Trisagion
The horse hair brush spread blue across white, the colours mingling in majestic harmony. Gentle twists and turns of the bristles created flurries of clouds that stood out against a golden backdrop. Hues of violet, azure, ivory, and opal danced among only their lightest of shades, decorating a jacquard finish to rolling clouds full of fluff and dew. It was almost as if the drops themselves truly glittered, like raindrops newly fallen…like the accumulating teardrops of angels.
Winged seraphs lounged, crying their trisagion among the heavens. Their regal, lithe features twisted glory into the overdone stanza, airy, fun, self infused. The Cherubim, fierce in their defense of Eden, heard not the Thrice Holy. Only the blazing of their fiery swords to ignite a death upon the Gardens. These two lounged about the curved Ophanim, drunken in all their joys. Six other angels, including the Arch and the Virtue, danced about as the first sphere’s toys.
None concerned were these creatures of the turmoil their charges faced. An odd sense of cynicism-- of sarcasm-- was emitted from the painting, in all of it's beauty. I heralded layabouts. Pretty faces that never moved in their statuesque perfection. Long, flowing strokes created a tired, ethereal, and overall dull feeling of the heavens, mocking.
The brush pulled away in a splatter of snowy paint, and was laid to rest finally in it’s dirty water. The six-foot-three young man shook out his midnight tipped blonde hair, coal eyes gracing the busy art room about him. A bespectacled woman with too-many laugh lines to be very pretty stuffed a pen into her lopsided bun, hobbling over. He looked down at her with a scrutiny the half blind woman could not understand. Like he needed her to let him know the painting was magnificent. Almost a photograph.
‘Wonderful, wonderful, Ezekiel!’ the ancient bubble of a woman crowed, clapping her manicured hands together. His eyes zoned in on the chipping rouge on her nails distastefully, yet with all his might he fed a grin.
Dazzling. Like the morning sun on an azure ocean, young Ezekiel smiled, lifting the painting in the ginger of a newborn child. A word of thanks and he spun out of the room, to hang the painting high where other, less talented students would not harm his memory. Barely the healthily light teen himself could reach the painting where he placed it. A step back, and his obsidian lacquered nails played with a small, aptly placed beauty mark above his lip- A Monroe mark. Lips curled back into a sneer, his white teeth glistening. In the dim silence, the perfect Ezekiel stood with only his shadows, laughing gently at the joke only he’d understand.
A peel of bells more heavenly than the choir, he murmured the trisagion.

‘Sancte Deus, sancte fortis, sancte immortalis, Miserere nobis…”*
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*’Sancte Deus…Nobis’: Holy God, Holy [and] Mighty, Holy [and] Immortal, have mercy on us.