was glistening and illuminated with a wonderful radiant light, and in the center of this light shined two mirrors, which reflected the smiling baby girl, wrapped in a golden cloth.
Suddenly, the two mirrors seemingly filled with water, and the girl again felt the drops falling on her face and running down her cheeks. She rubbed her face with her fists, opened her eyes wide and saw an unusually beautiful woman leaning over her.
“Ma-ma-ma,” syllabified the girl and laughed.
“Fanyasha! My dear child! My darling, I…I am so happy… so happy you are here,” whispered her mother and stroked Fanyasha’s soft chestnut brown curls.
There was a rustling sound, and suddenly a beautiful man leaned over Fanyasha’s head. His big brown eyes emanated both strictness and gentleness.
“Great job, my dear! Already started talking! You take after your father! You will be very intelligent!”
Newborn Fanyasha stopped laughing right away, pouted her lips and proudly flung up her nose as if wanting to make an impression of a well-mannered and serious girl. The man stared at her for moment, and then shifted his glance to his delighted wife and triumphantly announced:
“Borisey, please meet your sister Efania!”
Behind him appeared the head of a handsome curly-haired boy. After seeing Fanyasha, the boy’s eyes popped out in amazement, and he hid behind his father’s back again.
“Bosya, why are you so afraid? Look at your beautiful 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
