The October Angel

She said she saw an angel in the leaves once.

It had been a cloudy day. Late October, when the mornings were frosted and the sun slept in and you needed a coat. Going on walks was loud, creeping in the forest impossible, with the dead leaves letting everyone know you were there. She was going down the lane to get the mail; the mailbox at my grandparents’ house was all the way down the hill, because they lived far up from the road, and it took a good ten minutes to walk down to the end of it. Two minutes in and you were out of sight of the house, alone on the gravel with just the trees and the overgrown on either side of the hill.

Now, she had an imagination, my mother did, but in the autumn you didn’t need one to picture what might be lurking in the forest. Every scuttle of every creature could be heard, and the leaves made it much harder to distinguish what could be big from small. Was that a squirrel or a coyote or a murderer—no, there was no way of telling. The trees there were yellow in the fall, and in the cloudy twilight they became a dusty, deep gold, tinkering like a chime when the wind whistled through them. What that the trees creaking, or something else—who can tell? You know the feeling—it creeps up your spine, and even those with the smallest of imaginations start to wonder if ghost stories might have something to them.

It was cold walking down in the evening, and the wind was loud, the kind of wind that went through every sweater and every hat, caught every scarf and tried to snatch it, tousled hair like a teasing schoolboy. She felt impossibly lonely; the warmth of summer freedom was gone, the woods and trees no longer safe for her. Go, they seemed to whisper. We had fun before, but it is no longer home for you now. Your friends, your people, are among hearths and kitchens and quilts. You do not have a friend here.

The mailbox seemed impossibly far.

When she reached it, the day seemed darker. Red in the ivy that curled over the birches at the end of the drive burned in her eyes like blood. She opened the mailbox with cold fingers; if a spider or a rat or a raven had jumped out of it, she would have been terrified, but not surprised.

Of course, she always said when she retold the story, that day was one of those rare days when the mailbox was empty. The quest had been futile after all.

She sighed. Shivered. Turned back up the drive. Looked up at the dying leaves.

But in that moment the world briefly transformed—in one of those rare moments that, when we are lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, remind us that we are insignificant in nature, that the world is far, far vaster than ourselves. The twilight clouds, silver and pink and cold, parted just barely at the edge of the horizon, and the orange burn of the setting sun came gleaming through as if it were shining through a crack in the universe. The horizon behind the forest burned behind the barren branches, and as she turned, it transformed into an orange glow. In the trees along the drive, rays of light cut the coldness of the world and set those brazen leaves positively aflame. At the same moment a gust of wind soared up, blowing them off the trees in swirls of gold dust and sending her hair in strips in front of her face.

It was in that moment that she swears she saw the angel.

It flickered there, in those leaves, a creature not of shining white but of golden brown, and it looked at her with eyes like orange coals and wings of red. It was terrifying; it was nothing like any depiction of an angel she had ever seen, just purely and wholly otherworldly and terrifying.

She stopped dead in her tracks and blinked.

That was the mistake. It was gone in the next instant.

She waited until the wind died, until the trees stopped dancing, and she peered through the branches and looked for it. Breath short. Heart beating. An angel.

But the sun soon slid behind its sliver of sky, back under its blanket of cloud, to drift off into slumber behind the horizon, and the world grew frighteningly cold again.

She stood still as long as she dared, suddenly very aware of her own self. It felt like looking in a mirror, she said, but looking into one with someone else beside you, both of you beholding your reflection together. She felt exposed, anxious, excited, but not alone any longer.

Were you scared, I always asked. No, she always said. He wasn't there to frighten me.

What did you do, I asked. Nothing, she said; I took a deep breath and I walked back up the lane.

She always said it was a guardian angel. Of whose soul, I don’t know. It could have been anyone's.

Did you tell your parents, I asked. No, she said, I never told anyone until you, my son, because I want you to know there are angels out there.

I had heard her tell this story many times before it occurred to me to ask her how she knew it was an angel.

She cocked her head; she didn’t know, she said, though she had never doubted it, not even that day, walking back up the darkening lane. It might not have been, she supposed aloud, but then shook her head; no, it was an angel. You just know these things—you just feel them. Your soul recognizes it even if your eyes don’t.

And what else could it have been? He was terrifying—his orange eyes haunted her dreams for weeks—but he did not scare her. He was not there to scare her. She knew, somehow, he was there on her side, made visible in an instant of the world’s grandeur.

I’ve wondered at that many times since. I knew that there were things that roamed the woods, of course—no one would deny that, and they always act up in October. So, I supposed, as I grew older and stories needed rationalizing, it was not really a stretch to believe that there was something out there protecting us from whatever else roamed the forests on autumn evenings, when colors sharpen and horizons blur, when the sun itself is unreliable and grows lazy. And why shouldn’t it be an angel, guarding those woods on the lookout for human souls—not to harm them, no, but to keep watch for them? To protect them from the creatures and monsters and demons?

He was not terrifying in form to scare her. He was meant to scare everything else.

After all, why should all the monsters in the woods be against you? Some, it would reason, would be on your side, standing guard to keep you safe.

There were lots of odd things about my mother. But this story I never doubted, because I too know what it is like to be out at twilight in the autumn, when the world seems to bend a bit around the edges. When things feel strange and the lines between this world and the next are not as sharp as they once were. I, too, have quickened my pace walking up a lane in the fading light, making for the glowing windows and the warmth up ahead and wondering for an instant if I would actually make it there. And I have felt the presence of something in the trees, something watching me, not knowing if it was friend or foe.

I have never seen it. I've often pictured it, red and gold and brown, and sometimes when the sun is setting just so I think perhaps I see those glowing eyes, but no.

Even so... even so. I think there are friends there, guarding the woods, guarding souls this side of the veil. And I like to believe I am good enough that I would recognize one if I saw it. That I would know an angel from a demon. That it would know me, and that it would think we are on the same side.

My mother was on the side of the angels, that I know.

I hope I am too. I wouldn't want to meet an angel that thought I had my loyalty with the devils.