"The Old Man With Enormous Wing' demonstrates the lack of empathy, compassion, and cruelty the townspeople show for a deformed old angel with filthy tangled feathers who is found face down in the mud, too weak to stand up. Instead of treating this pathetic angel with kindness, the townspeople throw food at him when the couple lock in a chicken pen. They cruelly torture the angel, wickedly throwing food at him and pluck- ing out his feathers to place on their infirmed and sore body parts. The couple instantly makes a profit by charging 5 cents for admission. Now, this poor angel is exploited, abused, and misused instead of treated reverently as a celestial creature of God. They ignore the angel's holiness and readily believe in a spider-woman. The pathetic angel is plagued by crab, insects, and vermin to demonstrate decay, rotten, filth. Th angel is treated as an outsider, an other, a monster. What the author demonstrates is corruption, base cruelty, and barbaric behavior. Because the townspeople cannot conceive of miracles and God, they want to diminish his unique divinity; it is easier to reduce him.
