little sister!” said his mother lovingly and picked up Fanyasha.
The golden cloth slipped off the girl and flew away, swirling in the gentle playful wind until it got tangled in a snow-white cloud-chair.
Everything was made out of clouds here, as it should be in a typical house of a typical angel family: above and below and on all sides – clouds were everywhere!
The walls were made out of light grey dense cumulus clouds; the windows of light transparent milky white clouds; the doors, tables, and chairs of thin and hard white clouds; the couches and pillows of soft and fluffy clouds, which gleamed with all the colors of the rainbow because everything around was filled with warm sunlight. Fanyasha was examining her house with unabashed enthusiasm. With a mouth open with delight, she turned her head back and forth making her unruly curls bounce playfully on the lacy collar of her purple dress.
“Oh, oh!” said Bosya, cautiously examining his sister. “She is a girl. What am I going to do with her? We haven’t gone over that yet…”
“Don’t worry, my dear, you will do great,” encouraged his mother. “I remember that you recently had a lesson on the five languages of love, and you aced that topic. The most essential thing that the child needs is love.”
“And not just a child,” noted father while looking at mother playfully, catching her affectionate look and kissing her shoulder.
“But, mom!” Bosya became concerned again. “How will I… how will we… she cannot even fly! Look how small her wings are!”
“Borisey, you couldn’t fly either when you were born, but thanks to me, your mother, your grandmother and your grandfather, you learned very fast,” said father strictly, then patted his son on the back, and pointed up. “Why don’t you bring your love languages notebook, and we will distribute the duties among all of us.”
Despite the fact that Bosya was an angel, he was nonetheless a boy, and, of course, as a boy of about twelve, he was not too excited about this new responsibility in the shape of a small girl in a purple dress who could not fly or speak properly. But Bosya understood that it was useless to argue with his father, and slowly flew to his room.
“We all lived in peace and then – bam! – a sister appears for some reason,” he mumbled, flying up the corridor. “And now what? Does everyone need to drop what they are doing? Maybe I had different plans! Maybe I did not want a sister at this point. What is the good of it anyway? If I had a brother, I would understand that. We would have things to do together: common interests, man talk… Eh,” Bosya sighed helplessly and entered his room.
Of course Bosya heard that children are, perhaps, one of the biggest miracles of the world. Moreover, neither people nor angels could know for certain who would be born and when. Still, it was unclear to him why things were the way they were, and why one could not choose the desired time of birth and the gender of the child. Bosya was sure that order could be established in life this way. And he really loved order.
Bosya was not in a hurry to return, and therefore decided it was the right time to tidy up the table and the bookshelves. He started flying across the room and rearranging books from place to place, pondering how challenging his life would be from now on. After all, in a couple of years his sister would be flying on her own, and poking her nose everywhere.
Bosya remembered how his classmate complained about his annoying younger sister who constantly got in the way of him doing his homework, flew into his room, and asked a whole lot of questions. And how hard it was for him since, according to the “Rules of Protection of Happy Lives of Small Angels and The Preservation of Information,” one must safeguard angel-children of under school age against everything that they do not need to know. And the most forbidden information was everything that concerned people.
“And how does one do that? I want to know,” mumbled Bosya, and hid the books and pictures with the images of people and life on earth.
Then Bosya flew up to the window and started examining the neighbors’ houses.
Unlike the people’s houses, whose outside appearance doesn’t give away how many people live inside and what ages and gender they are, houses for angels are built according to strict standards. For this reason, one could easily determine how many adults and children live in that house by simply looking at it.
All of the angels’ houses were constructed out of thick cumulus clouds. They hung in the air at a short distance from each other, and were like long column-corridors, going up so high that it was impossible to make out where they ended. Below were large spherical living rooms with multiple windows and a front door. Vertically, along the corridor, there were rooms hanging atop one another from the littlest ones to the largest – in order of seniority. All members of the family from the youngest to the oldest had their own room. On the left side were the women’s rooms with round windows, and on the right were the men’s rooms with square windows.
Bosya saw very few houses nearby where parents lived with only one child. Three or four children’s rooms hung on the majority of the houses. The house across the street actually had eleven rooms: two large ones at the top, and nine down the corridor.
“The Zorge’s have nine children! How do they manage? It’s incomprehensible!” he muttered, irritated. “There is no logic to this! None! Since they created strict standards for the preservation of information and wanted the children to live happily, then they should have given each family one child, and everyone would have been content. And then we would have order.”
When Bosya returned, the whole family had already moved from the lobby to the living room. Father settled comfortably in his favorite armchair made of dense clouds; mother sat to the side on a soft armrest hugging his neck, smiling and humming.
In the middle of the living room, grandmother fluttered in the whirlwind of clouds, cheerfully hooting. Every now and again she would toss Fanyasha up into the air; she merrily laughed and flapped her arms, her legs, and her small transparent wings, as if trying to fly higher and higher, but then falling again and again into the arms of her happy grandmother.
“Here, I brought it,” muttered Bosya, looking at the hero of the day from under his brows, and handed his green notebook to his father, on which it was painstakingly written:
Languages of Love
This notebook belongs to Borisey Aros, student of the second grade of the School of Angels,
“Well, well,” said father in a businesslike manner, scanning the pages covered in neat handwriting.
Even though father tried to hide it, based on his delighted expression, it was clear that he was very proud of his clever and diligent son who had graduated from the Junior School of Angels with honors, and had been a student at the Middle School for the past year. There was no doubt that Bosya’s diligence and patience would be enough for the seven years of the Middle School of Angels, and then for the three years in High School, which is a totally different life, a life of a grown-up angel.
Father was confident that Borisey, with his inherent sense of responsibility, in addition to his love of learning and order, would succeed in tackling not only school, but also his new role as an older brother, and would become a good role model for his sister.
“So,” said father loudly, and paused expressively, waiting for everyone to settle on the puffy clouds around the armchair in which he was sitting, “today the beautiful Efania has joined our family.” Having said these solemn words, he looked at Fanyasha who, realizing that she was being talked about, flung up her nose and closed her eyes with pleasure.
“Our task is to give her as much love as possible, and to help her to become a strong, beautiful and happy angel! Now we will divide our responsibilities for the next ten years.”
This was exactly how much a childhood without a care in the world was supposed to last, according to the laws of the lives of angels, after which