Counter Tenor

COUNTER TENOR

First published in 'Skeleton Girls' 1995

The angel crept into my prayers – to assist their passage upwards, it said.

“May the angel in this prayer carry my words further than they otherwise would reach,” I intoned, upon realising that the angel was present in the meaning, if not the voice. But then, as I continued, even the timbre changed to a genderless falsetto, to such an extent that I felt I was actually upon the point of becoming the angel.

I knew that, if God didn’t listen to His angels, He’d listen to nobody. So I pursued my course of cross-over invocation, despite the arrival of Susie – whose visit I must have expected before becoming the angel.

“Are you allright, George?” she asked, plonking a bottle of red wine on the dining-table.

I was startled – imprecatus interruptus, as it were.

“Yes, I’m allright,” I answered in my old voice, as soon as I had managed to recover it. “The dinner’s not ready,” I added, pointing to the plates bearing the uncooked morsels of a vegetarian’s nightmare.

“I was certain I heard somebody else speaking as I came upstairs...” Susie said uncertainly.

Her mouth didn’t quite seem to match the words, as if I were using her as a ventriloquist’s dummy. My prayer had indeed been a plea for female company – and here it was, ready-made, in the shape of someone called Susie, knowing me as George (which had never been my name) and dressed to kill. Almost her whole top was on show, with a thigh skirt already riding higher as she sat opposite me in the easy chair, within reach of the table.

As I stood up to show my legs who was master, I realised that falsetto was more than just in the voice.

Prayers are double-edged, I guess. And, as Susie plopped a stringy piece of raw meat into her mouth, I cringed with more than just a little empathy with God. Yet I still loved her.

(Above thingie dedicated to Sue whose name was given to me by the Skeleton Girls as someone to whom they would like me to dedicate it.
Another was dedicated to Paola and is republished here: http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/archive/268.html).