The Greatest Gift

 

The Greatest Gift was originally published in the anthology Angel Love.

There’s an odd story behind the novella.

I was trying, desperately, to come up with a story idea.  I couldn’t think of a scenario in which an angel could be considered a hero. I mean, an angel is dead, right?  (Little did I know that I would face a similar challenge with vampires later.)

That night, I dreamed of a scene in Pompeii, and a man who had lived a life of hedonism.  Before he died, however, he helped hundreds of people escape Pompeii as it was being destroyed by the eruption of Mt Vesuvius.  I woke up, went to my computer, and wrote the story as I dreamed it.  Frankly, I loved it.

One day, about a year after the anthology was published, I was thumbing through a book on angels, thinking that I wish I’d had the book as an inspiration when I’d needed it. I stopped and stared when I came to one image.  It was a lithograph of a mural found at Pompeii.  A picture of an angel. Too weird.

I bought the book, and had the lithograph framed.  It sits on my bookshelf as a reminder that things happen that are sometimes unexplained.  Or that angels really exist.