NOTE: The following excerpt is culled from The Wishing Place, a mainstream
novel by Larry Schoenholtz. It involves a section of The Angel Book, a mysterious
volume which insinuates its way into characters' lives and offers them clues
concerning events in the larger plot of the book. Currently, Schoenholtz is still
marketing The Wishing Place. E-mail the anthology editor for more information. 


FROM CHAPTER 2:  "Jack-in-the-Box"

Marcie sat on her daughter's bed leafing through the large book. Terralyn was using it as a weight for one of her shoeboxes of frogs, and Marcie wouldn't even have discovered it had Sam not been curious to know exactly how many frogs Michael already sent his sister. Marcie read excepts here and there with a growing sense of concern, and found a particularly odd one near the front of the book: 

	552	However dark the shadows men cast upon the earth,
		none are so black as to eclipse every manner of
		goodness that your good earth has to offer.  And
		why is that?  Because We came-the children of
		the burning stars themselves.  We serve here in
		penance and mediation, and no amounts of cold,
		dark night can extinguish us.

	553	We were the first eyes to behold the rise and fall
		of great stars, the first ears to hear the roar of 
		oceans filling up the wombs of life.  Well before
		the ancestors of men discovered, choking and flopping,
		that the watery cradle could be shed, we had long
		acknowledged life.  We stirred and spoke.  We thought.
		We rose through the shadows which both do, and do not, 
		imprison men.  Everything dumbfounded us.  We said:  
		splendor shows promise in the Creation, and we will 
		know her.

	554	The poor daughters of men.  We opened our eyes, it 
		is true.  But only to be blinded by a carnal outrage
		embedded so deep within our inheritance that we were
		helpless against it.  We struck out like salmon against 
		currents of disaffection and want.  We stumbled 
		down the corridors of space, drunk with impossible desire.
		The daughters of men had absolutely no chance against our
		charms and wants, of course, so we knew them.

	555	Mighty are the angels who strip whole worlds down to a
		common flesh-who weave the bawling, wretched little
		rocks between the stars into a single web of joy.

			-Larry Schoenholtz

All rights to this excerpt belong to its author.

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