“I can help you,” he whispers, under its hands.

  It attacks him with a single ravenous kiss. His neck is made of cords and cables, and it’s sweaty, a little salty on Angel’s lips. It pulls away, slowly, to look at the gaping hole it’s made, and a horrifying noise flutters from the fugitive’s slack mouth.

  He doesn’t look like he thought he could die. Fright like a doe’s is large in his eyes. Angel mourns for him in this final moment of panic, in which a smaller person might feel peace.

  Don’t fear me, it thinks. This was always your fate.

  He doesn’t go quickly or quietly. He makes sounds for the longest time: fighting roars, piercing lathers of agony, and long moans as his organs come apart in strips and ribbons, cull and lace. He is uncomfortably hot in Angel’s hands—huge on the outside, and small on the inside. His skin is slick. His red-striped palm reaches into the air, closing in. Smoke flavored with coolant mixes with his cruor. He groans, long and low.

  I am Angel. I am a guide.

  A room circles Angel like a millipede, and dismantled cubicles fill its corners. Dystonic lights hang from a cage roof. Angel squirms on a mattress stained with its own fluids, its strange face contorted in anticipation of pain.

  “Is he dead, or isn’t he?”

  Angel whips its face to one side. A hand slices a cruel Y-shape across its abdomen, and peels its skin away in flaps. Angel resembles a Rhinelander rabbit, a little girl’s vivisected pet—an animal with a cream-colored pelt, and soft spots of gray and fawn, dragging its guts along under it as it hops to its death.

  “Damn it,” a man snarls. “Pass me that—”

  Angel’s spine curves. It’s crying and pleading in a language no one here understands. Gloved hands reach inside of it, hunting, searching. A flashlight shows glimpses of glistening places outside of this dimension, caverns criminal to the laws of physics, and folds of intestines too long for its abdominal cavity.

  “That lump. Cut into it.”

  Angel screams and contorts. From out of its insides comes a thing at first shrunken, still bloating and blossoming into real size: the mangled remains of a human head. It has ruined cheeks, and fragments of skull under its missing nose, and it sheds flesh onto the gloves that hold it. Angel goes still. Half a face: a plump mouth, and pierced lips. Panic makes its hands limp, as frantic and clumsy as flowers flying in a spring wind. It pushes the peaks of its shoulders hard into the mattress, down, away.

  “—really chewed him up—”

  “—sure.”

  It was pleasantly full for a moment, and now it can hardly move. The pain of the instruments picking through its innards makes it shriek like a hyena. A huge face covered in a cold lilac lens looks down on it from above, and Angel imitates the fugitive’s cry in reply. Maybe he is still the lucky one. How fortunate for him that he can go into darkness, into death, and find that pallid citadel of Angel’s first small millennia rising up in front of him so fast. It howls as a hand slaps its face, and its manacles strain.

  “Its halo. Its halo! Hold it!”

  Hands circle Angel’s neck, and it scalds them with its fury. It feels the coward recoil.

  “—your calculations, you sniveling nutsack? You said—”

  “It’s too strong! Oh, shit. Oh, Lord have Mercy. Look at those wings unfolding…” A faint, cowardly crack. “Its ribs—it’s like a fucking albatross!”

  In a shattering instant, its restraints fracture and fall away. The fugitive’s head starts to laugh. The white-coated figure holding it shouts, and fumbles it away from his chest. Angel reaches out for it as the walls close in, carapace-like, around its captors. It launches itself from the mattress that plunges and lists under its naked feet, and lands on all fours, ankles folding, wings flapping in short, useless strokes too large for the confined room. It forces the fugitive’s head-half into its unfurling mouth and swallows it. Stars splinter in its scarlet pupils. White coats collapse in an avalanche to the floor, and red spots dot the fallen as Angel scrambles clumsily to the door.

  It doesn’t stop until it’s outside, and it’s finally ripped all its armor to pieces. It’s nude. Sanguinary wings fall from its shoulders, arms, hips, and ankles, all dirty and soiled. Its hand slaps a windowpane. Ranks of portals rise up a stark wall: pretty windows full of lights, which mutate from dark, to dirge-purple, to orange rind, mango, and gold. Angel shoots past, all the way up to pure night. Its ascension pulls wind-fingers through its hair, dislodging chunks of its halo, now dark, its shattered parts still stuck amidst inky snarls. Dried filth flakes from its face.

  It flaps, and carries itself for a hundred thousand miles. Manna, manna, manna—it’s like it can’t fall.

  Above hangs a sun like a lemon, a clementine, cut apart. Angel straggles through an arid mesa on feet and ankles coated in gunpowder dirt. It’s walking with a hand on its stomach—or, more hinging and hitching forward than walking, but fast, nonetheless. Fluids and pieces of the fugitive’s chewed-up flesh coat its fingers. Its innards are still hanging out, still healing, but it’s not those that it’s so desperate to hold in: it’s the fugitive, the rest of his head, his heart. It clutches itself harder. At this point, it could lose miles of intestines, and it wouldn’t care. It’s only this final impending separation that is unthinkable.

  Constipation cramps fold it in half. It rises again, and staggers onwards. How much of him is fecal matter? How long can it last, without finding a way to follow?

  Past Angel’s sickly form, mesas rise and fall for miles, and finally reach a shoreline. As the sun slides down to the radioactive horizon, arcs rise and criss-cross its formidable surface. Past the last line of the atmosphere, its modulation starts to sound automotive. Solar flares from late August, the roar of colliding metal; a self-perpetuating looping, humming, the calls from monsters of millennia ago; whistler waves, a high-pitched wailing, and farther, a low rumble announcing a car parked among the stars. Its driver has white dwarfs for his piercings. From the last sane reaches of lethal inhumanity comes a voice that moves like a shark, forever, with no start and no finish. Out here, meaning is only a short occurence in an inane sequence that persists for infinity:

  “—go forth,” it says, “and find my angel—”

  The former fugitive grins. Flames shoot from his hood vents, all color in the cold necrosis surrounding him, and hot luminance licks his neck. Mankind might have ransacked the very pearly gates at last, if only he cared to share this course with any of them. He follows a roiling path of angels through the plexus of space, accelerating through time, and thinks of utter destruction at a single angel’s hands.

  Heaven at last: to be utterly devout, and devoured.

  An angel song from the ether

  Rafael Nicolás

  Content Warnings: Sexual Content, Some Violence

  In the second circle of hell, they tell me,

  the lustful live in a tempest,

  hands outstretched, fingers caught

  in the leaving breaths of their lovers,

  never quite touching the fleeting, wind-swept

  bodies — once familiar chests, rising, falling

  — the press of love becoming memory, becoming

  unremembered, the budding stranger

  of your lover in leviathan hurricanes

  the Lord has damned you to chase love in

  until the end of time

  But hell is also on earth,

  and the lustful have brought their storm,

  the winds that drag them from canyon to sea;

  watch and catch them falling and flying

  when a breeze flings them toward the sun only to

  plunge them into deep dusk again; they scratch at the sky, picking

  at stars, startling them; the lovers, wanting to grapple each other in

  the eye of the hurricane — for a second’s serenity —

  reaching with their mouths, not their hands,

  their tongues flicking out at the ether

  between them

  See the first lovers, the forth-bringers of this hell —

  the beautiful devil, ensnarled in sun-threaded hair, in

  upturned nose, in snaking twirls to cherry lips, and arrogant sighs,

  and the archangel, wrestling the winds, striking feathers to

  beat his body until the incarnate of it is brought to ember;

  sweet angels, pray for these damned souls, torn askew by the tempest of lust

  Yet here I will tell you a story I shouldn’t:

  The devil says, I let myself fall,

  believing you’d catch me,

  but our archangel has not spoken in centuries;

  the chief prince, half dead, but never dead,

  the angel, taking now his sin by the waist

  like he should have done at the dawn

  of creation, when they were cut from the same tendon of God,

  blown from Him, like runaway pollen, seized from His womb,

  the gore of the ether itself

  Let the first lovers struggle against the whirlwind and

  become the body of the hurricane,

  the beast of the end,

  a rapture of somber demons remembering

  to sing again

  in the last moments they can

  They tell me the heart can cave in,

  angels, but the adversary of God brings an open

  embrace to the prince of heaven, a seraphim

  with all six wings still and the very sun gathered at his halo;

  lingered love, overstayed and unwelcome, yet

  they introduce themselves again,

  in the hell they’ve made, of this beautiful earth

  The tempest of sin loses its teeth and out comes

  the deep red from its mouth; but, Lord, the damned

  cannot fear damnation, and the angel and the demon —

  they say, We will make, of hell, a paradise,

  I will find paradise,

  unearth it from you,

  by prying you apart and tugging you free,

  from the binding of your anger,

  now so ancient it has become something else, this

  exhaustion

  Devil, delicate and kind monster, let me

  wet you with my mouth, as if I were

  introducing you to God, my Lord, and

  dipping you into blessed water, days after birth;

  fallen angel, I have you now at the end of time,

  and in your lovely, vicious heat, my coaxing fingers at your

  gate, I think there is hell, inside of you

  Angel, I waited long enough for you, there

  is no love left in me, now, but lust I’ve never known

  to live without, so grip my thighs and feel how they’re

  soft where they ought to be held firm enough the pain

  overcomes the pleasure; my hips shiver up into the

  air, and you take them, and you, shy, put yourself up against me,

  and I ask, Will you descend from your Father’s house and stay

  in the storm with me; if you will, I’ll part my gate and invite

  you inside, allow you to sink into me, sink into the earth

  From lust, make love, and from love, lust

  demon and angel, heaven and hell;

  God has always cursed the lovers

  to chase

  and even within each other, they chase —

  see their bodies, catch them in between

  their breaths turning hums turning songs

  of worship, in rhythm with their rocks, forward,

  back; a pliable chest and a hand by its heart, clutching as if

  to grip the fluttering pulse and abduct her forever

  The tempest of hell for the lustful,

  caught up in its passion, that is wails and cries, but

  often little kisses, spoiled by little laughter;

  percussion drumming of flesh and spirit meeting,

  drawing back, then thrusting into place again; the arc of

  the devil’s spine, the shudder of his legs, the spasm of

  revolt against the angel who’s taken his insides and

  held him tight, tight by his belly, tighter, so clenched

  he will soon tear from the virtue of this; the goodness,

  the angel reminds him of goodness, long-forgotten,

  replaced by the greed of the devil that says, Give me every drop of you,

  give me even your blood, I’ve been soulless for too long,

  and left emptied, needing to be whole again

  Watch — the rain reveals itself and intermingles with the storm, but it comes

  from within the first lovers, both unfolded and dripping to

  come, hot, as the winds of their punishment are unmade with

  the wet of maltreated, full lips, caught by open legs;

  their bodies, still moving, to fight the finish, for eternity,

  rebel against the loom of the end;

  in their second circle of hell, they find

  the opposite of death, between them:

  life or creation or

  merely joy

  See, angels, that

  everything will come in time,

  and tomorrow there’ll be new ways to love;

  hear the devil and our chief prince, laughing,

  Let all the lovers be jealous of us, they say,

  they will never love like we do

  Hashem yireh

  Dorian Yosef Weber

  Content Warnings: gender dysphoria, restraints, and a father nearly murdering his child

  The sun was bright and the sky was clear as Yitzchak climbed Mount Moriah with his father. He hooked his thumbs into the straps holding wood to his back as he looked over the mountains and hills curving like a woman’s hips.

  “Son,” Avraham said from behind Yitzchak, “come along. We have almost reached the peak.”

  Yitzchak turned to smile at his father. “Forgive me,” he said. “Everything just looks so beautiful from up here.”

  Avraham hummed. “And it will look even more beautiful from the peak when we make an offering to our L-rd.”

  Yitzchak nodded and trotted along behind his father. Three days ago, his father had woken him before dawn had broken, frantically mumbling under his breath. Father, what have you seen? Yitzchak’s father rarely talked about his life before Yitzchak had been born. All the boy knew of his father was that he was some sort of prophet who hoped to be the beginning of a long line of scholars who would study the weaving of the universe. Yitzchak, the first and only son, was a gift from G-d in his parents’ elderly years and a means to that end. He had never told anyone the way the title felt like a skin stretched too tightly over a body holding more soul than it had room for.

  We have to go. There is no time to tell your mother. The shock of it all would kill her. We have to leave and worship the L-rd on the peak of Mount Moriah. Yitzchak’s childhood had been spent being doted on by his parents as well as the hungry guests the two of them were constantly welcoming into their tents to eat and share their company. But none of them ever saw his parents when the fever of visions overcame their minds and they would speak frantically about what needed to be done but not why they needed to do it. It had frightened him as a child, but Yitzchak did not let it scare him anymore. He refused. If there was a twinge in his gut when his father shook him awake with blown-out pupils and matted hair, he would not acknowledge it and thus give it authority. He told himself that the uncomfortable knot had nothing to do with the way that he had silently and obediently followed along after his father and two of his men on a three-day journey. They did not take an animal to be sacrificed, but when Yitzchak had asked his father about what would be used, all he was told was that G-d would provide the sacrifice. Yitzchak was a good son; he always had been. It did not matter that the status of the eldest son was a weighted chain wrapped tight around his neck. He would not question the words of the L-rd or of his father.

  Much of the trip up the mountain had been made in silence. Avraham had teased Yitzchak about women briefly, his voice and smile strained, and after Yitzchak had laughed and said that there had never been any he had been interested in, his father had just nodded jerkily and continued up the mountain. His mother, Sarah, had whispered once that the angels were terrifying, that seeing them rattled even the strongest of men. Whatever messenger had come to his father must have been holier than any other for the memory to cling to him so.

  Content to leave his father to his higher, grander thoughts, Yitzchak began softly singing one of the hymns that Avraham had taught him. They sang them together, as a family, Yitzchak’s voice soaring up alongside his mother’s above the bassy vibrations rumbling out from his father’s chest. They would sing over food and wine, teaching their songs to those passing through, and Yitzchak would fight to stay awake until the bleariness of a full stomach and whetted thirst made his eyelids heavy and he would fall asleep on the floor, head pillowed on his arms.

  One night, when the three of them were alone, Yitzchak was curled up on the edge of sleep when, somewhere above him, whatever blurry conversation his parents had been having trailed off into silence. Yitzchak curiously winked one eye open but saw nothing but the wall of the tent. His parents were to his back.

  “What troubles you?” his father asked in the soft, hoarse voice he saved only for his wife. Sarah was gasping shallowly, and it took a few seconds for Yitzchak to register that she was crying. “Why did the L-rd give us a child only for our bloodline to stop there?” Avraham sighed, and just from the sound of it Yitzchak could tell that they had had this conversation before. “It is not your fault.”