The Children's Hospital

33

I feel a change in me, commensurate with the change in the world. So I was filled up with joy when the waters rose, and so now I feel emptied out, drained and hollowed and sad.

Praise! my sister says, in voices for me to hear, and for the refugees to hear, and even for our brother to hear, deeply sleeping in his mortal costume. He stirs and rages a little in response to her joy, for anger is his worship and his praise. And then to me she says, It is abomination, to be sad in the dawn of this great day.

I am joyously happy, I say.

Humph, she says, releasing a horde of balloons from underneath the lobby. They rise toward the top of the atrium, most of them blown by her to float down the halls of the wards, but a few bob impatiently at the ceiling, and she opens a door in the glass to let them out like so many dogs.

Who could not rejoice, on this day? I ask her. And who could feel anything but pride and joy, seeing Jemma ascend to the regency of her power, putting out her hand to heal the hospital and the world? It is the sort of thing most angels would wait an eternity to see, and isn’t it the pinnacle of a recorder’s career? If I am sad it is probably because someone has to mourn for all the lost sicknesses, for the jolly fleshy tumors and fancy blood dyscrasias and unique anatomies that will never be seen again in a child. They are dead and gone and soon will be forgotten, and I have become the sort of angel who is saddened by any loss, and grieved by any death.

Mortals covet. They covet flavorful tea and dark chocolate and silver ladles and fluffy comforters and the fat bottoms of women bending over to tie a shoe. They covet wide green fields and open skies and even hulking mountains of ice and stone. Nothing — nothing in creation has ever been safe from them. Calvin Claflin coveted the whole earth. He wanted to hold it in his hand and crush it in his fist, and he coveted the stars, and he coveted the hot fire at the bottom of the sun. He coveted his sister’s bland ignorant peace, and he coveted her inheritance of a power that would make all of his seem nothing, because it was bigger than him and his complaint, and because he suspected that when at last she commanded it her hand would bring life instead of death, and that she would redeem where he could only reform.

But angels are not covetous. Angels do not envy.