Hunger

When I get home from work the angel in my old aviary is no longer weeping. She has gathered her naked form into a corner and is fast asleep, her magnificent wings wrapped around her like a white feathered blanket. Her ankles and wrists are bound with rope.

I enter my bedroom and approach the 1.5 x 1.5 metre bird cage at the foot of my bed, stepping over discarded panties and brightly coloured packets of tampons, empty ramen containers and copies of Bird Fancier Quarterly. Clutching a box of grape juice, a jar of baby food and a yellow plastic spoon, I open the door and step inside. I kneel beside her and brush the wisps of luminous hair from her dry, plump lips. Eyeing her perfect face, I bring my lips to hers and touch them softly, the flesh yielding with an irresistible allure. I intend to break off here, to attend to more pressing matters, but feeling her lips, parted in submission, I sense that I am dropping over the edge into the abyss of desire and before I can stop myself I press violently into her, biting her mouth, pulling her hair and squeezing her tantalising breasts beneath the silky feathers.

She awakes and regards me reproachfully, the victim from head to toe, huge amber eyes brimming with glistening tears. Her wings spring open behind her in a majestically tragic display of futility, then fold away behind her back.

“Honey, I’m home!” I say, thrusting the small white straw into the juice box and pushing it between those lips.

She drinks, slowly, sadly. I stroke her hair and listen to the weak little slurps, the shallow breaths through her pretty nostrils, the distant babble of children playing outside. She has a fragile look, the look of something powerful rendered impotent and sad by captivity.

The opening of the jar is loud in the stillness.

“We have Pineapple Glazed Ham today.” I load the spoon with the sweet smelling mush, which resembles nothing so much in colour as the skin of a plastic doll, “I know you probably don’t need food…” I slip the spoon into her mouth and tip the contents onto her tongue, “I like to feed you when I get home. Owners like to feed their pets, mothers like to feed their babies. It’s a compulsion, isn’t it? It’s a ritual…”

She eats. I study her, fascinated and aroused, pushing the yellow spoon into her mouth.

“You were in my head all day.” I wipe her mouth with my finger, lingering perversely over the task. “I gave out scandalously incorrect change to at least ten customers.”

I discard the empty jar, the exhausted juice box and the spoon. I sit Indian style with my elbows on my knees, chin cradled in my hands.

“So, whatcha wanna do?”

She sits with her knees drawn up to her chest in a half-vain attempt to preserve her modesty. Her arms are wrapped around her legs and her bound wrists rest on her bound ankles. Her wings twitch anxiously.

I remove the plastic name badge that reads ‘Hi, I’m Jen! – Why Not Ask Me About Fancy Canaries? ” from the breast of my blue work vest and put it aside.

“I did keep canaries in here, once.” I tell her, “They all died. Blood and feathers everywhere. When I was little I used to watch my grandpa prepare the pigeons he hunted.” I shuffle around to sit behind her back, “You know, one time, when he was done and the kitchen table looked like the scene of some gruesome crime, he took one little grey feather and put it into my hair. His fingers were still bloody.” I’m idly playing with her obscenely soft long hair, twisting it around my pinky, stroking it. I’d never seen actual flaxen hair before. It smells good. “After my grandmother left him, he stopped going out to hunt and I took the knife from a shoebox under the sink.”

I reach into the pocket of my jeans and produce the very same knife. I dangle it in front of her, holding onto the pink-tinged rabbit’s foot, feathers of all colours surrounding the old knife, cleaned and freshly sharpened. She tenses.

Last night I noticed a glow in the darkness, coming from the foot of my bed, a luminescence emanating from the cage. And now, looking at the ropes that bind her, I can see that they have caused some skin to rub away and in the places where this has happened, the slightest suggestion of a glittering substance is now visible. Like the sparkle of fool’s gold, just beneath the surface, glistening.

I cut through the rope binding her wrists and examine them. She flinches as I pull her arms back behind her but says nothing. Yes, there it is, something shimmering beneath the skin. Some golden substance from heaven. I lick her wrist and the taste is like – death. A dirty, seductive kind of death, like decaying flowers.

“So that’s what makes you irresistible…” I whisper this in her ear. She kneels before me, her arms limply hanging at her sides, her wings folded demurely back, like a sheathed weapon. The downy feathers are soft against my chin as I lean in, “This is how you do it.”

When I first realised that no one but me could see her wings and her light, I felt very sorry for them. It made me sad to know that while I was seeing a magnificent angel, a messenger from above, they only saw a girl who hoped to purchase a rabbit. But soon the realisation came – they do not see her because she is here only for me. Why reveal herself to the ordinary masses? There was no need to expose herself and risk jeopardising her mission. She need only show herself to me, so that I might be overcome by her divinity, her beauty and that smell – the smell of her blood, like dying lilies. It made me hungry.

“I wonder – are you ashamed that you couldn’t tempt me?” She remains silent, just as she has done since I let her know that I was onto her, “I saw through you, didn’t I? I knew you were here to stop me, didn’t I?”

Still not a word. Perhaps her voice has been somehow removed, so she won’t reveal the secrets of the almighty.

“It was your choice of animal that tipped me off – if you’re wondering where you went wrong, how I discovered your true purpose. You probably should have asked to buy something else, a rat or a komodo dragon. But you wanted to save the little bunny, didn’t you?” I pull her hair and her head jerks back. Her face wet with tears, she looks at me, doe-eyed. “Now, now, I think we’re past the angelic wiles stage. Do you want to know where your precious bunny wabbit is now, hmm? It’s on my stove, boiling in a pot.”

The angel doesn’t like this piece of information. Her chin quivers and she squeezes her eyes shut, causing big Disney tear drops to splash down her cheeks.

“You failed. You failed to make me love you, you failed to change my ways and now I shall be free to do what you were sent to stop.” I take my grandfathers knife in my hand, “Now I am free to kill you.”

A swift blow, from left to right, applying just the right amount of pressure, and a gash appears on the angel’s neck. From the wound, liquid gold pours. It glitters and shimmers, iridescent and glowing. The angel begins to squirm and whimper. She lurches away from me, her wings spreading and folding frantically. A clump of her lovely hair is left in my fist as she writhes on the floor of her cage, dying. She becomes covered with the golden substance as she struggles to get up, to drag herself to the door of the cage, which is open. She slips and falls down on her back and no longer tries to move. She rasps a string of bizarre, alien words – surely the language of heaven – and then she is still.

First I remove the head. Then I detach the organs and remove them, one by one. With birds I can do this in one swift movement but I don’t have the practise yet to do this with an angel. It has every organ a human would have, right down to the spleen, but the colour is different. Its insides are white, marbled with little veins of gold and glowing with divine light. Outside, daylight begins to fade as I pluck the wings, feather by feather, but the light in its body, in its blood, glows bright enough for me to finish my work . When I am done, I attach one of its wing feathers to my knife. I drag the angel down the stairs and place it on the kitchen table. I take a pot of goose fat from the fridge and tear off the lid. This part is fun. I take my time smearing it all over the skin, making sure to amply cover the breast and thighs. I remove the trays from the oven I inherited from my grandpa – a big farmer’s oven, big enough to cook for a staff of hungry workers and big enough to roast an angel. I tie its wrists to its ankles and shove the angel inside, on a medium heat.

I slump in a chair at the table, exhausted and pleased with myself.

“Ha ha. I win.”

I pick up the remote and flip on the TV. Some kind of soap is on; I stare at it for a while. The room is starting to smell like flowers. It makes my mouth water. I flip channels and watch snippets of a cookery show, a gangster movie, horse racing, various sitcoms. I’m getting impatient and my stomach is rumbling. The news comes on. They show a picture of the angel.

“- the disappearance of fifteen year old Czech immigrant Eliška Holubová, who was last seen at Pine Valley Pet Emporium in Alderton last Thursday – “

I stroke my cheek with my new feather trophy and smile. The buzzer goes off.

Time to eat.