Angelaboutme -

“Thank you.”

The woman looked to be in her late thirties, with frizzy brown hair pulled into a lopsided ponytail and a faded denim jacket covered in patches—a rainbow flag, a “Coexist” sticker, a small embroidered sunflower. She was eating a bag of cheese puffs with the kind of aggressive focus usually reserved for hostage negotiations.

Lena closed her eyes. “I’m hallucinating. Head trauma. Great.” angelaboutme

Margo still showed up, though not every day. Sometimes she appeared on the fire escape outside Lena’s new apartment, eating cheese puffs and watching the stars. Sometimes she appeared in dreams—quiet dreams, the kind where you sit on a park bench and watch the leaves fall and feel, for once, that everything might be okay.

“Technically,” Margo said, picking a fleck of orange dust off her jeans, “I’m a guardian angel. Third class. Very low on the celestial totem pole. But I passed my human-interaction exam on the third try, which is actually pretty good, considering.” “Thank you

“I always knew I had a guardian angel,” Lena said slowly. “I just thought she would look different. More wings. Less orange dust.”

She stayed in the hospital for two weeks. Margo visited every day, always bringing snacks—cheese puffs, mostly, but also an alarming number of those little peanut butter cracker packets. She told ridiculous stories about other people she’d guarded over the centuries (a Viking who kept trying to fight trees, a Victorian lady who secretly wrote terrible poetry, a nineteenth-century baker whose bread was so bad it once started a small riot). She made Lena laugh, which hurt her ribs, which made her laugh harder. “I’m hallucinating

“I don’t know how to do this,” she admitted. “The whole… feeling things. Being a person.”