Little Cherubs

Great Aunt Marie’s house hosted a flock of angelic porcelain babies. Suspended from the ceiling, they gazed into the distance with blank devotion, their lips parted rapturously.

I plucked a string hanging over the kitchen table. Its baby spun woozily and smacked into a cabinet. “Stop,” Dad said. “Look what you’ve done.” The angel had chipped its wing. It now hung off-kilter, arm tangled. I knelt so I could see what it had been looking at. In the bedroom, a life-sized statue of the Madonna goggled up at the stained ceiling.

“That,” Mom announced, “is the first thing that’s going.”

Anna Call is a librarian and critic living in Salem, Massachusetts. She writes regularly for The Big Brown Chair (www.thebigbrownchair.com) and Isotropic Fiction (www.isotropicfiction.com).