My Angel

     It had a long, segmented body for an abdomen -- more like a chubby caterpillar than, say, an earthworm or a grub. The segments were armored like a centipede, a millipede, or pill-bug, but they were swollen, stretched apart, and soft and translucent creamy pink between the bands, like the peeled flesh of a raw shrimp. The bands of carapace weren't solid, either. They were more like a simplistic filigree of black chitin and a golden coppery metal. And the body was bulbous, tapering to a sphinctered end about two meters away, perhaps more, from the pinched waist.
     I counted six pairs of wings, like scalloped dragonfly wings, slender and translucent and veined in glossy black like filigreed marble. I could see the ichor pulsing in the branching veins towering overhead, could feel the heat cascading off them like they were glowing rods drawn from the core of a nuclear reactor. Two of the wings swung backwards, covering the back of the bulbous abdomen. A pair similarly swung forward and covered its head.
     It smelled overpoweringly of a cockroach. Of molten plastic. Of steaming earth.
     It had six legs, smoothly joined and jointed like a crab's or like a grasshopper's. In the same fashion as the wings, they all branched off the carapace of the black-and-golden thorax, shaped like nothing other than a keeled and tapered breast-plate and smooth back-plate from a suit of mail. The filigree on the thorax was all swirls and branches and needle-like points and curved angles.
     The head was a shiny black mass covered with long golden bristles. An ant's head, maybe. A single set of whipcord antennae branched off the top between the enormous and enormously dimpled multifaceted eyes, huge and round like pollen grains under a microscope. The head's structure supported a set each of mandibles and maxillae, and beneath them was a coiled black tube, striped with the coppery gold.
     A single iridescent gray, partially feathered wing of a pigeon protruded -- momentarily -- from the orifice between the mandibles. And as it disappeared from view, a single downy, rumpled feather drifted down through the mist in the alley, down between my battered brown street shoes.
     The feather barely had a chance to brush the rain-wet, mercury-vapor-lit asphalt before I scooped it up. Mimicking my angel, I put the feather in my mouth and sucked it in, crushed it in my teeth, swallowed.
     My angel laughed, tittering like a silver flute melted into syrup.
     I laughed too. "Pigeons might be filling, but they're nasty, Abdiel." I felt no shame in borrowing the name from Milton. "Let's find you some better fare."
     I turned my back and began to walk away, but I was snatched aloft by Abdiel's forelegs. Its mandibles pinched either side of my neck, right between my ears and my jaws, and the maxillae -- with a crash of agony, like I had been smacked with a small hammer -- bit off a tiny portion of the very top of my skull. I could feel the feeding tube questing about on the top of my head, feeling for the trephination, and then a blinding throb of sweetened pain as the tube thrust in. I thrashed my arms and legs, twisting and jerking as the feeding tube wormed down between the lobes of my cerebrum, down into my medulla oblongata, slipping down the length of my spine, twisting around my spinal cord. My jerkings grew weaker, calmer, as it sucked the spinal nectar, caressing my basal ganglia.
     And then there was nothing but bliss.

[*]

©2002 Spinnaker Religion Factory ALL RIGHTS RESERVED