ones who have fallen

Later, you will say you met down by the river, that he offered to help water the sheep—oh yes, Rachel was not the first to offer that particular excuse, when a father asked why a young man with a hard mouth was before him, daring.

The truth is something closer to this—there was a man in the shade of a tree, eating a handful of dates and watching you swim. That when you emerged, he tilted his head back so he might meet your gaze, instead of his eyes lingering on your breasts, the swing of your hips.

I am called Tamiel, he says when you ask. I am a messenger of the One True God. Be not afraid.

You are not (though you thought him just a man, then) so you do not feel strange in asking, Do you have a message for me?

No, says. His face is guileless. I just like it here.

Very well, you answer, sitting beside him in the shade. After a moment, you steal one of his dates from his palm, and watch him smile.

.

Tamiel is still there the next day, and the day after that. You are not sure he has left, since that first meeting. You begin to tell him stories of your sisters, your father, and he shows you miracles in the dust, makes pebbles dance through the air or shows you distant sights—mountains of ice, strange creatures and whole lands covered in lush greenery.

When you ask him to show you his home, he goes cold and cruel for the first time in your knowing him. I have no home, he says.

You do not ask again.

.

(The first time you kiss him, he tastes like the lime he conjured from a handful of grass—sour and sweet at once.)

.

In the dark, he cannot always remember what shape to stay in—the number of fingers on each hand, whether his skin has scales. If his mouth should make you ache or bleed, or both. He fumbles with your body, unsure of what to do with it as with his own.

But you hold him fast, and when he thrusts inside you, there is a moment when you carry all fire and air and divinity in the circle of your arms.

Afterwards, he settles his wings around you. In your innocence, you think of it as a wedding bower.

.

One day, he is not there by the river. You never learn why.

.

Nine months later you give birth to a daughter with too-long fingers and winedark eyes, small wings slick with fluid and crumpled against her back. The midwife is the only one who will touch her, and only then to cut the cord, to set her—heavy and warm, skin tinged with green—in your arms.

Your daughter has small scales at the nape of her neck, and she does not cry.

You call her Avigáyil, her father’s joy.