Angel's Fall

I tried to sit on the bus today, but my wings got in the way. Wings don’t qualify you for priority seating, though I fail to see how they aren’t a handicap when you must use the municipal bus system to get around.

So an angel stood on the 43, getting jostled and unbalanced and sweating because she could not fan herself without her wings spread wide. There are no thermal currents on Market Street, though when the wind is right you can smell flowers over the stench of exhaust. When it’s hot you can smell the sewers, boiling up and over your nose like a vent straight out of some Stygian pit. Angels have noses like harriers, designed to find the worthy, the dying, and those in dire need; they are not meant to process the scents of a million people’s waste and decay. Ironically, though, we revel in the smell of fear and desperation, rolling in it like dogs while walking away smelling like cookies.

We angels are icons full of holes like old Swiss; people see our ability to fly away as a sign of strength rather than a burden of too few ties and too much of a taste for chaos. After all, I know chaos tastes like chocolate in my mouth…still; I would think this journey would have earned me some respite from the burdens of mortality…

But God has no sympathy for an angel who falls, having found comfort in the arms of a green-eyed devil. He lets her sweat and ride the N, bound for The Embarcadero, holding onto the poles like any other mortal, three hundred dollars stuffed in her bra and an appointment to see a hellhole in the Mission on her agenda. After all, heaven is forever barred to those like me, right? Yeah, well, fuck you. He lets her wonder where her life is going, wandering amidst people who refuse to see her. He lets her see a dream coated in diamonds that cut and make her bleed on the cracked sidewalks in the Financial District. I have decided that God is definitively a dyke-hating, bitter old man…the taste of resentment fills my mouth and I feel disgust, like vomit, rise in my throat at the injustice of walking twelve blocks in the pouring rain when I should be flying, yet I am stepping over transients and crack-heads, praying to that selfsame god that the last bus is two minutes late. Standing soaking in my wool coat and dripping feathers, I don’t even smell good to me.

When I lay down to sleep at night, exhausted, the memories of a life 2,337 miles away fill me, and I am damned once more…

Because the green–eyed devil has me by the throat in my memory, holding me up while exploring every inch of me with hands that were intended for that purpose. She calls for me softly, chuckling darkly and I come, wings wrapped around her as she fucks me. She is everything a devil should be; dangerous and dark, tattooed and pierced, with eyes that turn yellow when she is angry and reflect soft shades of the sea when she looks at me. I feel her nightmares and she sees what I cannot say out loud. She is my sister dark, and now her face is buried in my neck, tracing soft, sweet patterns across my throat as I scratch long trails in the skin of her back. Our hands can heal one another or rip each other open with impunity. We are fire and ice, love and hate, violence and tenderness, the fear of being alone and the terror of letting someone get too close. We fill each other’s spaces, defying convention and logic and all things that make up the American Dream.

I ran to another coast and still those eyes haunt me…I will never find their like in another face. After all, heaven is forever barred to those like me, right? Yeah, well, fuck you...