Angels of Destruction by Keith Donohue Page B

baffled reaction, she had slowed the pace, lured him into her confidence with more ordinary games, and he savored her attention and company. Norah preferred the outdoors, even in the dead of January, rolling out snowmen, cracking long icicles from the eaves and leaping away when the points threatened to impale, breakneck sledding, snowball fights, the stinging thrill of being cold beyond caring. For his part, Sean preferred to be warm and at the table, just the two of them, where he could teach her games. He revealed the trick of tic-tac-toe, unlocked the stratagem of checkers, the playful thinking of chess, so that in two weeks’ time she unseated the master as often as she lost. Not having any siblings of his own, Sean brought over every game he had been given but rarely had the chance to play They solved the mysteries of Clue, mastered the Rube Goldberg mechanics of Mouse Trap, and engaged in marathons of Monopoly, lasting hours over the course of several days. Once they tired of his games, they pillaged the closet upstairs and, hearts afire, played the game of Life, backgammon, and once, for nostalgia's sake, an Uncle Wiggily But treasure lay in the attic, beneath a film of dust.
    In a bright and brittle box lay Tip It, a balancing act. Players had to remove a single colored ring from one of three stacks while keeping balanced a plastic acrobat—they called him Mr. Tipps—who stood on the tip of his nose at the top of the pole, itself balanced on a fulcrum. Depending upon luck and destiny, the winner was the one who avoided spilling Mr. Tipps and sending the entire contraption crashing to the floor. At five in the afternoon, they had reached the crucial moment yet again. Sean had already won three times in succession and had taken a yellow disk away, just barely managing to keep the fellow from falling. Silence and cunning overtook any notions of sportsmanship; he passed the spinner to her with glee, and she, equally certain that any move was doomed, flicked the arrow and sent it circling madly around to blue. She picked up her plastic fork and pointed it at him.
    “You know you're going to win no matter what I do. Why do you keep torturing me?”
    “Just go,” he said, then caught himself, swallowed, and smiled. “You never know. If you're real careful…”
    “We can but try.” Not budging from her cross-legged seat on the floor, she leaned over and slid the fork beneath the disks opposite from the direction the pole was leaning, keeping Mr. Tipps near her nose. With a saint's patience, she lifted the blue disk, and the plastic acrobat twirled like a pinwheel until slowing to improbable stability.
    “You cheated!” Sean shouted. “It's impossible—there's not enough weight on that end. You breathed on him.”
    Her mouth was still an O. Glaring at him, she clamped together her lips, but the acrobat refused to fall, and then, closing her eyes, Norah made a new circle and began to gently blow. Mr. Tipps tottered, the pole shivered and slightly bent before heading back to the center until stopping at ninety degrees, and still she blew no harder than the air it takes to launch seeds from a dandelion puffball, and when the acrobat righted himself, steady and still, she inhaled, the wind whistling. Mr. Tipps spun counterclockwise, faster and faster till Sean grew dizzy just watching. When she sealed her lips, the whole apparatus clattered to the living room floor.
    “The rabbis say that with every breath, God exhales an angel.” Norah picked up the pieces and placed them in the box.
    Eager to know the truth, he pressed the question. “How do you do that?”
    The plastic man lay flat in her hand. Pinching his head, she picked him up and balanced his nose on her fingertips. “My grandmother's sister is coming this weekend. She will not believe without some proof.”
    Lightly blowing, she spun Mr. Tipps on her finger, and then setting the acrobat inside the box, she replaced the box top and slid the game beneath