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The Half-Life of Angels

by Sarah Monette in Uncanny Magazine Issue Five | 122 Words

Disasters spawn angels upon the earth.

The angel of New Orleans bears wings of rain and howling wind. The angels of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bear wings like flash–burned silhouettes. The angel of San Francisco bears wings of smoke. The angels of London stand together, wing brushing wing, fire, plague, the concussion of bombs. The Valdivia angel, the Wenchuan angel spread their wings of shuddering rock. Angels with wings of floodwater stride across continents, the mud of rivers, the salt of tsunamis.

They are not angels of god, and no one knows how long their memory will last.

© 2015 by Sarah Monette

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Sarah Monette

Sarah Monette

Sarah Monette and Katherine Addison are the same person.

She grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the three secret cities of the Manhattan Project. She got her B.A. from Case Western Reserve University, her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Despite being summa cum laude, none of her degrees is of the slightest use to her in either her day job or her writing, which she feels is an object lesson for us all.

She has published more than sixty short stories, eight solo novels, and four collaborations with her friend Elizabeth Bear. Her most recent novel is The Grief of Stones (Tor Books, 2022). The Goblin Emperor (Tor Books, 2014) won the 2015 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel and was a finalist for the Hugo, the Nebula, and the World Fantasy Award.

She is adjunct faculty for Ashland University’s low-residency MFA program.

You can find her on Patreon as pennyvixen.

She lives, with spouse, cats, and books, somewhere in the Upper Midwest.