Azrael settled into the leather armchair, letting his tired legs stretch out.  Despite the fact that he was a being of pure energy, his stress seemed to manifest itself as a physical strain when he manifested.  And now, as he irritably waited for his drinking companion to arrive, he could already feel his mood fouling.

An attendant was instantly at his shoulder, a shining glass snifter of amber liquid lowered into Azrael’s hand.  The archangel took the glass without sparing a glance to the lesser cherub, who scurried off, and lifted the rim to his lips.  The scotch was perfect, aged and seasoned and infused with a million notes of flavor on the edge of perception.  In Azrael’s mouth, it might as well have been sewage.

The archangel glanced down at his gleaming watch three more times before another visitor entered the lounge.  He knew that Mephistopheles was late; the demon had last wandered around the mortal plane back in the late nineties, when arrogant young kids in freshly tailored business suits ran the corporate world on their own personal clocks.  The fallen angel had picked up more than a touch of that arrogance, as well as a disgusting likeness for energy drinks combined with his alcohol.

When the other man finally strolled in, one hand running up to slick back his greasy black hair, Azrael didn’t bother to hold in his sigh.  “Get lost?” he asked.

The other man didn’t respond right away, settling into his seat opposite the angel and accepting his own drink from another cherub.  “You just have no sense of panache,” he responded between slurps of the fizzy yellow drink.

Azrael disguised his lack of respect with another sip of his scotch.  Fortunately, he knew the devil sitting across from him well, and the archangel could out-wait him every time.  And true to form, Mephistopheles only managed to sit still for a minute or so before he took a deep pull of his disgusting alcoholic energy drink and opened his lips again.

“Okay, let’s get this over with,” the fallen angel announced, sitting back and squirming in his chair.  “I hate having to physically manifest.  This body itches.  What’s on the list for today?”

The archangel raised his hand, and another cherub dropped a scroll into his hand.  He set down his snifter of scotch on the end table next to his seat so that he could pull the ornate scroll open.  “A light load,” he replied, a note of relief creeping into his voice.  “Just three items.  North Korea, something about a missing flight, and that issue that we keep tabling.”

The devil waved his hand in a dismissive manner.  “Ugh, not North Korea again.  What are we even supposed to be doing about it?  None of our operatives are there.”

“Nor ours,” Azrael replied.  “And to be honest, we believed that one of yours was behind the whole debacle going on down there.”

With a snap of his fingers, a long list appeared in smoky red flames in front of Mephistopheles.  He flicked through it with one finger, reading off the names in demonic script.  “Nope, no one there,” he said at length.  “It’s just that dictator they’ve got.  Totally off his rocker.”

“So what should we do?  Lightning bolt?  Column of fire?”

Mephistopheles waggled his fingers noncommittally. “Give him a couple years.  He’ll either come around to your side, or we’ll end up replacing him with someone focused a little more on the religious hellfire.”

“Great.  Next item: we apparently lost a plane…”

Coming out of my apartment, I hurried quickly down the street towards my coffee shop of choice, hoping that I had escaped notice.  But I heard the flutter of wings behind me, sounding like a dozen pigeons were descending on my location, and I knew that I had been sighted.

“Hello, my little charge!” Otriel, my guardian angel, greeted me as he alighted on the sidewalk.  “And how are we doing today?  Happier now that I’m here?”

I made sure to turn towards the angel so that he could see me rolling my eyes.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t even sure that he knew what that gesture meant.  “You know, sometimes I like my own time,” I commented, talking under my breath so that the other pedestrians on the sidewalk wouldn’t see me apparently talking to myself.  “Do you really have to drop in every single morning?”

Otriel blinked a couple times.  “I’m your guardian angel!” he replied.  “If I wasn’t here, who would protect you?”

“Protect me from what?” I shot back.  “No one’s attacked me, no big heavy things have fallen on me, and you certainly don’t stop me from making stupid choices!  Not much of a guardian angel!”

Now Otriel was starting to look a little hurt.  Good.  “But nothing bad has happened to you!” he insisted.  “That wouldn’t be true if I wasn’t here!  I think.”

I had to fight the urge to throw my hands up in the air.  How had I managed to be stuck with the guardian angel who didn’t have a clue on how to do his job?  “Plenty bad has happened to me!” I exclaimed.  “Aren’t you supposed to be, like, making my world perfect or something?”

“Actually,” the angel remarked, “we tried that once.”

“Tried what?”

“Tried a perfect world.  And I have to tell you, it ended up taking a lot of time, causing a ton of headaches upstairs with my bosses, and really just didn’t come together that well.”

Dammit.  The angel had managed to pique my interest.  “Okay,” I let on cautiously, turning into the coffee shop and joining the back of the long line that had already formed.  The angel stood next to me.  I never understood how people didn’t run into his big, white feathered wings, but they somehow instinctively walked around them without realizing.  “What do you mean?”

Otriel smirked at me.  He knew that I was curious and couldn’t stop myself from asking.  “Point out something that could be fixed,” he said.

I looked around.  “Okay, well, how about this?  This coffee line always takes forever.”

Otriel leaned in towards me to point over my shoulder up towards the barista, a young girl currently looking flustered.  “That’s Ellen.  She works two jobs to put herself through college.  If she was fired for a faster helper, she would experience a lot more tragedy than you’re going through waiting for your coffee.”

I shrugged off this setback.  “Fine.  How about that kid that was killed in the hit-and-run?  It was on the news the other night.  That doesn’t seem like something that should happen in a perfect world.”

The angel standing beside me twirled his fingers, and a thick manila folder appeared out of the air and fell into his hands.  “Let’s see,” he commented, licking his forefinger and flipping the folder open.  “Ah.  Bobby Simmons.  Well, first off, the man that hit him, Ernest Fitzhugh, was falling apart.  If he hadn’t gotten into this accident, he would have gone on to inflict more harm throughout his life in countless other ways.  And Bobby, if he had lived, would have grown bitter and resentful and ended up drunk and abusive.”

I shook my head as Otriel snapped the folder shut and it vanished from his hands, back to wherever it had originated.  “You can say things like that about any tragedy, claiming that it could have been worse,” I insisted.  “That doesn’t prove that you can’t have a perfect world.”

“Look, I can’t prove it without some seven-dimensional math,” Otriel said, his voice maddeningly calm.  “But the higher-ups decided that, instead of making everything perfect, they’d focus on the little things.”

I quirked my eyebrows at him.  “Here, I’ll show you,” the angel went on.

By this point, we had reached the front of the line.  I gave my order to the girl behind the counter.  “Thanks, Ellen,” I said when she handed it to me, and turned away before she could ask how I knew her name.

As I headed over to the station with cream and sugar, Otriel pointed at the cup.  “No, wait a second,” he said.  “Try it now.  Just take a sip.”

Looking unsure, I lifted the cup up to my lips and sucked a few drops up through the plastic lid.  To my amazement, it was perfectly balanced.  “Hey, it’s perfect!” I exclaimed in surprise.

“There you go,” the angel replied.  “Perfect world?  Not feasible.  But we can make sure you get a perfect cup of coffee every now and then.  And is that really such a bad thing to settle for?”