there's this girl

there’s this girl.

.

you remember the daughters of men who enticed your brothers to fall, in those early days of mankind. They had been beautiful—women of salt and rain, of little vanity and no hesitation. The daughters of men were born with horizons in their eyes and hearts that sang; they wove the priestly garment without needle, learned Sarai’s laughter. (and the fruit of the tree was pleasing to the eye…)

your brothers had forsaken everything for them, in the end.

and you had pitied them.

.

she will be fourteen, all coltish limbs and half-tamed hair, when she kisses you—a swift, daring thing, her lips pressed to your lion’s maw. (she had asked you to kneel, down and down again, and she had gone up onto her toes, and somewhere between the rising and the falling…)

she leaves behind a faint slick of strawberry lipbalm and something older, sweeter, like crushed apples.

oh, child, you breathe.

I wanted to know, she says, and there is defiance in the set of her shoulders. okay? I wanted to know.

she grabs her backpack from where she left it on the concrete and takes flight, her sneakers hitting the pavement like an afterthought of wings.

.

the visions keep her awake on school nights, margins of her calculus homework full of sketches of the end of the world. She dreams in tongues, divinity shut up in her eggshell skull—the migraines are worse than the visions, and she swallows aspirin with her coffee every morning. (you are rotting yourself from within, you chide her, aphorisms about temples on your tongue; no prophet can be killed outside jerusalem, she always retorts, smiling.

there are dark circles like bruises under her eyes.)

in spring, you lay in the field behind her house, wings fanned out across the grass to let the sunshine warm your blood. She lounges on your carapace, face upturned, telling you about her science class and how the world was made—of the dust of stars, and heat, and the breath of the universe.

I remember, you almost say, I was there, I remember—but the sun is warm and she has not woken up with blood in her mouth for almost a week. She has dreamed enough of the ending of the world, you can give her its beginning.

.

(mine, you think once, and immediately shy away from the violence and heat of it, the terrible power of that claim. she is not yours, she is not even hers; she belongs to a thing more terrible and greater than either of you.

you are a hand, and she is a tongue, and you serve.

she is not yours.)

.

she moves to a city that is not jerusalem (there are no other cities) and shares a cramped apartment with three other women, whose names you never bother to learn. During the day, she writes prophecy in a spiral notebook, alternating hands to keep from cramping; at night, she goes out among the city, and comes back smelling of cheap alcohol, and someone else’s skin.

afterwards, she will crawl onto the fire escape and fit herself into the space between your ventral wings. There is always grief in the lines of her face and so you do not speak, merely comb out her hair with your claws until it falls like a flock of goats winding down the slopes of gilead. You would leave the smell of lebanon in her clothes, but you do not remember how.

I think this is supposed to be easier, she says once, with an expression you cannot read in the half-light of streetlamps; or maybe I’m just supposed to be better at it.

no, you tell her gently. no, you are everything you were meant to be.

.

(you have never lied before. you did not realize how easy it was.)

.

you cross paths with one of your fallen brothers once, his coming heralded by the stench of his rotting wings, decaying like gangrenous limbs. But he has a woman with him, and they are laughing together, her fingers lingering where his shirt collar brushes the nape of his neck.

he glances up as you pass, and nods graciously—but there is no shame in him, no cringing from your gaze. He looks back at the woman in his arms, and (despite his rotting wings and the yawning abyss where he should have a spark of divinity) there is only joy.

what’s wrong? your prophet asks that night, when you have still not spoken.

I don’t know, you say. There is a place within you that feels very empty. I don’t know.

.

she will kiss you again when she is twenty-eight, drunk on tequila and divine ecstasy. She has left a cacophony of half-intelligible hebrew on her voicemail, and there is koine greek scribbled on her bedroom wall in red sharpie. She is drowning awake, muttering the shortest path from earth to sky in between drawing fractals on her hands.

you pull her back from nearly diving out the open window only find her in your lap, her nails digging into your halo and her mouth open under yours. She is so small—you could break her wicker-basket ribs with a thought, crush her candyglass bones with one beat of your wings. Everything in her is blood and softness and you are not worthy, you are a hand, you should not dare—

but you let her kiss your lipless mouth and cling to the circlet of your halo as though she will slip into hell without it. come on, she snarls, though there is a sob choking in her throat, come on, come on, isn’t this what theresa was raving about, isn’t this what you’re for? weren’t we made for this?

(maybe you were. you are a hand, and you reach)

she comes like salt and rain, and you follow her down.

.

do you love me more than god? she asks.

to love you at all is idolatry, you answer.

.

he shouldn’t have given you wings, she says, after a night of horrific visions and blood in her ears, in her mouth, in her dreams. falling is too easy from so great a height.

he shouldn’t have told us to love humanity, you answer, tasting the copper of her kiss, unless he fully intended for us to take him up on it.

.

at night, she writes prophecy on your back, her ballpoint pen curving between the roots of your wings. Yesterday, your lion’s teeth fell out, and you strung them on a length of twine, gave them to her. Tomorrow, you expect you will finish shedding your carapace, the last layer giving way to soft flesh, blood.

your brothers had forsaken everything for the daughters of men.

maybe it’s a plan, she says, as the two of you lay in the one bed, a tangle of limbs only some of which are human. The greasy lamplight pools on the floor, and the only sound is your breathing, the distant whisk of cars on the rainy street below.

maybe it’s grace, you say. maybe it’s grace.