MicroHorror

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said, gazing at the monitor. “There really are angels, and they really do dance on the head of a pin.”

“Point of a needle,” the old man corrected.

My father was a genius. Putting aside the fun had at Aquinas’s expense, he had devised a machine capable of detecting angelus rays–what in modern terms would be described as an angel’s thermal energy loss. The idea was first propounded in an anonymous eighteenth-century German work, by a theologian who seemed to take seriously Cudworth’s statement that “some who are far from Atheists, may make themselves merry with that Conceit of Thousands of Spirits dancing at once upon a Needles Point . . .”

Which might explain why they were so… hot.

We watched the infrared readings on the video screen. Bright, streaming veils of color, like Dali landscapes melting inside the frame. To think these were the electromagnetic radiations of God’s messengers, His celestial attendants, emitted from seraphic and cherubic flesh… Teary-eyed, we gazed upon the thermographic images as the holy celebration unfolded under my father’s angelus-ray detector.

I checked and re-checked our instruments.

Though we were not equipped with sound, I heard them singing, calling my name as clearly as the old man weeping beside me.

“Their voices,” he said, “are exquisite–”

Plucking up the needle, I jabbed it in my father’s eye.

And now he’s sprawled on the concrete, amid his centrifuges and microscopes, thousands of spirits cutting loose on the point of a needle sticking in his brain.

Like everyone else, we had assumed only those with wings and haloes cavorted in such a tight place.

Now I know why they were so hot.