There is a universe—one we have made without meaning to—where things happen too quickly and it is a woman, not a man, who kills angels, one after another. There are so many of them, and they should be killed because they remind her how unworthy she is. She still has the dream—and always will—in which she is running through the house when she was little—her father, an Army officer who claimed women were garbage; her mother, a teacher who took it; and all of them, her brother and her grandmother too, living in officer’s quarters that should have been nice but weren’t—except for the basement, where she kept the snakes she loved. In this dream she destroys everything in the house, everything, demon-girl that she is, hideous, unable to stop herself; and when she finally does stop, she drops to her knees weeping and says, “What about the snakes–the beautiful snakes?”
A therapist, one of the dumber ones, said: “The snakes are your sexuality, which your mother could not allow.”
Another, one who babbled and said nothing, said this: “The demon girl is the Shadow of the Wild Child in you. Both sides of this child are natural and must be accepted, for through your Shadow you can become the woman you wish to be, the human being you are truly, if you wish it, destined to come. You learned under your mother’s bitter guidance and your father’s annihilating contempt that the anger of the Wild Child was not acceptable.”
A third, a defrocked priest who lived with an ill woman and worked in the prisons just before the killer was released, said: “It is a Mystery. The snakes are The Divine and you love them without knowing why. That you love them is what matters and always will. The Demon Child knows this. What is a demon, Melissa, but an angel who cannot love God–because she imagines God does not love her?”
In the end, she understood that what the dream really meant was simply that she loved snakes, nothing more. She loved the way they squeezed the breath from small creatures, swallowed them, sometimes threw them up if she fed them too many; loved their muscular beaut —their sheen, their scales, the way they moved without arms or legs, a vulnerability which, like hers, hid their terribleness.
When she discovered she could see angels when others could not—like a curse, or God’s teasing—she chose the ones she would kill not for their looks, but for the way they carried themselves and acted, which told her what they really felt. The length of their hair, if they had any, did not matter. Their smell—which was always the same—a wet-animal smell—did not matter. The degree to which their legs had atrophied because they did so little walking did not matter either. What mattered was the arrogance, false modesty, insincere caring she saw in their pupil-less eyes. They were angels and therefore special and knew it. Even if they acted humbly, she knew it was a lie.
The first time it happened, she woke on her knees in the motel room, the coarse cloth—a robe of some kind—loose around her, crossbow in her hand, the body on the bed before her, the crossbow dart (that’s what it was called) just below the man’s left breast. She had never seen anything so beautiful in her life. Even the neat circle of blood where the dart had entered, even the way the mouth hung open as if trying to take a breath it could not take. Even the position of the legs and wings, splayed and akimbo. It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen and she refused, at first, to believe it—that she was the one who had done it. An angel. An actual angel. One that had simply, because he claimed he was interested in her, followed her to her room, asked her questions, wondered about her, his wings folded on his back.
It had come to her in a dream: How to kill one. Get a piece of the Cross. After all, God’s son had died on it, abandoned by his father, hadn’t he? It fit. The son knew what she was feeling.
Spend all the money she had; borrow and steal if she had to. Go to Jerusalem and steal a piece of that Cross, outwitting guards but using weapons if she needed to. Put a piece of the piece she stole on the tip of the dart. No body, no soul, would be able to withstand it, the rapture, the power. To be invited by the dart, the wood of its tip, to feel what God’s son felt abandoned and dying, as she did. Even an angel would not. It would be her snake.
So she’d done it, using the dream. It had taken only two weeks and, yes, money stolen from the two stores where she worked, hating the jobs; and, yes, the lives of one guard and two bystanders at the crowded museum in Jerusalem; and two handguns and three passports (all of which had cost her more than the airfare and lodging); but it had been remarkably easy—people were stupid, rabbit-like—and now, looking down at the rug, she saw how perfect it had all been. She had put the crossbow down on the little throw rug and risen, shaking, and stepped toward the man, half expecting him to sit up and laugh, a prank, or to scream like a bad movie. He did not, of course.
She leaned down to look at him, holding her breath, and saw no motion in his chest. She put her finger under his nose, too, but felt nothing. No breath at all, a small creature, the breath squeezed from it. Then she exhaled, so that she might feel her own.
When she went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror, a monk in a rough robe looked back at her with a silly smile—like a Halloween party but not really. She touched her own chest and the monk did the same; and then they nodded to let each other know they both knew. After that she killed some angels, but not others, certain that this was how God did it: To kill some of his creatures because He could, while letting others live—just because He could. She could not reach God in heaven to kill Him—she’d given up on that long ago—so this was what she did, until they caught her again and lied again, claiming it was only people she killed—not angels at all—people who, like everyone else in the world, happened to have wings, just as she did. Couldn’t she see them—those beautiful wings of hers—ones they would now have to cut away?
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Bruce McAllister short fiction has appeared over the years in the SFF&H magazines, “year’s best” volumes and original anthologies; and has won or been short-listed for awards like the National Endowment for the Arts, Hugo, Nebula, Locus and Shirley Jackson. His most recent novel is THE LOCUS finalist fantasy THE VILLAGE SANG TO THE SEA: A MEMOIR OF MAGIC.
This story has a twisted beauty to it and is a little mad. Maybe a lot! Very nice.