“Up here on the left,” he spoke quietly, and Jesse silently parked in front of a normal looking townhouse. The man turned to face him and stared, waiting. Jesse refused to meet his eyes, focusing on the details of the house.

  “I don’t— this isn’t—” The man took a short breath. Jesse ignored the hint of frustration in his voice. “I haven’t done this before, okay?” The man searched Jesse’s eyes and when he couldn’t find what he was looking for Jesse watched the man huff, slam the car door, walk up to his house, straighten his shirt, and gaze up at the dark windows of his house. He fumbled with the lock and before he could look back, Jesse had pulled his car forward and rolled up his windows, out of sight.

  His wings were new and so they were wet. The skin was the fresh pink of skinned flesh and striped with muscle and tendons, pulled into pointed taut wings. The remnants of his cage were in tattered pieces on the ground, held together by broken strips of silk. Dripping with mucus and slime they flapped unsuccessfully, only managing to pull Jesse upright. He tried to land his feet against the dirt but they crumbled against the new weight, his bones cracking and rolling. Yelping in pain, he tried to stay grounded but his wings demanded autonomy and once again yanked him into the air, feet suddenly pulled off the earth, he dangled uselessly.

  Jesse attempted to go limp, wanting to be left alone on the ground like a child throwing a tantrum. It became increasingly clear he was not going to be given his wish and he groaned in frustration, the giant wings insistent on movement. Jerked into the air once more, he began to understand his balance, and how to navigate his body weight and his wings. When he shifted his weight his wings responded. Attempting to keep his body from shuddering with every breath became easier. With a triumphant yell, he unfurled his arms and palms, stretching them wide until his fingertips pulled at the skin, ripping at the wounds across his body. His ribs strained against his chest and he shot forward into the cool air.

  Jesse turned into a side road. He had been aimlessly driving for what felt like hours. subconsciously making his way to an old hiking trail. He parked in front of the trail entrance, the trees overhanging, waving at him slowly. Jesse fished through his work bag, pulling out all the cash, propping his feet up against the dashboard. Inside was a small tin box that held a single joint, his reward for completing a shift. To get out of the club quickly he’d tipped out and left without counting his earnings.

  Flicking open a lighter, he took a hit of the joint, sifting through the cash in his lap. He grinned and exhaled slowly, smoke covering the bills, his lips moved silently. He had up-charged the man. The smoke filtered through the open window, Jesse watched it creep up into the night sky and disappear into the looming branches.

  With his rent payment in his lap, he sorted it once again into neat piles, matching the pile of ash that sat outside his car window. The night air coaxed him through his open windows, the cool breeze seductive. A whisper, brought through the wind, made its way to him, wrapping around his mind. Jesse looked deep into the darkened trailhead, the buzz of the insects pulling, pulling at his mind.

  “Fuck,” Jesse muttered just before his feet hit the tops of a tree, bark raking against his shin, leaving a trail of sap before it tumbled to the ground. He watched it numbly as it broke once more, the sound of shattering echoing around his mind.

  The wings beat off time from each other and his legs dangled unceremoniously, like a child learning how to ride a bike. He teetered and swayed fifty feet in the air, less tentative of the night. Again, he leaned forward and without minding his balance, rushed into a large tree branch, he wrapped his arms around it, as his breath left him, desperate for a moment of reprieve. The rough bark dragged against his forearms, sap intermingling with blood. Heaving gulps of air, he began to understand the exhaustion that came with flight and freedom. With a final breath, he began off again into the night.

  The man stared up at the monstrosity in front of him. He believed himself still in his dream; the knocking at the window had been incessant until he made the mistake of looking. In full view, he could just barely make out the remnants of his lover’s face. Grotesque chunks of flesh hung off of him and it took the man a moment to understand they were wings. Terrible contortions of muscles and veins, pulsing through the thin flesh. They held up the remains of who he used to know, what he barely could recognize as the body he had worshiped just hours ago. He screamed, the sound hollow but the feeling taking his chest.

  The man crawled away from him, as far up the wall as his feeble hands could take him, before Jesse swooped forward grabbing the man’s neck in his grip. It felt so much smaller in his hands. He could feel the man’s windpipe in between his fingers, slowly cutting off oxygen, each finger adding more pressure while the man squirmed and clawed at the arms that were already torn and flayed. It struck Jesse with hilarity that he could not feel the man’s feeble attempts at freedom, it was a faded pain. He watched his arms spout blood but could not feel it. A grin peeled against his face, and with strength he did not know he possessed, he threw the man back against the bed. With a hand on either side of the man’s face, frozen in a mask of horror, Jesse leaned down and playfully bit the man’s ear.

  The man whimpered and a hushed scream escaped his lips, the thing that used to be his lover looked at him with hunger in his eyes and he fell silent.

  His teeth, had they grown sharper or had he just now noticed the way enamel tore through meat? Jesse ran his tongue over his teeth and the canines stabbed it. Just now noticing his gums throbbing, inflamed and red, Jesse tossed his head in discomfort.

  Every cell in his body rioted for sustenance and he leaned forward, his lips parting slightly. Leaving a kiss on the soft skin in front of him, the vague feeling of nostalgia floating by, as he continued to leave kisses against the familiar body. He told himself it was another kiss, opening his mouth wider, allowing his teeth to sink into the flesh. The man was screaming differently than the last time they did this. It struck Jesse as odd, he had never heard the body below him call out like that. Teeth sunk deeper deeper into his skin. Tear. Only allowing his body to lead, he tore and was rewarded with an applause of wailing. It was as if the horrors he had fell to in the forest were forgotten from his body, with each swallow his scars softened. Every tear stitched together his own wounds. Every drop of blood fallen from the man replenished a drop of his own. Jesse gave in, falling into frenzy. Strips of muscles torn, the ripping of raw sinew hitting the walls with a dripping smack. Bones snapped and marrow sucked, he treated it as sacred, refusing to spill his treasure. Blood dripped from the ceiling. Onto the angel, the curls matted, falling against his face. He would be drenched soon enough.

  The body was left in the room of horrors. With the call of dawn, the ants marched through. Trudging through the sludge, they pulled pieces of flesh for their own, spreading the word. Carrion beetles colonized to feast and start anew. Maggots, the true keepers of the gates, inspected their claims, wriggling deeper into the leftover flesh. The only movement was the larvae that were birthed into the rot.

  Recovered Contents From an Angel’s Stomach

  Rae Novotny

  Content Warnings: mentioned animal death & cruelty, bodily fluids, body horror, cannibalism, death, gore, strong language

  ANGEL SUCKS ITS QUARRY’S TRAIL from thin air as a dogfish might swallow a string of plastic pearls, gaping, gagging, and pushing great swallows down its windpipe. After a minute of stillness, it convulses. Its gray skin goes paler still. Foam gathers at the corners of its colorless lips, and a fluvial stain pours forth from its mouth, separating into a crimson pall. Altostratus gas spills limp past under its reaching hand as it swings around and points along the path that its lungs have disgorged. Here—an apparition. A faint shape, a fugitive sitting on the roof’s lip, formed of pheromone-laden perspiration: he’s plump, human, and playing with a curl of his dark hair. He smells like salvation. If it weren’t so hungry, Angel might’ve liked to find him, press its nose into his ample chest, and just sniff him.

  But its stomach makes a painful sound, like a dead thing rattling its last in the pits of a storm drain, so Angel rolls its loose hand into a fist and punches itself hard under its ribs. A different dull ache replaces the first, and it rubs itself through anti-flak nylon as its dye dissipates into the wind.

  Its fleshy mouth quivers, and flattens into a pathetic line.

  This time, it’s time—time for food.

  High above hangs an abandoned sun. Fins of it fall through the city’s upper floors, and wriggle out amidst ranks of constructions swaying in an oily sealskin of shadow. Cold descends across petroleum-stained magnet pads, and sirens howl in snatches of polar color. In the pits, acid rain is sluicing over the awning of a haircutting parlor, making opalescent orchids in the remains of a boulevard, and under that asphalt is aggregate; under the aggregate, more aggregate, so fine that it’s almost soil; and under that soil, parking garages that sprawl for miles, deeper and deeper, until the parking valets resemble cavefish, and a sunken hush permeates the caverns.

  Low: a pulse. Lower: it’s louder. Lower, and faster through the hollows, until an antique car appears, coated in orange urethane paint, and polished to a flawless satin finish. Myriad spokes kiss its whitewall tires, and fruits and flowers styled like oil paintings crest its adorned hood. It’s huge, and it’s roaring, headlights pouring forth into cotton candy smoke rising from a silver undercarriage. Reverberations pummel concrete poles, which yank their graffiti stockings up against fingers of pinkish vapor. Up the hood, through dusky laminate, to the driver’s face—he has a lipsticked mouth full of dove pinions, and a dehydrated tongue punched through with surgical steel, sliced in half almost to his missing tonsils. It’s stippled with papillae, paler on the flat, ridged with molar-marks around the sides. He licks his lips and glances nervously at the shotgun seat. An aluminum tray sprawls across the upholstery, heaped with pulled pork all slid into one corner, and glistening with rivulets of hot grease.

  He’s never fed anything that wasn’t a stray dog. Pork is supposed to taste most like human flesh, isn’t it?

  His hunter looks hungry. Privately, he thinks that if he got its clothes off, its ribs would look like grandstands.

  Sworn dirt cages him. Worms squirm through contaminated soil, up, up, and up, and meet more garage walls lying under the first layer of what passes for dirt. Another road lies dead, and soda spills make sticky filth that accumulates cockroach antennae. Angel’s strapped shoes pull up strings from the pavement. A grappling hook runs on rope from its leather plumage, and drags, sparking, along the road in its wake, past the span of its huge wings. Its right-hand fingers spasm around a four-muzzled catalytic mortar fastened to its other arm. Its glassy stare glows red, red as a Gonga lure’s, stark above the hood of its mouth, as it follows a midair suspension, a scent floating in a medium of particulates, of droplets, and of pollutomatic filth. It’s on high alert. Its abyssal stomach is churning, as if it’s still flying in host with its littermates so far above. Nine months of this, and Angel feels its halo collaring its neck. Hunger scrapes infected nails along its stomach walls. It needs meat, ruined muscle, and sinew.

  The fugitive should’ve killed himself while he had the chance. He is its fate. If he’s killed, it’s fed, and if he’s not, it’s—

  it’ll roadkill-doze on a kennel floor and dream of a man’s apocrine glands: his underarms, his areolas, his—

  and dream of concealment from cameras—

  “Hurry up,” the fugitive mutters. He looks at himself in the rearview mirror. After this long, it’s like he can feel it getting close—its presence flutters in his stomach, and resonates in his heart. Fear, infatuation, or foresight? The fugitive’s antique automobile, a 2049 Ormandy Resistor, shakes as his fingertips pass through suspended scarlet-and-menagerine controls and play up the ARR1 sound, a phantasmic cross of a feminine sigh and the Soviet probe Venera 14’s 1981 recording of Venus’s surface winds. He reclines, drills the sound into his head; raises his Resistor up, and drops it so hard his stomach comes loose. He looks at himself again, and pushes a fierce smile to the front of his face.

  “All hidden things must plain appear.”

  And in the next moment, it does. It materializes in his smoky headlights—its arms, a mass of machinery, its shins, armored in Pantax, its neck, preternaturally long, and choked in a collar. Leather folds droop down its androgynous shoulders to meet ammunition-laden harnesses and a militaristically layered midriff. Lacerations mark the soft flesh of its upper thighs, naked, and lithe as a Saluki’s. And its wings, its wings—sharp, and white, like immodest fangs. It’s so much more gorgeous than he’d remembered. God, he thinks, is a pervert.

  All the smoke is dematerializing, now. Angel faces off against the Resistor on a flat cliff. It’s small and passerine, soaked in the car’s headlights, and the Resistor’s sole passenger is larger than life. Angel’s white feathers fly in no wind. Its nostrils flare, and it raises its nose.

  Pork?

  The fugitive snatches the foil pan from the passenger’s seat, and, with the pile of meat still warm on his callused palm, flings the driver’s side door wide. His heavy car sways as one of his heeled riders hits precast concrete. Angel raises its quadruple muzzle mortar. Amaranthine light coalesces in crescents around the girth of it as it powers up, ringing with a charge that shorts the circuits overhead and makes an active windfall of sparks all along the room’s rim. It’s singing, gathering all of its light in its middle, like Holy Mary whispering a lullaby to the monster in its irradiated arms. Angel aims, and raises its spare hand to its mouth. It’s salivating uncontrollably. Across from its gun, the fugitive catches his metal-riddled lower lip in his incisors. He dodges its first poorly formed shot. A hole forms in the wall at the room’s furthest reach, and starts to piss out liquid matter.

  The fugitive’s smile curls his shout up at the corners. “You hungry?”

  It gropes off another shot, and struggles to raise its gun again for its purpling skin. It groans. Recoil noise rings in its mind. There was a time, once, in which imprisoning an angel was an unthinkable feat, a crusade akin to reaching the moon in its opal asylum. How far away the planets must have looked to those people. First, the moon, last, the angels. To think he still might survive this—with such faith, this man might’ve finally reeled in time itself. Angel drools. Why won’t he die as all the others did?

  Angel looks up again to find the fugitive crouching with his cargo, slowly, as if he’s still ready to run. A million metal spikes move on his clothes. He looks shattered. Sharp. Covered in mirrors.

  He places the foil pan on a stripe of paint, and Angel’s arms go soft. It wipes its mouth again, and saliva smears across its cheek.

  He retreats a few paces. For a moment, Angel is too dull and doltish to answer. In the next, it makes a decision. It raises its shaking arm, and fires at his car. A pure shaft of foxglove light hits it at a diagonal, and dissevers the front from the rear. For a moment, the Resistor melts apart in slow motion. As purple disintegrates into dusky smoke, the fugitive covers his mouth with his hand, and his face swims from delight to sudden desolation.

  He stands stock-still. Ahead of him, the car’s internal components catch fire.

  Angel drops its gun and dives hands-first at the foil pan. It falls upon the pork with abandon. It’s past the point of relishing anything. It can’t register flavor, or how the meat feels in its mouth. It is lost to need. It forces handfuls into its mouth, scarcely chewing. It feels more and more hollow the more it swallows.

  “Is it any good?”

  Angel can’t recall time passing. The fugitive’s metal-capped riders scuff the concrete a foot away. Firelight flickers on his shins.

  “I’m not much of a cook,” he says.

  It swivels its head to look up at him. Its face is a mirage of grease, and its gun rests dead on the ground past its shoulder. A film of spittle rinses its canines and recedes to architraves along its gum as it snarls. It has strings of meat stuck in its piercing incisors.

  “Don’t glut yourself,” he says, gently. “You’ll get sick.”

  It doesn’t heed him. It fits another greasy handful of pulled pork into its mouth, and gulps it down.

  He crosses to its flank, crouches, and puts a hand on its shoulder. It ignores his slight pull, so he presses. It pays him no attention until he takes it two-handed, and pulls it away from the tray. In an instant, it’s on him, its fingers around his neck. His head hits the line of a parking space with a clunk that nearly knocks him unconscious. He clutches at its sinewy arms as a small, armored hand chokes him, shutting off his airflow and forcing a small, pained noise from his mouth. His heart palpitates, and his pulse pounds in his skull. This close, he can count its lashes. Its nose is a mutilated flower around its nostrils, and its mouth, a dribbling slit. Its other features are so delicate and doll-like that it hurts to look at it for too long.

  His hand falls from its arm, and he reaches up to stroke its hair. His periphery starts to pulse. Spots of nothing float in his sight as it lowers its face to his. It makes phonic snuffling sounds as it noses his cheek, his chin, and his neck, and he allows its chilly hand to move under his shirt, and across the coconut husk of his stomach. A soft “Hello” slips from his hardening lungs as it presses its face into his breast.

  It inhales loudly—‘snnmsss…’

  He manages a husky little laugh, and its hand slips from his neck. It looks startled. He revels in the sudden sugariness of the air following deprivation.

  “I have a home for you,” he puffs, through his strained panting. “You remember what a home is? A nice, hot meal at night? Maybe a little more romantic than this?”

  Angel sniffles. He can’t understand how hungry it is. He hasn’t felt hunger like this. If the natural use of immortal hunger is control, the natural consequence of immortal hunger is frenzied loss of it. Now that it’s had meat, all it can think about is having more. And not only has it not fed in months—it hasn’t had proper nourishment in an age. It feeds on what scraps of goodness it found in profane food and people. It’s never enough. It hasn’t really fed in so long, it’s forgotten how divinity feels. It only knows that the fugitive’s smell reminds it of manna…