Excerpt: CrossOver

Jeanette lit a cigarette and dropped the pack and her lighter back into her coat. The smoke cruled from the end of the burnging orange tip and reached out across the courtyard to the statue that sat in the middle of a large pool of water. She pressed the cigarette between her lips and reached back to secure a ponytail with an elastic. Her long coppery red hair trapped the smoke and it lingered for far too long. The patients would smell it.
It was this angel that always gave her pause, for it was so entirely out of place at a research hospital. The pedestal upon which is rested rose a foot above the waterline of the pool. Within it koi swam back and forth, knowing only hunger, and slowness and speed and a lack of hunger, all the while, adding accents to a mythological mosaic underneath, of the ferryman Thanatos , and the bottom of the pool, a bluish purple river Lethe, upon whose banks rested the forlon, the lost and the dispossessed.
Above all of this, stood a statue of a cloaked angel, hands obscured by the arms low slung and folded over one another, the wings spreading out behind the hooded head.
The aging copper feathers were a dusty sage now, but Jeanette imagined, when this statue was first made, not that long ago in the scheme of things, it must have looked brilliant here in this courtyard. At midday, the sun shining from over the roof line, and down into this space, it would have set it ablaze with reflected fire.
Hooded angels, and ferrymen.
Nonsense most of it.
But not all.
She of course was a kind of nonsense, but if her essence were truly nonsense, it did not equate to even the tiniest fraction of her mentors complete ridiculousness.
Some things should not be, but they are, because they must be.