I knew the main angels, the ones the Bible had promised the Mississippi Coopers they could command as Sons of God. Angels were little more than non-corporeal animals to them, winged messengers, servants of their Father, while they were mortal Children awaiting a rebirth into Glory.
    I knew seraphim, cherubim, the Holy Archangel Michael. I knew of Lucifer the fallen and the legions of the proud who were cast from Heaven. And I knew that, through Christ's name, we supposedly were granted power to bid angels guard us, demons flee us, and God save us.
    I'd grown up in backwoods Protestant congregations taught by people who said Catholicism was a cult, as if their own beliefs were less radical or insular. Catholic pomp still seemed exotic to me. For my family, pomp had been the tent revival when an evangelist came through town.
    I approached the altar with a certain uneasiness to shine my light on its weathered surface.
    Before Sariel's plinth stood a shrine. A lockbox sat on the ground beneath it, but I didn't touch it. Whether or not I'd go to hell for being gay, I wasn't adding robbing a church to my sins.
    Instead I touched the melted pools of wax affixing the myriad candle stubs to the wood beneath, feeling a thrill of power as I imagined what rituals were performed here. It seemed to me that I had stumbled onto the core of New Orleans's mysteries, that I was in the very heart of her pact with the wind and waves, whatever higher power allowed her to stand in defiance of logic and the delta's whims.
    As I marveled at each item, I felt again the Knowing. I crouched and looked at the ashes coating the floor, then instinctually reached into them. My fingertips skated over something smooth, and I brushed away the soot like an archaeologist unearthing a fossil.
    A water-stained portrait revealed itself. My skin broke out in gooseflesh. I knew this man.
    It was my savior.
    With a careful touch, I lifted the photograph closer to the lamp to study it. I turned the photograph over to see a date scrawled on the back: 1954. My savior hadn't seemed more than thirty, but I knew this was him nonetheless. In this place, anything seemed possible.
    And my savior had seemed so sad. I had to find him. It didn't need to make sense. I had faith.
    I slipped the photograph into a pocket and made for the old, iron-bound door. Its swollen, misshapen planking would not budge from the tightly fitted stone frame. I had the mad thought that I ought to set the planks on fire, and then realized it would do me no good if I tried; the wood was swollen with moisture and would no more light up than the green flesh from a sapling.
    On impulse I uttered a forbidden prayer, as Pentecostals did not pray to saints or angels, but only to the Lord Their God, "Sariel, help me."
    A screech of iron on stone split the air. The door's wooden planking disintegrated before my eyes. A twisted mass of cold iron hung uselessly from old bolts in the stone. The doorway stood open, awaiting my escape.
    I felt faint.
    I wanted to be brave, to hold my head high, to find witty things at the tip of my tongue. Instead, I struggled not to piss myself.
    "Sariel?" As I said the name, I realized that in my prayer I had conflated the angel with the man who rescued me the night before. At first, I tried to argue that thought, to dispel the Knowing with logic.
    Then the silent voice entered my mind again, and no amount of logic could dispel it. "Burn the image. Burn it like once I burned the painted icons and the spell-carved roof and the blood-soaked paneling and the priest-blessed floor. Burn it with cleansing fire in the light of the sun, then return to me."
    As I started toward the stone stairwell, I realized my ankle no longer hurt. I thanked Sariel with wordless gratitude projected like a prayer and ascended the steps to find myself again beside the grove. The stairwell rose to ground level and then emerged as broken chunks of rock like the one I'd stumbled over before.
    The sun overhead was still well to the east, and as I blew out the hurricane lamp and set it at my