The Writing Machine
Stories by Christian Cloud Abraham
Stealing Wings from an Angel: Excerpt Page 9
I am old. Inside. Centuries of death and millenniums of rebirth.
For 25 years I have been alive. Twenty five savory years of rich chocolate blood cake fermenting in my mind as a wine delicious with enough life to leave me typing 50 years after I have passed away.
There is a place, in Indiana, where I am already buried. Deep. It’s about 45 minutes north of Fort Wayne and still another 10 minutes north of Kendallville, but if you go to Wolcottville you went about a mile too far on highway 9, but I am sure you didn’t miss it as you left Rome City, the big blue water tower that rose up to your left on the hilltop resounding out in giant black letters tattooed on the metallic blue metal skin—THE WAY. And below this four-legged guardian I am sure you didn’t miss the many buildings and beautifully landscaped campus of what was once known as Kneipp Springs, now officially called the Way College of Biblical Research, Indiana Campus. Or affectionately to me, Rome City.
Rome City was a house a castle and a graveyard all in one. There were hundreds of rooms, vacant and full of antique memories. There was a musty dim-lit labyrinth of a basement that was black as pond mud when the dull lights were off. There were tunnels, arched and laid in brick, and a gray attic full of spooky furniture with pillars of light coming through skylights from an unseen sun. There was a graveyard surrounded by high shrubs and it was off limits to us kids. There were tin ceilings decorated with curious designs and four stories of stairs that wound around in a quadratic shape leaving a forty foot G.I. Joe parachute drop in the middle. There was a huge chapel with a ceiling that reached to God with a weird marble slab that stood upright at the pulpit, and in its side was a safe that stored curious items. There was an abandoned confessional where sins now long forgotten and forgiven were once purged. There was a trap door in the organ loft that took me inside the balcony’s terracing and above the balcony pipes for the loud organ climbed up the chapel wall. There was a tiny door in the third floor attic that led to wooden planks that were old and dry and creaked when I walked on them to get to the bell tower and I always held on to the trusses and beams shooting out at all angles about me trying not to remember that the plaster floor beneath the planks was actually the ceiling three stories up from the red chapel carpet. There was a secret panel in the floor of the closet beneath the annex stairs that opened into a crawl space that seemed to go on forever. There was catwalk between buildings and fire escapes that lowered with big metal clangs as I walked on them. There was a dumbwaiter and an elevator that still had the sliding metal accordion door and never stopped on the floor quite flush. And on warm summer nights, bats flew in from the attics and once, one flew right down the grandest tube of the loud pipe organ.
There were one hundred and ninety seven acres of land filled with woods and moats and rivers and ponds and a lake with a lone tree on the shore in which we built a tree house—and barns and silos and cows and pigs and sheep and chickens and corn fields and vegetable gardens and apple trees and cherry trees and mulberry trees and maple syrup trees and grapevines and raspberry bushes and strawberry patches and a waterfall and a trout pond and fairways and hills and bogs and a mound that arose from out of the flat earth into a perfect breast circled with strange shrines at the bottom and pierced with a huge stone crucifix at the top—and natural springs and wading pools and fountains and the soaring water tower that grasped for the sky and rose above the buildings and loomed down upon the world mysteriously—and it was all beautiful and it was all paradise and it was all mine—and down below in the darkest moistest creepiest part of the basement where the elevator opened into the room with the sauerkraut tunnel, there was a place filled with hundreds of statues of Jesus on the cross, the Virgin Mary, and other long dead saints—and it was all haunted and it was all the place I called home.
Until…
About Stealing Wings from an Angel
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© 2007 Christian Cloud Abraham
Posted on October 14, 2007 in
Emotion: Tender, Type: Creative Nonfiction