Jegudiel

david f- shultz

Jegudiel

It was the summer solstice, nearly noon, and the sun was so open all of God's archangels might pass through. The Order of Jegudiel hoped for just one. A circle of white-robed acolytes had assembled in the field. Joseph Watson, their pastor, saw that his flock was not unlike the daisys and dandelions that dotted the grass, standing in perfect devotion, heads pointed towards God's light, surrounded by and themselves part of the beauty of creation. Monarch butterflies alighted for the ritual, and on the hillside, a white rabbit peeked from his home under the roots of a pear tree to bear witness.

A silk sheet had been laid out between the acolytes. They could have been mistaken for a picnic gathering, but for the absence of food. Salt decorated the sheet in the sacred arcana of their order, an elaborate hexagram invoking the name of Jegudiel in the geometric language of Jehovah. They chanted to The Glorifier as the sun reached its apex.

Joseph Watson gripped his leatherbound bible, fingertips sunk into the golden embossed lettering. He prayed in the

perfect language of heaven, for God's beauty to be finally unveiled to the world in the form of Jegudiel, the Archangel of God's glory.

Across the field seeds lifted from the dandelions, less like rising in the air than sinking upwards towards some great magnetic pole. The sun brightened, smeared lengthwise, and began to take the shape of glorious wings. On the hillside, the rabbit plunged into his tunnel. And, though Joseph hadn't seen them depart, the butterflies had vanished.

The silk sheet whipped in the rising wind, and devotees scrambled to hold it in place, until Joseph Watson commanded them to look on the glory of God, shouting over a rising chorus of trumpets.

The archangel Jegudiel unfolded his glorious wings across the length of the sky, glowing down on them with the warmth of a furnace, searing their vision with the infinite, burning beauty of creation, speaking to them in a thousand notes of a heavenly anthem, rising to crecendo. Don't look away, Watson screamed, as much to himself as the others, over the horns of a platoon of angels. Senses blended together—the sound of pure white light, a defeaning vision not meant for human eyes—and they were enveloped by Jegudiel's halo. Watson turned his frail humanity, catching only glimpses within the searing aura. A baby's first cry. A final sunrise under an exploding sun. Galactic nebulae echoed in microscopic fractals inside the cells of his eyes. The realization of humankind as infinitely minute, a dust mote lost in a black ocean, and utterly worthless. And in the echo of that perfect beauty was the lingering appreciation of the finer details of creation. A rabbit screaming as its flesh is torn by a hungry wolf, multiplied across the surface

of the globe, wherever rabbits are found, multiplied by all the varieties of predator and prey, by all the forms of tearing tooth and ripping claw that creation devised, multiplied by the billions of years that life has fizzled over the surface of this rock, multiplied by the all planets across the billions of stars in billions of galaxies in which there had evolved the capacity for pain and suffering and mortal terror, before it inevitably came to its whimpering end.

Joseph Watson was on his knees, eyes tight shut, hands over his ears. Gradually, he came to accept the solid ground, the soft grass and gentle wind, his quiet return to the safety of mortal finitude outside of Jegudiel's halo. He had been the weakest of them, alone in turning from the full glory of God, and now surrounded by his flock, silent and still in the grass. Those lying supine faced the sky with empty sockets where they had torn out their human eyes. White robes were stained red with the final moments of their rapture, and dusted with the salt of Jegudiel's scattered name.

The hillside rabbit poked up from his home, blissfully beyond revelation, and hopped out to munch on a dandelion. Under the roar of gnashing teeth, the helpless dandelion was crushed, juices of its masticated head forming the slightest trail of spittle at the corner of the rabbit's twitching mouth, who hopped to the next patch of sunny vegetation.