Bacchus Evidenced: A Vignette

by Griffin R.K.

It was autumn in Montreal in 2019 A.D., and I was playing pool in a bar in Westmount with my friend, Kyle Gursky, as the world devoured its own tail. Earlier that week something of an apparition, much like the one in Cairo a few decades earlier, nihilated itself in the air above Calgary, Alberta: an ebony black angel from an Edgar Ende painting holding in its hands a pearly white sphere. Palmers from around Canada and the world began flying in en masse, and men and women spilled out of their houses and into the streets to burn incense and cry and repent. The atheists of Alberta became god-fearing Christians overnight; the Saracens saw Israfeel and went about their business. People in Montreal were still drinking, but within days every home along Sherbrooke had lamb’s blood smeared above its door, and the whole city smelled terrible. Attendance to the Mormon temple increased tenfold as well, or so I had heard.

It was midnight. The Irish pub was lit by these stained, academic-looking, dealer’s-visor-green lamps: a sickly kind of green, perhaps the same shade as their Nazi equivalents. Kyle had accidentally scooped an eight ball into my groin, and we stopped playing and went outside to smoke our savory-smelling cigarettes. I thought the chalk might’ve made lighting somewhat easier. He was in an unwashed NASA t-shirt. It was too cold for a t-shirt. I couldn’t tell whether his arms were fat or muscular. I was slightly in comparison to him and my undertones were anemically blue. He did something neuroscience-related for McGill University. He was a left-brained, Scholastic breed of non-denominational Christian. He showed the bartender a photograph of his baptismal certificate in lieu of a driver’s license.

“You know, Eric,” he pontificated to me, “we’re living in Sodom.”

“No, the sodomites were living in Sodom,” I replied. “We’re quite well-behaved. God hasn’t smitten a city in a few thousand years. I think God likes the pride parades and the fentanyl and the crime. Your God is a laughing god, perhaps a little fat Budai if anything.”

An inexorable throng of cardboard-carrying clamoring zealots and flagellants passed us by. Their leader had gouged out his eyes like Oedipus and was averring something in French I couldn’t understand. There were colored lights strung up everywhere. The blind spirit-seer slipped on ice and his followers hoisted him back onto his feet and continued their slow march. I sobered up, observing their progress, mustering a zen-like focus on the so-called “greenspace” and cobblestone and summer’s remnant gossamer. Some shadow of the pool table’s texture continued to linger in my mind: the pulpy, rough felt. I thought that felt was a crime. What strangely horrible felt it was.

“There’s a castle in Jordan named Montreal built by the crusaders. I’ve been there.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

Another angel came to be above a far away highway. She was a comet above London on December 14, 1664, then again on April 6, 1665. She had been clad in many colors by the Sun back then, a neatly-dressed aerolith in a bodice of magnesium blue and iron red, but this time around she was more austere. She made contact with earth, and her toes preceded her soles, touched and tested the concrete. Then, she stood flat and proudly on her feet. Her features stirred like what one might do to a mojito and her visage rotated like a revolver’s chamber. She decided on a face. It was an all right face. How much more grand it was to be ugly and alive than beautiful and inanimate. She wanted to be a testament to that. A heroin-addled man with a distended, buckshot leg sauntered by her and spat on the bitumen.

This new angel thought to herself, “The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these.” She shoved her hands in her pockets and proceeded to walk down the thoroughfare whistling.