Angel's Nest

I pushed the doors open, as I stepped inside the bar everyone just stared at me, being the new guy in town is never easy, you know? You gotta to learn new thinks, meet new people, get a job and so on. Luckily, if I may say so myself, I'm a jack of all traits, so I knew I could make it. I stepped towards the bartender and asked him for a large cup of beer, he looked at me and said, "Alrighty pal, tell me are you new to town? I've never seen you before."

I smiled revealing a set of teeth that have gone slightly dark due to the passage of time; I looked the man right in his dark brown eyes and said, "Yeah, I am."

The bartender poured beer into a huge glass cup placed it firmly against the wooden counter and said, "Here's your beer, and welcome to Helsmoth!"

Before I could thank the man, he said, "You know son, we have some pretty weird stuff going on here, so be careful."

I sipped some beer out of my cup, smiled again and asked the man, "Oh yeah, what kind of stuff?"

The bartender's face gave out a stern and serious look as I asked; he ran his hand over his square chin, whipping the sweat off his short brown beard. He slammed his hand on the counter and said, "Alright, I hope you're not some new age know-it-all skeptic"

I chuckled, said, “No, I’m not like that”, and pulled out a crucifix from underneath my hoody. Seeing my religious item the man sighed in a slight relief and smiled to me.

"Alright, boy, I'll tell you about Angel's Nest," he said. I looked at him in shock, knowing that angels don't live in nests or even visit humans anymore, since well, God hasn't spoken to humanity for a very long time.

Sipping on some more beer and asked cautiously, "Angel's Nest?" with a confused expression on my face.

The bartender looked at me with a pleased look on his face and said, "It's not exactly what you think... Not the traditional kind of angel, or nest."

The man crossed his arms inhaled some air and said, "At the edge of town there's a really large white house. This house used to belong to a pious family, The Jacobsons; you know your typical Christian family, a happily married couple in their thirties and two kids, the nine-year-old Josh and the six-year-old Miranda. Everything was perfect for them - they had money, they had a car, a big house. They were your decent folks working their asses of to live the American dream until one evening it all came crushing and burning, in the literal sense.

"One night after Josh wore his pajamas, threw himself in his bed, pulled the blanket over himself and closed his eyes in order to fall asleep and wander off to dreamland, something started to shine inside his room, he opened his eyes to see something, something out of this world.

"He started yelling cheerfully at the top of his lungs, 'Mommy, Daddy, Mira! There’s an angel in my room' - he has wings and all! Come here, you have to see this!' I'm sure that the boy knew exactly how an angel is supposed to look like, I mean that's all his parents ever taught him - Christianity, God, angels, holy shit."

The man's voice started quivering as if he was going to cry and I asked him, "Hey man, are you alright?"

The bartender twitched his head quickly and rubbed his sweaty hands across his face while exclaiming "I'm good, let me finish the story", he said.

I drank the last of my beer and slammed the cup against the counter, as I wipe the foam from my lips. The old man placed his hands on the counter again and said, "Well, anyways, just a few moments after little Josh was screaming he had an angel in his room the neighbors called the cops complaining about extremely bright lights and an excruciating static like sound, followed by an explosion coming from the Jacobsons house.

"By the time the cops arrived at the Jacobson estate, Miranda was sitting on the front steps, weeping with her hands covering her eyes. One of the cops asked her if everything's alright, she removed her hands from her face revealing her blind cataract like covered eyes crying, 'I can't see... why can't I see, Mister?' Meanwhile the other cops stormed into the house only to find it covered in blood, no bodies, no culprit and a strong smell of iron everywhere, the strangest thing they found was a pair of white feathers on the floor, inside Josh's room.

"A few days after the incident, while still a hospital Miranda managed to explain them what happened, she simply said, 'an angel did it'."

Once I heard that last sentence a smile crept to my face, soon enough my smile turned into a hectic laughter that made the bartender give me a shocked look.

After a few moments of hysterical laughing I finally noticed the confusion in the man's eyes and asked gleefully, "Why on Earth would these people think I'm an angel?"