Annunciation
Word was, there in the Land of Canaan, that the angel Gabriel had 600 wings. The Lord’s bidding brought Gabriel often to Israel and Judah and the nearby kingdoms of Moab and Ammon, and with each appearance accounts of him grew more fantastic. The angel radiated an aura so bright, people said, that safe viewing required eyeshades. He stood seven cubits tall. Gabriel alone among all God’s messengers spoke Syriac and Chaldee, and his voice could demolish walls or tame monsters, as he pleased.
This was all nonsense, of course, and Elisabeth knew it. The angel stood a paltry four cubits, for one thing, or 4.3 if he followed an elongating night of horizontal rest with the donning of elevator sandals. And Elisabeth could testify, based on the poor show he’d given when the boy next door requested a demonstration, that Gabriel’s Chaldee was halting, at best. Elisabeth had had ample time to observe the archangel. He had come to Jerusalem to foretell her miraculous postmenopausal pregnancy and had stayed to sullenly oversee it. She was now retching her way into the third trimester.
Pregnancy did not become Elisabeth. She had not contrived, as the youthful celebrities always did, to carry her growing belly with grace. No pert bulge on an otherwise lithe frame, her baby-bearing abdomen drooped and sagged and seemed intent on taking the rest of her body with it. Edema swelled Elisabeth’s ankles. Sphincter troubles had her alternately writhing with chest pain and squirming with rectal fullness. She waddled.
So it was an uncertain, certainly graceless gait that carried Elisabeth one March morning into the courtyard of her husband Zacharias’s house, lately vacated by the Lord Himself. Or a hologram of Him, anyway. This shimmering, 3D likeness of the Godhead had all but disappeared by then from the low wall of plaster and local stone. A wisp of beard remained, and an eerie outline of all-seeing eyes, but if Elisabeth interpreted these as anything other than the color variation characteristic of natural building materials, she gave no indication of it. Instead she struggled to stanch a geyser of a nosebleed with scrap of cloth torn from her skirt. Over the bloodstained folds of the makeshift handkerchief, she peered—squinty-eyed—at Gabriel.
The angel stood, at attention almost, against the wall opposite the fast-fading Jehovah, exuding, for once, much of the magnificence his earthly admirers attributed to him. For as with homely unwed daughters, so with archangels: it is all a matter of carriage, of attitude. Gabriel had the wings required—his mere two would do—to carry him away from this barren square of dirt and olive pits, and this fact, combined with the Lord his master’s authorization of his departure, sufficed to impart to the angel a radiance only ten candela short of blinding. Gabriel’s hair—a strawberry-blond Jewfro—shone. Rippling pectoral muscles strained the fabric of his robes, tautness accentuating its silken sheen. His eyes glinted, and he beamed. Gabriel was happy, and it showed. Sure he worked a shit job that left him prey to the whims of a megalomaniacal supervisor, one whose directives often left him in ethical quandaries and whose displeasure carried the threat not just of demotion but demonization... But, he thought as Elisabeth’s ponderously pregnant form appeared in the doorway from the kitchen, things were looking up.
Looking now at Zacharias’s knocked-up wreck of a wife, Gabriel realized that what really jazzed him about delivering this latest divine edict was his vision of its recipient. Out of all the women on earth, Jehovah had chosen one—this Mary, apparently—to mother His child. So she must be some gal. Better looking than Bathsheba or Delilah, Gabriel surmised, and pure and innocent in a way neither of those temptresses was. Young and virginal, at any rate. Seduced by the implied promise of beauty beyond compare, intrigued by Mary’s seeming avoidance of both deflowerment and the ready anger of an irascible God, Gabriel couldn’t wait to meet in the flesh this must be perfect specimen of humanity, of femininity.
Elisabeth’s question recalled the angel from his reverie. Pinched nasal passages made her voice even more grating than usual.
“Leaving soon?” Gabriel had flapped as he fantasized. He worried his muscles had atrophied over the sedentary six months in Zacharias’s backyard.
“That’s the plan,” Gabriel answered. “It’s not like I’m doing you any good.” Irritated by his protracted tour of duty in Zacharias’s household, his long-term consignment to such a dull neighborhood, Gabriel had done little to help with chores or otherwise ease Elisabeth’s discomfort. He wasn’t exactly giving foot massages, in other words, or hopping to satisfy the mother-to-be’s every hormone-induced craving. Leave the preparation of almond-encrusted fillet of tilapia to Zacharias, that was Gabriel’s philosophy.
“No,” Elisabeth agreed, and sighed a sigh mighty enough to shake even Gabriel’s lack of empathy. The angel regarded the tired woman with a look of almost tenderness. With the long-awaited departure imminent now, compassion came more naturally to him.
“I’m not supposed to tell you this,” he began. “And your husband can’t, since God has struck him speechless until the delivery.” Gabriel gestured vaguely and with near-stifled distaste at Elisabeth’s ballooning belly. “But your son—that’s a boy in there—John. He’ll be pretty special. God’s going to be having a Son of His own soon, and yours is going to pave the way for Him.” Gabriel couldn’t properly see Elisabeth with that rag covering her face, and she didn’t say a word. The angel coughed without real necessity. “So to speak. I thought you might like to know.”
Gabriel cocked his elbows and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He ran a few steps, but stopped. “And tilt your head forward,” he called over his shoulder to John the Baptist’s soon-to-be-mother, still standing immobile in the doorway. “That nose’ll stop bleeding faster.” And with that, the angel backed up, took a running start, and cleared the courtyard wall without so much as grazing a metatarsal. He glanced about to get his bearings, and set a course north toward Galilee.
#
For all his heavy-handedness, Jehovah did affect chumminess sometimes. Maybe because He was lonesome sitting there on His nimboid throne, a pantheon of one. He’d summon Gabriel into His heavenly presence or appear in holograph to the angel at his post. He’d dictate to Gabriel his latest charge—tell him to go here, warn them, destroy that—and then, just as the archangel was poised to embark, He’d get all…familiar. He’d peer at Gabriel’s wings, perhaps, and ask how the annual molt was going. He’d try to make small talk about halo fashion. At the very least, He’d subject Gabriel to unsolicited travel advice: wind advisories, shortcuts, diverting detours. “The Sea of Galilee is a little out of your way,” God had said after explaining to the messenger His divine business in Nazareth. “Seventeen kilometers as the crow flies, but well worth a look-see.” Gabriel had cringed at this forced informality. He knew from experience that one misstep, and a scowl would supplant the patronizing smile, a reprimand replace the friendly chitchat.
Privately, Gabriel thought Jehovah mercurial. Passive-aggressive, even.
Now, though, his spread-eagle form reflected by the placid sea, the archangel had to admit that his boss knew scenic when He saw it. Of course it was only when a breeze ruffled the water into an unflattering funhouse mirror that Gabriel wrested his eyes from his own image and took a look around.
Fishing boats dotted the surface of the lake, their cedar decks and white sails standing out against its bluer than blue. Lush greenery ringed the shore, reeds and palms and the neat grids of vineyards and olive groves. The rectilinear outlines of rooftops proliferated, too, and seemed almost to multiply before the angel’s eyes. All those fishermen had to live somewhere, Gabriel granted—and then returned to primping and planning in preparation for his encounter with the virgin.
The archangel had the grandeur and lung capacity, he knew, to utter shalts and thous and arts and hasts with the most traditional of the heavenly hosts, but he found such diction at odds with the image he cultivated, one, he fancied, of almost vernacular hipness. Besides, except on His (not infrequent) peevish days, God didn’t care if messengers departed from the given script, so long as they preserved the spirit He had intended. So as he rounded Mount Tabor and sighted Nazareth away to the west, Gabe reviewed again the particularly zippy opening he’d crafted to break the ice with Mary.
#
Gabriel almost overshot Nazareth, so immersed was the divine emissary in rehearsal of his lines. It was a piddling settlement, really, nestled inconspicuously in a valley between hills terraced for viticulture. But Gabriel had an eye—or a nose, rather—for a good wine press, and the pungent smell of fermentation wafting up from the village outskirts recalled him to the task at hand. Making an abrupt U-turn above the startled heads of the grape stompers, he doubled back into town.
Mary was looking out her home’s lone window when Gabriel alighted, and so witnessed the angel’s post-flight composure of his person. Gabriel folded his wings; he smoothed his orb of windswept hair; he arranged his features into an expression befitting the gravity of the occasion. With this routine he afforded Mary the time to, if not accustom herself to the idea of entertaining a winged guest, at least pretend to have done so. So it was that when Gabriel stopped fussing at last, having satisfied himself that no neighbors were in earshot and that no bird droppings besmirched his back or shoulders, the face of the angel registered more surprise than the maiden’s did. Joseph’s betrothed regarded her extraordinary visitor quizzically, yes, but the visitor gaped back with ill-concealed dismay. The coarse floridity of Mary’s cheeks had none of the delicate beauty he’d imagined.
Nor did the solid figure he beheld as he stooped beneath the lintel to avoid skewing the rakish angle of his halo. Mary stood in the best-lit corner of the low-slung dwelling, sturdy arms elbow deep in a ball of dough. Gabriel watched rapt as she resumed wrestling the mass of wheat, barley, lentils, and spelt into a form of submission that looked to him like flatbread.
“You have good birthing hips,” the angel stammered finally, wilting visibly as he scrapped his premeditated intro. “And breasts big enough to feed a hungry boy-child.” Gabriel cleared his throat. “The Lord thinks you’ve got the constitution to withstand the rigors of labor, and,” he appended, “the trauma of seeing a son crucified.”
Gabriel could almost hear God thundering profanities at him, could nearly feel the fires of hell licking at his today un-elevated heels. He had been told to leave Calvary out of at least this initial interview. Jehovah permitted alteration of syntax, substitution of synonyms, but on the substance of a message He was inflexible. “Blessed art thou among women,” the messenger ventured, lapsing into angelspeak in a half-hearted stab at atonement.
Mary ceased her kneading. “How’s that for a ‘hello’? Drops in uninvited and starts in on my hips!” The presumptive mother of God turned on Gabriel tartly.
He tried to recall the wording handed down to him from on high, but, failing, had to improvise: “Don’t worry, Mary. The Lord doesn’t go for these twiggy model-types. He likes His women curvy.
Mary’s expression didn’t soften, and it seemed to Gabriel that she punched the dough ball even more vigorously. He doubted so much oomph went into making manna. The tasty flakes just seemed to materialize whenever he had a hankering.
“You’re going to have a baby. And you’ll name him Jesus. He’ll be great, and rule from the throne of David over the house of Jacob. His kingdom will last forever.”
The angel looked at Mary hopefully, trying to determine if this last string of heady prognostications had made her forget the crucifixion looming large in her firstborn’s future. Had she even registered that slip-up? Even with the superhuman perceptiveness of his kind, Gabriel was having trouble reading her.
“Oh no,” Mary said, her head wagging one way as, Gabriel noticed, her plump posterior wagged the other. “I’m not having any baby. I’m a virgin.” The conviction here was palpable.
“You don’t understand,” Gabriel persisted, taking less pleasure in this avowal of virginity than he had anticipated. “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee.”
Gabriel remembered this peculiar phraseology well enough, having smirked—in Jehovah’s presence, no less!—at its euphemisms. “He whom you bear will be called the Son of God.”
“He whom I bear,” Mary parroted. She crossed her arms over her truly prodigious chest, dusting it carelessly with millet meal. “Damned if I’m going to be raped by some spirit!”
Gabriel nodded in knowing assent, having witnessed what the Lord did to mortals who defied Him, having smelled the sulfurous fumes of eternal torment and heard the screams of those suffering it. Only wariness of sharing Lucifer’s fate kept Gabriel even close to toeing the God-given line. “But your cousin Elisabeth is pregnant now, six months along already.”
This news left Mary temporarily speechless. Her arms protruded from the mound of dough like tree trunks from a knoll.
“And she was supposedly barren. See, with God, nothing’s impossible. Virgin births included.”
“Okay, maybe,” Mary conceded, “but just because I could have a kid doesn’t mean I want to. God might think of asking first before going ahead and doing the deed.” With a look of sudden horror Mary smoothed the cloth below the rope cinched at her waist. As she assessed the contours of the underlying flesh, the flatbread lay forgotten.
“I don’t think there’s anything in the oven yet.” Gabriel wasn’t sure about this, but he didn’t want the girl to whip up and self-administer a womb-evacuating mixture of acacia, colocynth, and date paste before he had a chance to duck out. Mary, though, hardly seemed to hear him.
“God has singled me out to endure morning sickness and incontinence, backaches and heartburn—I won’t be able to see my feet for Chrissakes!”
Had he let that title slip, too?
“All without the steamy sex beforehand?! Mother of a bastard son, strung up to die in his underwear! Some honor!
“Some God! He creates the world, declares it good, changes His mind and floods everything. He gets His jollies from telling people to kill their kids and seeing how far they’ll go with it. He turns women to salt on a whim. The same fellow who made us imperfect then condemns us for it! Our sole purpose is to boost His ego with continuous adulation. Never mind we do it only out of fear...”
Mary’s florid cheeks had by this point deepened to scarlet. Gabriel marveled in spite of himself at this unsuspected firecracker. Maybe not the prettiest face in Canaan, but did she talk sense! And the gumption of her! A thrill traversed his wing-encumbered spine.
“If God wants a son to torture, let Him make one out of clay. Or His own rib. Or let the sacrificial lamb spring fully formed from His Holy Father’s swollen skull. If Zeus could do it, so can Jehovah. Count me out.”
Mary stewed in silence now, flushed to the tips of her ears. Gabriel struggled to suppress a smile as he collected some of the most unholy thoughts he had yet entertained in his tenure as divine go-between. He understood, he was fairly certain, the mechanics of mortal sex. He was, after all, at least partly to blame for original sin. Had he done a better job patrolling Eden’s borders, had he recognized the serpent for what it was—Satan in disguise—chaste little Adam and Eve would never have learned about nakedness or farming, snake-bites or hard-ons, death or—Gabriel quivered—orgasms.
He looked around the traklin, then, its plaster walls and scant furnishings. Was God watching them from the basket in the corner? Regarding him furiously from the jug by the door? Or could the Lord witness His messenger’s insubordination without actually stirring from His favorite easy chair in heaven, without manifesting Himself in any form corporeal or nebulous at the scene of the contemplated crime? Could He see through ceilings? Gabriel cursed himself for never getting a better handle on the finer points of omniscience.
There was another question, too, besides whether and how God might be watching them. Assuming He was—it’s not every day you conscript yourself a baby mama—how was He going to react? And what about this Holy Spirit chap? What was his deal? This shadowy player—the appointed impregnator, apparently—worried Gabriel more than the wrath of God the would-be Father. That he’d dealt with before. He reckoned he could sweet-talk his way out of exile. He could trade camaraderie for a pardon, laugh at Jehovah’s jokes in exchange for a shortened sentence. But he shuddered to think what a ghost—what was a ghost, anyway?—would do when it (he?) showed up looking for some action, only to find that someone had beaten him to the job...
Gabriel knew he should cool it, make a graceful exit, go on to lead an uneventfully eternal life of harp playing and dove keeping... But sauce, it was so irresistible in a woman.
The archangel drew himself up to his full and commanding height. He felt his customary swagger returning. His eyes strayed pointedly through the doorway into the bedroom beyond. As the mother of all pickup lines trembled on the tip of his angelic tongue, the scent of jasmine filled the room, tinged with an aphrodisiac potpourri of sandalwood and orange blossom.
But Gabriel bit back his winning come-on, licked his lips with that trembling tongue, and, as swiftly as he had loosed it, removed the perfume from the air. He looked at Mary, worrying the dough with that menacing intensity again, jaw set and eyes narrowed. Here was not a woman, Gabriel wagered, likely to respond warmly to the flattery, to the reminders of mortality that often won for lusty suitors that sought-after romp in the hay. He didn’t think it wise to compare her to either a summer’s day or a flower in the so-short bloom of youth. No. He would level with Mary.
“How’d you like to help me stick it to Him?” the angel asked.
“Excuse me?” The virgin, like her visitor, had been preoccupied with her own thoughts. “Who?”
“God. Jehovah. The guy in the sky with His trigger finger on the floodgates.”
“What about Him?”
“Let’s stick it to Him. Throw a wrench into the old man’s plan.” Gabriel sought in vain for a phrase to convey his meaning such that Mary would grasp it. The messenger’s command of idiom often outpaced that of his human interlocutors, confined as they were in space and time. To be restricted to the stale locutions of one temporal and geographical neighborhood? Tedious! Gabriel didn’t see how anyone could stand it. “Put a little fly in His ointment.”
The angel waited a moment for a glint of willing complicity to dawn in Mary’s eyes. When none came, he continued.
“It’s like this.” Gabriel crossed the room and circled behind Mary as he spoke. She craned her neck sideways to keep him in sight even as he stood behind her. Close. Touching. “If I, if we, you know...” Gabriel wasn’t sure whether virgins—even otherwise mouthy ones—could handle frank sex talk, so he let gestures convey that part of his meaning. Hand brushed breast in what was obviously no accident. And while Mary must have felt Gabriel’s robes stir below the waist, she did not recoil from him.
“If I’m already carrying your kid when this Holy Ghost comes to do his mischief...”
Gabriel’s chin hammered Mary’s head as he nodded in gleeful assent. She was catching his drift!
“God’ll have to find someone else to saddle with this immaculate conception and all of its associated heartbreak.”
“Or at least wait nine months.” At a barely-audible 18 decibels, Gabriel’s whisper shattered no walls.
“He will not be happy.”
“Nope,” Gabriel agreed out of one corner of his mouth as the other playfully enveloped Mary’s plump upper lip. “He will not.”
Angel and virgin decamped to the bedroom.
#
Afterward, Mary sat resplendent in post-coital afterglow. A pleasantly winded Gabriel dressed himself, maneuvering first one wing then the other through the tailored slits in his vestments. As he secured the otherworldly fasteners that had so frustrated his novice partner’s groping hands in the heat of hasty disrobing, Gabriel struggled to shake an increasingly persistent mental image: Mary with a pendulous belly like Elisabeth’s.
Meanwhile, 87,000 feet above the pair, on a nebulous recliner, feet propped on a puff of altocumulus, Jehovah panned back from the nowhere town of Nazareth with its communal well and stand of scraggly date palms. The sounds of the place, the wheeze of donkeys and the creak of spinning wheels, got lost again in the white noise of a planet teeming. As God’s attention drifted, the two lately foregrounded streams of consciousness—the rogue archangel’s and the no-longer-virgin’s—rejoined the torrent of hopes and dreams, neuroses and internal monologues cutting a canyon through His divine intellect.
Eyelids drooping and mouth curved into a crossbow, the Lord looked pleased. And He was.
“Amen,” Jehovah said. And fingered His ribs as if fond of them.
END
Family legend has it that Sophia D. Merow scarcely spoke before she could spout sentences. Published sequences of her sentences are accessible via sophiadmerow.com.