Jesus lay dying in a five-dollar flop. Dark against the sheets, his face and hands were marked and bent by every day of his seventy years; his thin body barely made a dent in the old mattress.
None of the beds in the shelter's clinic were empty. There was no shortage of old men too poor for the hospitals or for whom there was simply no room elsewhere. Once, he had tended the hopeless old men in these beds; now, he was just one more of them.
"Yeshua bar-Yosef." The voice was lifeless; the words a statement, not a question. It was his birth name, no one had called him that for two thousand years.
He opened his eyes.
"Oh," he said, "it's you. What are you doing here?"
The old man glanced down the aisle at the floor supervisor. If he'd heard the voices, he gave no sign. The words weren't English--weren't any Earthly tongue--, but it wouldn't matter anyway; there was always the low murmur of voices here. Some patients prayed, some babbled, or cried out in pain; if you were here long enough, you got used to it.
Vic wouldn't see the angel standing over the old man's bed.
)
A dark tale of the Second Coming.
