Say you died; as you so recently did, actually. Now you’re waking, half alarmed (I know, my dears, believe me, I have been there), waking to this mystic scumbly light. You snap to, alert. First you hear my perhaps annoying babble, sounding like the nurse’s prodding chat that roused you from the outer edges of an anesthetic or—in thirty cases present-that did not.

You’ve re-become yourself but, in addition—wriggling beneath an overlay unsought—you’re also, confusingly, an angel. Disconcerting to find all telltale traces of your fond mortal coil gone. Even within your Ziploc envelope of powder-white light, you feel nude … deprived of a single youlike souvenir. You’re shivering, that cold.

You were just getting almost used to the earthly you. You’d set up the bank draft program that freed you from writing those depressing monthly utility checks. You’d started acknowledging certain thorny traits that, in resembling your same-sex parent, you always feared most— qualities you’d begun to joke about and even crankily accept, love almost. —Then, whammo, that missed left turn, a new lump under your ear, and here you are, one semi-translucent flame of soul, grafted with wings, no less.

Well, be calmed. You fear that, in gaining Paradise, you’ve sacrificed your own true earned identity. You miss your friends. My dears, all is not lost.

The earthen stamp has been preserved. Certain features wholly yours. Back there, I see a few of you start noticing. Excellent. Go ahead.

There are echelons of virtue here as there are echelons of filth and lust and greed below. I will now tell you how the highest forms of the Once-Earth get recognized. Say you are standing here, winged, similar, if merely “designed.” All our torsos are single-sex units—chests, sizable for pecs, if small for breasts. Your silver ectoplasmic wings are tucked behind.

What has stayed constant from that depressed old world to this inspirited new one? What, on you Job-patient postmen so schnauzer-gnawed, on you unpredictably bighearted Monte Carlo gamblers, on the twin brother Kiwanians who broke records selling Christmas trees for Cerebral Palsy in subzero weather only to catch pneumonia as your one thanks? What? That’s yours? Looks exactly as before? Yes, I see more of you back there catching the drift. Good, explore, feel.

The single portrait-fixtures still serving as Autobiography for all we otherwise-samish angels?

Yes, your original genitals have stayed intact. Those, and your beginning hands.

The dear baubles—be they cleft or sceptered—plus your clever mitts—are still themselves, no? And in their every cuticle particular. Open and close your hands. Look between your legs. “Hello,” right? Now, don’t you feel a heap less alone?