As it turned out, most of the people in the United States who prayed to angels were white women living in the mid-west and in Florida, and as it turned out, most of them refused to believe Angel was an angel because she was black.

“Are you some kind of a crow girl-superhero?” Melissa from Iowa City asked Angel as she approached Melissa on the overpass where she was furiously praying for an angel to come and stop her from diving into the traffic on the interstate below her. “Is there one of those cos…cosplay things down at the convention center?”

“No,” Angel said, “I’m the angel you’ve been praying for.” She stopped herself from adding, you dumb shit.

Melissa looked doubtful. “Your wings are black.”

In response Angel spread them to their full width—nearly ten feet. They were in fact black, and glossy, and unmistakably powerful. She glanced back at them and felt the surge of pride she always felt when seeing them unfurled. From below her a semi honked furiously, maybe the trucker had seen them from high above like shimmering vengeance? “They are, aren’t they,” she said and gave them a little shimmy. “And aren’t they gorgeous?”

Melissa made a face, her pink lips forming a contracted little O. “But angels have white wings.”

“Do they?” Angel asked.

“Don’t they?” Melissa asked. “I mean, in the costume stores the angel wings are always white.”

With a little bit of regret, Angel folded her wings and tucked them back up against her scapula. “I guess they’re black to match the rest of me,” she said, “Now let’s get down to business. You were praying for me to keep you from jumping off this bridge, and that’s why I’m here, so come on, let’s get you off of this thing.”

Melissa looked petulant. “I was praying for real angel, like, from heaven?”

Angel switched her halo on, saw it light up above her head, felt the annoying buzzing sensation that always accompanied it. “How’s that? Heavenly enough? Now do you want to tell me about this jackwagon boyfriend of yours? Is he really worth dying for?”

The space between Mellissa’s carefully made up eyebrows contracted. She had an awfully mobile face, Angel observed, very stretchy and twitchy.

“How do you know about him?” Melissa asked. “Wait, you aren’t one of those girls from Tinder, are you? The ones he’s been sneaking around with?”

“Don’t think those girls have halos now do they?” Angel said and flashed hers on and off a few times. “Sure, didn’t look like angels in those pictures they sent him.”

“You’ve seen those pictures?”

“I can see anything,” Angel said. “From the most miniscule insect on the underside of a leaf to the entire span of the universe and all the stars within it.”

“Do you think those girls are prettier than me?”

Angel examined Melissa. She was wearing her bedroom slippers and her eyes were red from crying. “I’m sure you clean up nicely,” Angel said.

Melissa looked at her and then gave a shudder and a sob. “Why hasn’t he ever asked me for a picture like that?”

Angel considered telling Melissa the truth: that human beings soon grow tired of one another and want something new, that familiarity acted on them like poison, that her fiancé Gordon Grimmer could not stand the slight sniffle Melissa had that woke him up every morning and at this precise moment he was masturbating to pornography in front of his computer and had not even noticed the perfumed suicide note that Melissa had left for him on the kitchen counter.

Instead she patted Melissa gently on the shoulder. “Now, now,” she said. It was one of the phrases suggested in The Angel’s Instruction Manual for Helping Humanity.

Melissa just sobbed louder. She looked at Angel from between her coral pink painted fingernails and blubbered, “Why do I never get the real deal? Like when Jessica got the Barbie that talked for Christmas and I got the one that didn’t. I always get second best, and now I don’t even get a real angel to save me.”

“Look, cupcake,” Angel said. “Do you think I’m getting paid to do this? You prayed for me. You don’t want me here, and I’ll just go. Say the word.”

Melissa lowered her fingers a bit more, “You’d just leave me here?”
Angel sighed. “You want me to save you, honey?”

Melissa pulled the corners of her mouth down, nodding at the same time. “Uh huh.”

“Ok,” Angel said, “let’s stop beating around the bush then.”

In a flash, so fast that the human eye could not have caught it, Angel caught Melissa around the waist, hoisted her up, and tossed her from the overpass. Melissa screamed as Angel spread her wings again. She knew exactly how long she had until Melissa would hit. Long enough to fly like a streak up through the dense grey clouds and into the sunshine, turn several stupendous flips and summersaults in the air and then dive back down like a hawk to its prey and catch the still screaming Melissa the split second before she came crashing down onto a grungy red Honda Accord. Angle caught her gently, like a baby, pivoted inches above the driver’s terrified face and flew up through the clouds again, carried effortlessly by her beautiful, flashing, inky wings.