One Saturday Night, With Angel: Seraphim Plague, #1

By Peter M. Ball

Read the first short story in Peter M. Ball's Seraphim Plague series, One Saturday Night, With Angel (also available in the short story collection Not Quite The End Of The World Just Yet).

 

There's an angel perched on the Nite Owl roof when Mike shows up for the graveyard shift. He thinks it's the same angel whose been following him for a week. Everybody thinks Mike's going to be purged before morning, Elvis and all the other regulars are telling him so.

 

But Mike figures he's lasted six days without pissing the angel off. With luck, he can make it seven and they'll find some other victim…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brain Jar Press
• Release date: Jul 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393354482

Peter M. Ball

Peter M Ball is the author of more than fifty short stories and six novellas, along with essays, RPG material, articles, and poetry. His short stories and non-fiction have appeared in venues such as Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Shimmer, Dragon Magazine, Writing Queensland, and Apex Magazine, and has been included in several Year’s Best anthologies. He’s previously taught creative writing at Griffith University and the Queensland Writers Centre, spent five years as the manager of the Australian Writers Marketplace, and convenes the biennial GenreCon writing conference in Brisbane, Australia.

Book preview

One Saturday Night, With Angel

One Saturday Night, With Angel

A Seraphim Plague Short Story

Peter M. Ball

Brain Jar Press

One Saturday Night, With Angel

If you ask Mike, the problem with the angels is that they smell like laundry powder. They have that real caustic, back-of-the-throat kind of scent that burns itself in. Mike is sick breathing it in twenty-four-seven, and he wants it gone. He’s not particularly worried about any of the other stuff.

There’s an angel on the roof of the Nite Owl when Mike comes in for the late shift. He thinks it’s the same angel that’s been following him for six days, but all the angels look the same. The angel is nude, covering its gaunt body with black wings and gauze bandages around the hands and feet. Mike’s stuck in the puke-yellow Nite Owl uniform that makes everyone look