annunciation

by Kendra Kvale

Mariah was eating leftovers standing over the sink when a light came through the window and something stood in it that was not a man and not a bird and not a column of fire but somehow suggested all three without committing to any of them.

“Mariah!” it said, and her name carried through the kitchen like a bell.

She lowered her fork and put the Tupperware lid down on the counter. She did not scream.

“You have been chosen,” it continued.

“Chosen for what?”

The thing adjusted, reaching for a shape more familiar to her. The suggestion of shoulders. A narrowing where a face appeared. An angel.

“To bear the child of God. The second coming. The new covenant. You have been found worthy among all…”

“No,” Mariah interrupted.

The angel stopped.

For a moment it stood in her kitchen like a screenshot of itself. The refrigerator hummed. A car passed outside. Somewhere down the street, a dog barked twice.

“I’m sorry,” it said. “I don’t think I…”

“No,” Mariah said again. “I don’t want to do that. Thank you, though.”

“You’re thanking me?”

“My mother raised me to be polite to guests.”

“I’m not a guest. I’m a herald. I am the Annunciation.”

“You’re in my kitchen. That makes you a guest.”

The angel looked around the kitchen as though seeing it for the first time, which it probably was. It looked at the refrigerator magnets. A crab from Maryland, an Edgar Allan Poe quote, a coupon for oil changes that had expired in March.

“This has not happened before,” the angel said.

“Someone saying no?”

“Anyone saying no. To this. To any of this.” It paused. “To me.”

Mariah considered this. Then she turned on the electric kettle.

“Do you drink tea?”

“I don’t drink anything.”

“Do you want to drink tea?”

The angel paused, performing whatever celestial process stood in for thought. The light in the room flickered then returned to its previous intensity.

“I don’t know,” it said. “No one has ever asked me.”

*****

His name, he told her, was Leopold.

“Leopold,” she said, setting two mugs on the table.

He was sitting at her kitchen table now, which had required negotiation. Angels, it turned out, did not instinctively sit.

Mariah had pulled out the chair and gestured.

He had regarded it as one might regard an unfamiliar tool.

“Like this,” she’d said, and bent her knees to demonstrate.

He had studied the motion. Then, with slow deliberation, he folded himself downward, joints articulating in careful sequence, as if assembling the idea of a body in real time. He lowered into the chair with mechanical grace.

The chair creaked.

He froze.

“It’s fine,” Mariah said. “That’s what chairs do.”

He nodded, absorbing this. Then he placed both hands flat on the table, fingers slightly splayed, as though steadying himself against gravity.

“I understand the concept,” he said.

“I can tell,” Mariah replied. “Can I call you Leo?”

The light flickered.

“No.”

“Fair enough. People try to call me Mary. Or worse. They hear Mariah and they start singing.”

“Singing what?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“I want to know everything. That is the nature of what I am.”

“You want to know everything, but you’ve never had tea and you don’t know what no means?”

Leopold wrapped both hands around his mug. He did not drink from but held it the way someone holds a small animal they have been handed unexpectedly.

“I know what no means,” he said. “It is a negation. A refusal.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“The problem is that it has never been a possible outcome. I arrive, I speak, the chosen one weeps or falls to her knees and says yes. It has always been yes. The question was not built for no.”

“Then why ask it?” Mariah muttered.

“The moment. The Annunciation is a…it is a….” He searched for a word. The lights in the kitchen dimmed and surged and dimmed again, and Mariah heard a church organ being played in a room three houses away. “The Annunciation is a certainty!”

“Not from where I’m sitting.”

She drank her tea and let him hold his. He examined the steam as it rose from the mug and unmade itself in the air. It troubled him, and he leaned closer. The steam thinned and then vanished.

“It isn’t gone,” she said. “Just… different.”

He absorbed this. Then he asked her, “Why?”

“Why is it different?”

“Why do you not want the annunciation?”

Mariah took a deep breath.

“I’m thirty-seven,” she said. “I teach fourth grade. I have a sister I talk to every Sunday. I have a cat named Otis who doesn’t like anyone, including me, and a mortgage I am eleven years into and nineteen years away from paying off. I go to the farmers market on Saturdays and buy more kale than I will ever eat because I keep believing I am about to become someone who eats kale.”

She took a sip of her tea.

“I’m not,” she said. “I have not become that person, and the kale rots in the fridge every week.”

Leopold listened with his whole body which in his case was not a metaphor. Every bit of his etherealness was oriented toward her like a satellite dish. He did not interrupt.

“I had a plan,” she continued. “When I was twenty-two my plan involved a husband and a baby by thirty and a house with a porch and a golden retriever. That plan didn’t survive my actual life.”

She traced the rim of her mug with her thumb.

“The marriage happened. And then it unhappened. Slowly enough that I kept thinking we could still fix it, but we couldn’t.”

She swallowed.

“The baby didn’t happen at all. And then I was thirty-four, sitting in a paper gown in a room that smelled like disinfectant and my doctor said some words to me that made the idea of having a baby a much more complicated thing. She said them gently, like they were manageable.”

A small pause.

“I sat in the parking lot afterward and cried until I had the hiccups. Then I drove home and I fed the cat. I graded spelling tests.”

She looked at him.

“I’ve built a different life since then, one where I moved into a little apartment and chose every piece of my furniture and painted the walls the color I wanted without worrying about what anybody else thought. And now you want to walk in and rearrange everything because God has a project?”

“It is not a project. It is the salvation of…”

She interrupted him.

“I didn’t say no because I don’t believe you. I said no because I do. I believe God is real and this child would be holy, and the world would be saved, or remade, or whatever word you’re using up there for what comes next. I believe all of that.”

Her voice steadied.

“And I am still saying no.”

She pulled her shoulders in and grasped her mug.

“Because this is my body,” she said. “And this is my house and nobody…not you, not God, not the entire host of heaven… gets to walk into a woman’s kitchen and tell her what her life is for.”

She softened.

“I already learned what it costs to have my future rearranged without my consent. I didn’t like it then, and I don’t want it now.”

The kitchen stilled into quiet.

Leopold looked at her and then glanced to the tea in his mug. With the slow deliberateness of someone performing an action for the first time in the history of the universe, he lifted the mug to his lips and drank.

“It’s good,” he said.

“It’s chamomile, and it’s not even the good chamomile. It’s the box from Trader Joe’s.”

“It’s good,” Leopold said again.

*****

Leopold did not leave.

As Mariah understood it, this was not an act of defiance or persistence. It was simply that Leopold did not know what to do next. He had come with one purpose, and the purpose had been refused, and now he was sitting in her kitchen without a next line. He was, she realized, experiencing something she recognized from the parking lot outside her doctor’s office. The moment after the plan collapses, the moment when you are still here, but the road you thought you were traveling has disappeared.

“What happens now?” she asked. “If I’ve said no. What happens to God’s plan?”

“I don’t know. I have never been in a conversation that lasted this long. My purpose has always been fulfilled. I speak, they weep, I depart. It takes one minute. Sometimes two.”

“And now?”

“Now I have been here for forty-seven minutes, and I have had tea. You have told me about kale, and I do not know what kale is, and I do not know what happens next and I…”

He stopped. The lights did the thing again.

“Leopold?”

“I am experiencing something.”

“Can you describe it?”

“It is as if I rehearsed a scene in a small, well-lit room, and upon entering to perform found a cathedral where the room should be. My lines do not carry, and the ceiling is too high. No one can hear me, and I do not know what to do next.”

Mariah considered this.

“That’s called uncertainty.”

“Angels do not experience uncertainty.”

“You do now.”

He was quiet for a while.

“Can I ask you a question?” he said.

In all the time she would know him, Mariah would remember this as the moment the story actually started. An angel at her kitchen table, holding a mug that said WORLD’S OKAYEST AUNT asking if he was allowed to ask a question.

“Of course you can.”

“The life you built after your plan fell apart. How did you know what to build?”

“I didn’t.”

“Then how…”

“You just start. You wake up the next day, and you keep going. You make coffee and you go to work and you come home and you do it again. And then one day you realize you’ve built something. Not because you had a blueprint, but because you kept going.”

Leopold turned the mug in his hands.

“I have a question about the kale,” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“You buy it knowing you won’t eat it.”

“Every Saturday.”

“Why?”

“Because I like who I am in the produce aisle. I like the version of me that’s going to go home and make a kale smoothie. I know she’s fictional. But I like her. She’s… aspirational.”

“You perform hope,” Leopold said. “As a practice.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Actually, yeah. That’s exactly what it is.”

“I did not know hope was something you had to practice. I thought it was something you were given.”

“Maybe for angels.”

“Maybe,” he said.

*****

He was there when she came home from school on Thursday, sitting on the front step with his hands on his knees, watching a squirrel navigate the power line with fascination. He was wearing something that approximated human clothing, khaki pants and a button-down shirt that was slightly too large for him. He looked like a substitute teacher on his first day.

“Leopold.”

“Hello, Mariah.”

“You’re on my porch.”

“I have been watching the squirrel. It is doing something very dangerous and it does not seem to know.”

Mariah followed his gaze to the power line, where the squirrel sprinted a few feet, froze, then sprinted again.

“That’s what squirrels do.”

“Why?”

She had to think about it for a moment.

“Because the acorn is on the other side?”

Leopold considered this with the gravity of a theologian parsing scripture.

“I have more questions,” he said.

She unlocked the door. “You’re in luck. I have more tea. Come inside.”

He followed her in. Otis lifted his head from the couch and regarded Leopold. Leopold regarded him with equal seriousness.

Otis lowered his head again, which was the closest he came to hospitality.

“He knows what you are,” Mariah said.

“All animals do.”

“And?”

“And he does not care. Which I admire.”

She made tea and gave him the WORLD’S OKAYEST AUNT mug again because she had already begun to think of it as his. They sat at the table.

“Ask,” she said.

Leopold inclined his head, treating the permission as if it mattered.

“You said your marriage happened and then unhappened. What does unhappened mean?”

“It means we got divorced.”

“Why?”

She considered him for a moment. “Because we wanted different lives,” she said. “And we were too young to understand that when we started.”

“But you chose each other.”

“We chose who we thought the other person was,” she said, the way one explains something simple that turns out not to be simple at all. “That’s different.”

He studied her face. “Is it?”

“Leopold,” she leaned back in her chair, “when you arrived in my kitchen, you had a version of me already formed. The weeping woman. The one who falls to her knees. The yes.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Was that me?”

A pause.

“It was supposed to be.”

“But it wasn’t.”

He grew very still.

“That’s marriage,” Mariah said after a moment. “Sometimes.”

*****

He came back the next Tuesday. And the Tuesday after that. Then on a Thursday.

One Saturday morning, when she was halfway out the door for the farmers market, she found him standing beside her car holding a butternut squash. He did not say where he had found it. He simply presented it to her with both hands, with the same grave seriousness, she assumed, that he once used for divine proclamations. His face was solemn, as though this too were an announcement meant to alter the course of history.

“I brought this,” he said, holding it out to her with both hands.

“Thank you, Leopold.”

“It is a squash,” he clarified.

“I can see that.”

“I do not know what you do with it,” he admitted, watching her face for instruction.

“You roast it,” she said. “With olive oil and salt.”

He nodded, absorbing this as doctrine. “I would like to see that.”

He was delighted when she offered to take him to the farmers’ market. He stood in front of a table of heirloom tomatoes, studying their bruised reds and improbable yellows. He touched a loaf of sourdough with one careful finger to confirm it was real. At the berry stand, a toddler bit into a strawberry. Juice ran down her wrist, and she laughed, a wild and unselfconscious toddler laugh. The light in the market flickered as Leopold watched.

“Leopold,” Mariah said, somewhere between the honey vendor and the man selling goat cheese.

“Yes.”

“Did God send you back after the first time to try again?”

“No.”

“Then why do you keep coming?”

He held a jar of honey up to the light. Leopold glowed, forgetting to hold himself in.

“Because I have never had a conversation before,” he said. “I have spoken. I have announced. I have declared. But a conversation requires two people who do not know how it will end.” He set the honey down. “I find that I prefer not knowing.”

“That’s a very human thing to say.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know.”

*****

It went on like this for weeks and months.

Leopold learned to sit without concentrating on the mechanics of it. He learned to drink tea without holding the mug as if it might detonate. He developed preferences. Chamomile over peppermint. The chair by the window over the chair by the door.

He could not eat, but he liked to smell things. More than once, Mariah came home to find him in her kitchen with a lemon lifted to his face, eyes closed, breathing in. The first time she saw this, she laughed so hard she had to slide down the cabinet and sit on the floor.

He opened his eyes and regarded her.

“What is laughing for?” he asked.

“It’s the sound your body makes when it’s surprised by joy,” she said, wiping her eyes.

He considered this. “What is it when there is no body?”

“I think,” she said, pointing to the ceiling light, “it’s the light thing you do.”

The kitchen went very bright.

He asked her everything. How fourth graders learned to divide fractions and forgive each other. Why sisters could love and resent in the same breath. Why humans agreed to pay for a house for thirty years.

He even asked about the day in the parking lot outside the doctor’s office. She told him.

The light in the room lowered and steadied while she spoke. When she finished, he said quietly, “I think that is the saddest thing I have ever heard.”

“You’re an angel,” she said. “You must have heard worse.”

“I have heard of worse. I have not sat across from worse while it held a cup of tea and told me it was okay.”

She asked him things, too.

Like what heaven looked like.

“It does not look like anything,” he said.

“Try,” she said.

He searched for an approximation.

“The closest analogy would be music,” he said finally. “Music is beautiful. It comes from inside you, but it is also everywhere around you.”

“That sounds beautiful,” she said. “What is God like?”

Leopold shrugged. “I do not know.”

“How can you not know? You work for Him.”

“A wave does not know the ocean,” he said.

“That’s very poetic.”

“It is not poetic,” he replied. “It is accurate.”

She smiled. “Sometimes poetry is the most accurate thing.”

He studied her. “You might be right about that.”

“But you’re not certain,” she pointed out. “Do you miss being certain?”

“Yes,” he said. Then, after a pause, “No.”

He folded his hands on the table. “The difficulty with certainty is that you do not know you possess it until it is gone. And when it is gone, the space it leaves is enormous. You can wander inside it for a very long time.”

“That sounds like grief,” she said.

He considered this.

“Maybe it is,” he said. Then he paused. “Mariah?”

“Yeah.”

“I have not reported back.”

“Reported back to who?” Then she realized. “Oh. Right. And?”

“It has three months, four days, and 37 minutes. I was sent to deliver a message and I did. But I did not report back.”

“Are you in trouble?”

“I don’t think trouble is a concept that applies to me.”

“What does apply?”

He thought about this.

“Drift,” he said. “I am drifting. I was a thing that moved in one direction…from God to the world, message to receiver…and now I am a thing that moves in many directions. Some of them are toward the farmers’ market, and some of them are toward the sound you make when you laugh, and I do not know what I am when I am not the Annunciation.”

“You’re Leopold.”

“Leopold is a function. Leopold is the name of a purpose.”

“Leopold is the guy who brought me a butternut squash and watched a child laugh like it was a miracle.”

“It was a miracle.”

Mariah laughed. The light in the kitchen surged.

“See,” she said. “That. Right there. Perhaps you’re becoming a person.”

“I’m not a person.”

“You’re not what you were, either.”

He was quiet.

Otis jumped into Leopold’s lap, and he scratched behind the cat’s ears with an ease that suggested he had been doing it for centuries, which, given what she now knew about angels and animals, he possibly had.

Otis purred. The refrigerator hummed.

“Do you know what I think?” Mariah said.

Leopold looked up from the cat.

“I think you came here to convert me. And I think it worked, just not the way anyone planned. I don’t believe in God more than I did four months ago. But I believe more. In general. In…”

She gestured around them: the kitchen, the table, the chipped mug, the cat, him.

“In this. In the idea that something can show up with a plan that doesn’t work out and stay anyway. That’s the most religious thing I’ve ever experienced. Somebody staying.”

Leopold was quiet for a moment.

“And you,” he said, “have converted me.”

She raised an eyebrow. “To what?”

“To not knowing. To chamomile. To kale as an aspirational practice. To the idea that a life can be built without a blueprint.”

She looked at him across the table. The angel in the too-big shirt, the herald who had lost his script, whatever he was to her now. Something between a guest and a friend and a theological crisis, sitting in her kitchen with her cat on his lap and her mug in his hands.

“Leopold,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You still can’t call me Mary.”

“I would never.”

“And I’m still not having God’s baby.”

“I have not asked again.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s why you can keep coming back.”

He nodded. He drank his tea. Otis stretched and rolled over for belly rubs.

*****

The child was born anyway.

Not to her, but to a woman in Wilson, North Carolina who worked at a hardware store and had not been visited by an angel but had dreamed of one. She had said yes without being asked, because she had wanted a child for a very long time, and sometimes the wanting and the miracle find each other without heralds or annunciations, through the plain, unscripted grace of a life that is ready.

Mariah read about it in the news.

Well, she read about a baby in North Carolina who had healed a woman’s blindness in the checkout line of a Harris Teeter which was either the second coming or very unusual.

She showed the article to Leopold, and he read it with a creased brow. When he finished, he paused for a long time and then pronounced:

“It didn’t need me.”

“No,” she said.

“It happened without the announcement or the certainty. Without any of it.”

“Yes.”

He looked at the table. “Then what was I for?”

Mariah took her phone back and set his tea in front of him. It was chamomile, Trader Joe’s, the WORLD’S OKAYEST AUNT mug.

“Maybe you were for this,” she said.

He looked at her.

The light did not dim or surge. It held the way light holds in a kitchen on a Tuesday evening when someone is exactly where they are meant to be, even if no one planned it and no script was written.

“Yes,” Leopold said softly. “Maybe I was for this.”

Otis yawned. The kettle clicked off.

Mariah reached across the table and laid her hand over Leopold’s.

They stayed like that.

Not forever.

Which, as it turned out, was enough.

Photo of Kendra Kvale

BIO: Kendra Kvale is a playwright and fiction writer based in Texas. She is the author of eighteen plays published with Pioneer Drama Service and a recipient of the American Alliance for Theatre and Education Distinguished Play Award. She is currently expanding her writing to include short fiction and novels.