Joseph Voelbel

As a child Sander followed the ascent of balloons until it hurt to look anymore. While he walked down the sidewalk streetlights clipped out as if on switches. His impassioned comments were periodically accompanied by an unrelated noise in the room, be it the unintentional bang of an elbow on a table, a window rattled by the wind in its frame, or the sudden and unprompted whirr of a mechanical instrument. It was as if, on occasion, when keyed up, he spoke in a physical sense, or more properly stated, what he said, mattered.

When people asked him who he was he responded through his eyes. Those eyes became lighthouses for ships at sea. The houses that marked the water from the land and prevented everything from blurring and turning to blue.

Sander regularly conversed with angels and other celestial folk. Late in life, after perusing Emmanuel Swedenborg's auto-biographical tale, Life on Other Planets, he deemed these incidents credible. The Swedish mystic’s experience with angels were well documented, and amused him. Like Swedenborg, Sander rarely found himself alone when at work. Angels gathered around him in crowds, in the evenings, during his compositions.

Curious creatures, angels. They were quite bothered by human's ears being so stopped up. Otherwise, they were downright jovial. They began arriving shortly after Sander's mother contracted cancer. She'd seen a white light. She told Sander that the brightness of that light revealed the distance she was from God. “And it was so bright.” She’d gasped.

That night as Sander fell asleep, he experienced, for the first time, a crack in his life, where the light flooded in. It contained both an earthly warmth and a celestial hue. After that, peeks between worlds became more frequent. They appeared on puddles, echoed in door frames, and whistled amidst will-o’-the-wisps. His pupils would widen.

When things got to be too much Sander tucked his legs together and retreated to the sensation of a waterfall rising up his spine. This caused his eye to shine in a radiant astral light. His chakra (that ‘wheel’ about the human forehead), became anointed, for someone put oil there, and he received this Christening. Biblical scholars speculate this ajna is what Jesus was referring to in Matthew 6:22, when he said: “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.”

Sander’s spiritual sight rested above his regular eyes, the eyes that perceived the ordinary world of common everyday experience. Religions acknowledged this taller point of view in their headware. As Sander's eye became unclouded, he quivered.

The angels heard this resonance as it reverberated off the walls of the heavenly realms, and performed a calibration which constituted itself as a murmur in the gut of his longing, a soft urging, which sounded to them like a mob of whales swimming, or parade of elephants running.

That next morning Sander’s eye burned bright like a lantern in the heart of darkness. Reality teethed. Moments dissolved and expanded. Maya swept away like a gail upon desert sands effacing the ancient visage of Ozymandius. Golden scales rang out within his ears.

The fulcrum of existence seemed to float in a space only discernible on the foggy face of a mirror made from an exhalation blown closely upon it, as if it were all no more than a plume of steam upon a sleek surface, where one could write a name with their finger, or wipe clean with the sweep of a palm.

As he no longer sought to hide, Sander’s wings became unclipped. There was nothing left to do but see and see he did.

“Maybe that's why all plants,” he thought, “like humans, turn their heads to face the sun.”