together, and the weight thumped into a nest of bath towels I had set underneath to dull its fall. Encouraged, I moved on to the other weights.
Now I examined the barbs in him more closely and realized that they were wed with his flesh so intimately that I didn’t dare try to snip them, so the best I could do was cut the chains or remnants of chains depending from them. In order to do this, I couldn’t help but touch him, and the first time my hand brushed his skin we both flinched, but he did not protest, and I went on to finish my work.
When my arms grew too tired he gently took the cutters from me and broke the last few chain fragments off their hooks himself, then he handed the tool back to me with a smile of gratitude and a relief so deep I nearly broke into tears. I had to look away from him, go back to pour a fresh coffee. I offered him a taste but he raised a palm to decline, and declined all nourishment I offered later, including water.
After a few sips of my coffee, however, I put down the mug and offered him my hand. He rose, and I led him into the bathroom.
I filled the tub with steaming water but he seemed hesitant to enter it, and I didn’t want to alarm him, so delicately I urged him into a kneeling position, and then knelt down beside him. I soaked a large sea sponge, and then began running it gently along his folded wings, washing layers of dried blood out from under and between the feathers, so that the floor tiles pooled with pinkish water. I didn’t care. And as I bathed his wings, he made a great effort to unfold them. I could tell it agonized him. The bathroom was also too small to contain them. I made him follow me into the kitchen and kneel down once more, and I filled a plastic basin with soapy water. This time he spread his trembling wings to their full span, and remarkably they filled the room, nearly touching opposite walls, majestic and black, narrow and tapered like those of a falcon. His shoulders shook with the strain of holding them aloft for me, and in reverence I stroked them with the sponge. And then I realized that his shoulders were shaking harder because he was sobbing. Whether he was sobbing in pain or in gratitude I could not know, but I put down the sponge and began to smooth his feathers under my bare palms, as if I thought this alone might balm his pain somehow. Without really willing it, I began to run my hands down to his back, where I caressed his marred white flesh.
He rose, turned to face me, tears streaking his face. They were tears of blood, making the whites of his eyes glisten red as well. But I took his hand, and followed him from the room.
I didn’t reach out from the bed to shut off the light. I didn’t care if he saw my legs. I was too intent on seeing him.
As we made love some of the barbs still in him scratched me, even drew blood, but in our passion I was needless, and it only made me feel closer to his pain, closer to him, merged as we had been in dream. He raised himself on his arms to look at where our flesh was joined, and then stared down at my eyes, and again his great wings spread, almost to their fullness, making a canopy over us. I kissed the brands on his chest to cool them, licked his nipples despite the rings pierced through them, slicing my tongue on their edges. When we kissed he sucked the blood from my tongue, and I in turn licked the blood from his face, kissed the blood from his eyes. Then he arched his back and moaned in climax, the first sound I had heard him utter. When he collapsed upon me, spent, his wings covered both of us in a blanket.
When at last he stirred he lay half atop me, his face almost shy with reverence as he stroked my breasts, my belly. Moving off me further to stroke me lower down, at last he noticed my legs, and I tried to take his chin and angle his face away. Instead, he gently slipped out of my fingers and shifted to the end of the bed. Bending over my legs, he lightly kissed my shattered knees, and then slowly began to trace his tongue along the white scar that wound up one thigh. I put my hands to his head to move him away, but then they held him there instead, as his tongue moved from the source of my pain to the source of my pleasure.
I did not go to my classes for several more days.
After those several days, Mrs. Hanson called to check in on me, since she hadn’t seen me about. I told her I had a slight bug. She asked if the brothers had come upstairs to see me. “Brothers?” I asked.
“From the monastery, I think,” she said. “I think they were monks. Priests, maybe; they had collars. They wanted to know if I’d seen anyone strange around the yard. I guess there’s a brother they keep locked up because he’s ill or something. I don’t know why they don’t have him in the hospital but I guess they’d rather care for him themselves…”
“Did he escape?” I asked, my heart blundering through its actions.
“Yes, the other night when it stormed.”
When I made love with the seraph that night my passion was clouded with fear for him. Lying in bed beside him, I begged him to talk to me, to tell me his story, to tell me about his former captors, the monks. And after a while of coaxing, he did try to tell me, but he spoke in tongues. Not in a frenzied rapture, however; his voice was deep, somnambulant, like a single voice lifted from a Gregorian chant. It was both weirdly beautiful and terrifying, and I put my finger tips to his lips to stop him.
I couldn’t avoid my former life forever, despite my fears, and after a week I returned to my classes. The first day was difficult, and I came back to check on him several times, but he was fine, either looking through the pictures in books or napping or stroking Virgil in his lap. The monks would believe him gone from the area by this time, I thought, and my unease lessened.
And then one evening I came home to find Mrs. Hanson dead on the landing outside my apartment door.
She was unmarked, but her eyes stared upward, glassy. The door frame was splintered, and I burst into the apartment with my blood roaring through my head.
At first I thought my vision was blackening, until I realized it was the blood sprayed and splashed upon the walls, Virgil sitting on the backrest of the couch contentedly licking the blood that matted his fur. I stifled a scream at the carnage strewn on the floor of the parlor. Two ruins, which appeared to have once been men, and which appeared from their shredded black garb to have once been clerics of some kind. My seraph still crouched over one of them, the corpse’s head cradled in his lap. Alarmed, he looked up with a lupine snarl, his teeth coated thickly in gore, and I knew that this was the sight that had stopped the old heart of dear Mrs. Hanson.
Trembling, relieved and horrified at once, I pulled the door shut behind me and managed to bolt it. Despite my terrible nausea, my feverish dizziness, I was not afraid of him. And he, also, stopped his savage growling when he recognized me. He lowered his head, as though ashamed, and lowered the mauled red ball of the monk’s head to the floor. I saw a dagger near this corpse, and a bottle of holy water spilled by the other, soaking into an already red-soaked throw rug.
He helped me drag Mrs. Hanson into the room, and by then I had arrived at the only decision I could come to. I helped him wash the blood from his hands, his body, his wings. This time he consented to a full bath, and it seemed to calm both of us.
I packed several suitcases. I selected a sweat-shirt and some sweat-pants I thought would fit him until I could buy him some clothing of his own.
From the generous tool box my father had lovingly equipped for me I raised a hacksaw. I showed it to the seraph. I moved it in the air to demonstrate its function. He sat on a chair and bowed his head in understanding, submitting to a cruelty worse even than those inflicted upon him by his captors. But we had no choice. In order to be free, both of us, I had to cut away the very symbols of his freedom…
And while I sliced them away, awash in my angel’s blood, I shook hard with sobs just as he did, tears blurring my vision like the tears of blood on his beautiful face…agonized, as if it were my own wings I was severing.
Mrs. Weekes
Mrs. Ferrin rested a hand like a ginseng root atop the smooth young hand of Kelly Bonham, who was new at Eastborough Nursing Home. Kelly leaned over the elderly woman indulgently, though she knew she suffered Alzheimer’s Disease quite severely. “Yes, Mrs. Ferrin?”
“She was here again, last night,” the emaciated creature whispered urgently in a creaky voice, as if autumn leaves rustled in her scarecrow’s throat. “I saw her come into the room…crawling on all fours. She stopped and looked over at me and, and hissed, then she went on again…she looked like a crab, scuttling…and she went over there, to poor Mrs. Carter’s bed.”
Kelly glanced over at Mrs. Ferrin’s room-mate, Mrs. Carter. She had deteriorated badly in just the one week since Kelly had started on the third shift at this hospital. For the first couple of days, Mrs. Carter had actually been
