Angels Unaware: The Bed Kept Made

Note to Readers: This standalone short story is also included in the complete edition, The Reed & The Flame: A Collection of Short Stories of Faith and Endurance. If you already own the complete collection, you already have this story! Looking for the full journey? You can enjoy this story on its own or get all ten stories together in the collected volume.

Some have entertained angels unawares.

Ada's mother fed everyone who came to the door. She cut the bread thicker than they could spare, and she tapped a finger over her daughter's heart while she said the verse — and taught her, without ever once calling it kindness, that the not-knowing was the whole of it. Ada spent the rest of her life keeping that door.

A soldier out of a blizzard the week before Christmas, 1944. A runaway girl on the step in the long summer of 1971. A barefoot man in the freezing autumn of 2009. She fed them all and asked them nothing — and each one left behind a single thing she was too busy living to notice.

Angels Unaware follows one plain, unsentimental woman across six decades of hospitality: its cost, its habit, and the slow bending of a life given away a loaf at a time. It is a story about the difference between being bent by the years and being broken by them, told in the idiom of the collection's own governing image — a bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out. Story six of The Reed & The Flame, a new collection from the author of The Candle.