Bile rose in the back of his throat. Anxiety swelling up from his stomach in the form of acid. And he couldn’t even pinpoint why. Maybe the other man was crazy, but he seemed harmless. Kieran lived in a city, he had for years. He’d seen worse than this on the public bus system on more than one occasion. But this felt different. It made his skin tingle. It threw him right back to his youth, into that fear that crept up in the middle of the night.

  What if he was about to look at something people shouldn’t see?

  What if Hell was real?

  What if this was the straw that broke the camel’s back and condemned him?

  What if all those priests had been right?

  “Please stop. Please. I don’t want to know, I don’t want to be involved —” There was no use to it. The words barely made their way out before Wyatt’s shirt fluttered to the ground and the world fractured. Kieran was used to bodies. To parts. To the little bits and bobs that made up a person. He’d gone numb to it over time. People were all the same, at the end of the day. Heads, fingers, arms, shoulders. They cut the same way. Separated from the body the same way. Tissue, muscle, then bone. This was … “What the fuck —”

  “I am sorry. If it’s jarring, I know it can be jarring ….” Wyatt frowned, lips pressing together as the wind gently fluttered through outstretched feathers. He reached back out to the door, re-opening it as Kieran stiffened, and stepped through. “Now that you can see them, can you help me? Please?”

  There was an innocence to the question that didn’t carry any of the weight it actually involved. The weight of what Wyatt was asking for. Like he’d strolled in, in the middle of the night, simply lost and asking for direction. Like he hadn’t overturned Kieran’s entire worldview just by showing up at the door.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “Are you asking if I’m telling a joke?” Wyatt frowned. “Why would I do that?” Another pause lingered before Wyatt took a breath, wings bristling behind him. It felt like a hallucination. Like some kind of uncanny valley nightmare, CGI come to life in an all too realistic fashion. “This is the right place of business, yes? You call yourself a body broker –”

  “No,” Kieran interrupted, nearly choking on the word. He’d never loved the term, really. Body broker. It felt like a job title from some kind of futuristic hellscape. It was why he’d never involved himself in the business end of things. He didn’t deal with the selling, or obtaining. He just dealt with the parts. He’d been able to separate himself from the rest of it. Maybe that was his problem now. He’d managed to drain the humanity from all of it. He collected them. Sorted the pieces. Made sure the cuts were precise, and the labels.

  Someone else dealt with the selling. With their final destination. He supposed the pieces all went to labs. To scientists. To researchers. That’s how he’d been able to stomach it. People were just electricity contained in a body, and when the lights went out – he divided up the parts and sent them onward, so maybe other people’s lights could stay on longer. If there was no such thing as a soul, it didn’t matter what happened to the body after death. It wasn’t like anyone was watching.

  Except now he was staring down an angel.

  And that angel wanted his wings removed.

  “I deal with dead people, not live — ” He paused, clearing his throat. “Not … anything living. I’m not in the business of body modification, and I don’t just sell parts off. I wouldn’t even know who to contact, especially not about —” His voice trailed off as he gestured weakly towards Wyatt, and the feathered wings that towered behind him.

  Jesus.

  That had to be some kind of mutation. Or make-up. Maybe it was some kind of contraption he had strapped on and this was all some sort of hidden camera joke.

  “I’ll deal with selling them. I just need you to remove them.” Wyatt seemed calm. Especially given the circumstances. His face was still. Good natured despite the inherent violence he was asking Kieran to commit.

  “Okay, let’s say they are real —” Kieran sighed, scrubbing at his face.

  “They are.” Wyatt only stared, wings stretching in response. “Touch them, you’ll see —”

  “I don’t want — I don’t want to touch them.” Kieran grimaced, jaw clenching as he backed a step up, like the space would somehow give him the distance he needed to click his reality back into place. It didn’t. It made it worse, somehow, giving him a full view. “ — Even if they are real, I can’t — I work with dead people, not live ones. I don’t have bandages, or painkillers —”

  “Pain is part of what makes someone human, I have no wish to numb it.” Wyatt blinked, eyebrows furrowing as he took a step forward. Christ, of course he sounded like some kind of psalm. “Please. If you don’t take them from me, one of my brothers will, and they won’t show nearly the care. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve done it. You have no idea what it’s like, to have something ripped from you by someone you love. They don’t care for clean cuts, they tear. The scar is the point. It’s a punishment —”

  “Why would you need to be punished?” Kieran stepped away again, back hitting the receptionist’s desk and jarring him back into some sense of reality.

  “Because humans are curious beings. And when I found curiosity, I also found fear. And then it all came flooding in like a plague, and those feelings aren’t for us, they’re for you.” Wyatt glowered as he held out his hand. “If you need to touch them to convince yourself, please do.”

  “I don’t want to.” Kieran’s lips pressed into a line as he leaned backwards. It was too much, all of it. The talk of angels and punishments. “When I was little, my mother — my mother read me that psalm about how it’s harder for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than it is for someone to get into heaven. And I used to lie awake at night paralyzed by it, because — well, then it had to be impossible, and that never made sense. I mean, how could God love us and still make it so hard, and if we were all going to hell anyway, then what was the point? Why put us here to suffer, and then suffer some more?” The words spilled out like thread unspooling from a tightly packed bobbin. He nearly choked on them. He’d shoved them down for so long, those thoughts had long since faded away.

  God wasn’t real.

  Bodies were just flesh animated by electricity.

  And here he was talking to an angel.

  “She read the psalm incorrectly. It’s harder for a rich man to get into heaven than it is for a camel to get through the eye of a needle. And the eye of a needle is simply a structure on earth. In what you call Israel. It’s tall. Camels are perfectly capable of squeezing through as long as they duck.” Wyatt nodded, stepping closer again until he could take Kieran’s hand. It would have been funny, had Kieran not been so shell shocked.

  “You don’t understand, I gave up — I gave up on all of it, and now I’ve done so much wrong — and I’ve cut so many bodies into pieces, and I’m — I can’t put this on my list too. You cut up an angel, that has to be a shot straight to hell, right? Do not pass go, do not collect $200.”

  Wyatt frowned, head cocking to the side as Kieran spoke. “I don’t understand that phrase –”

  “You don’t need to.” Kieran shook his head in response, fingers moving of their own volition to stroke through feathers just barely within reach.

  Fuck.

  Fuck.

  Of course they were warm. And of course they felt safe, and somehow electrified. And very, very fucking real.

  “I won’t let you go to hell, Kieran. I promise. You do this for me and you’ll fear for nothing.” Wyatt nodded, breath held as he watched Kieran’s face shift into something softer.

  “How could you promise something like that?” Kieran countered, despite the fact that his resolve was steadily crumbling the closer he stepped. The longer his fingers grazed Wyatt’s feathers.

  “I would not say it if I did not mean it …”

  A long pause lingered, as Kieran took another breath, withdrawing his hand only to nod down the hallway. Maybe this was all just a dream anyway. Some kind of vivid nightmare. And whether it was, or it wasn’t — perhaps it was best just to end it. “It’s going to hurt no matter what I do.” He sighed, glancing at the angel behind him as he wound through the hallways. There was a first aid kit along the way. It wouldn’t help much, but some bandaging was better than nothing, he supposed.

  “I know.” Wyatt’s answer was so simple that Kieran nearly paused in the hallway. Just to ask again why any of this was necessary. Why his resolve was so set. Why he would be so fearful of family he loved that he’d seek out a stranger to wound him instead.

  “You’re sure? That you want them gone?” Kieran paused at the doorway to his makeshift morgue. It all seemed colder than before, somehow. Bright and upsetting like an acid trip gone wildly wrong. Like the body parts he’d wrapped and set aside could spring back to life at any moment. Perhaps they could, all things considered.

  “I’m sure.” Wyatt nodded, pressing past Kieran into the room ahead. He seemed more angelic, somehow, in the middle of the space. When there weren’t shadows hiding his lack of imperfections. Kieran found himself holding his breath. It felt wrong. It made his stomach churn. Like he was about to hack the head off of a Greek statue.

  “I’ll try my best to bandage it, but it’s going to bleed no matter what I do….” The words were more for himself than for Wyatt, really. An attempt to keep himself calm. Like this was business as usual, somehow. Just cut off the pieces and move on to the next body. He could do that, couldn’t he? He did that every day. It would help, if he fell back into his routine. Opera, gloves, apron, bone saw.

  Except there was no checklist, now. No cut sheet. No guide to follow. Just Wyatt, standing with his wings outstretched and waiting. It was louder than normal, the bone saw. Jarring in the middle of the silence that surrounded them. Kieran reached out, touching Wyatt’s back. Well – the wings were definitely attached. Connected to flesh between his shoulder blades like a monstrous kind of bird.

  He didn’t offer a countdown, he couldn’t.

  If he hesitated any longer, they’d be there until morning.

  He just needed to cut, like always.

  Metal though flesh, then muscle, then bone. Muscle, and bone, and so much blood. The crunch of it all had never bothered him before. The grinding of metal teeth through marrow. The grind, and the thud of a heavy, dead wing hitting the floor.

  If God hadn’t loved him before, he never would now.

  He felt that in the pit of his stomach, even as he continued.

  Then again, maybe it was all just pieces. Maybe wings were just pieces too. Maybe this was all he’d been meant to do.

  Paradises

  Rafael Nicolás

  Content Warnings: graphic sex, referenced abuse

  The angel Gabriel travels to the temple of Tlāloc, one night, and he confesses his love. He falls, kneeling, before the God of Rain, and he puts his hands together, interlocks the fingers.

  He says, “Lord, after I tucked my Father into bed, I ran to my room, and I found my best clothes.” On the angel, there’s just an alb, lace stitched along the bottom, down from knees to ankles, with thin string pulled into a bow by the dip of his sweet neck. “While he slept, I snuck from the house, I ran through his Eden garden, and I flew past the gates of heaven.” Bowing his head, he trembles. “And now I’m here, before you, in your own paradise.”

  “And why,” says the god, “have you come?” On his throne, Tlāloc is enormous — the size of a sun, while Gabriel is a measly star, distant, half in stature and bright. “Only the souls I drown are welcome here, and you’re but a child.”

  “I’m not a child!” Gabriel cries, raising his head, meeting the gaze of the great being, who is blue-faced, fanged, and tough as the stone that his temples are built of on earth. “I’m more ancient than the universe, and too long I’ve been called nothing more than the child of my Father—”

  Tlāloc interrupts: “But why have you come?”

  “You—You—” Gabriel stammers, his eyebrows tugging together, his own mouth twitching, as he wonders if the God of Rain had forgotten. “You invited me.” The gesture of prayer leaves his hands; he raises one, waves it with the emphasis of his words. “You came into my Father’s house, not more than a century ago, and you asked if I could love, and when you were told I couldn’t, you said that if I ever changed, I was welcome in your temple.” He swallows the razor of anxiety on his tongue; he adds, “I’ve always loved. I’ve really always loved too much. I stayed by my Father when his first child left, and I stood with him as my other siblings each began to leave him one by one. And, now, it’s just him and I. Him, making new earths every week, forgetting them and their people; then me, helping him to bed on the seventh days and bringing a spoon of soup to his mouth each dawn.”

  Tlāloc lifts his god body, stands giant not far from the beautiful angel with too many wings sprouting from him, like a seed unsure which direction to grow. “And now you leave your senile Father too?”

  “I’ll return,” Gabriel promises, lifting his chin to meet the all-encompassing white of Tlāloc’s eyes. “I’ll return so soon, he’ll never have noticed I was ever gone. It’s not right to leave someone so frail all by himself. But when I go back to him, I won’t be a child anymore, not an angel.” When the all-powerful tells him to stand, Gabriel listens, stumbling but rising nonetheless. “I’ve always loved too much. I loved him. I forgave him for whatever the others said he did.”

  “I knew it was a lie,” Tlāloc admits, “when your Father told me you couldn’t love.”

  Off-handedly, Gabriel replies, “My Father told me that it was my sibling Lucifer who is the king of lies.”

  “Like mother,” Tlāloc jokes, “like daughter.” He extends a hand that Gabriel reaches for, only to find, in comparison, his palm and fingers puny and delicate, asking to be broken apart. “But I think he was only trying to protect you, angel.”

  Gabriel would reply that he doesn’t want to be called an angel any longer, but he knows this to be the final moment that it’s true, so he accepts the name, cherishes it for the last time. “Your last wife — she was kidnapped from you; she was the jewel of your paradise, but she was stolen, then dug into the soil, and she budded from the ground as a flower, and she became the god Xōchipilli. He didn’t forgive you; he said he had no interest in being your wife anymore because you didn’t know love.” Tlāloc’s other hand rises to the jaw of the angel, cradles him there. “And then your second wife, Chalchiuhtlicue, you loved too much. You kissed her body until it began to water down, and she dripped down from this heaven, and she became the lakes of the earth.”

  Tlāloc muses, “I had only recently lost her, when I asked your Father of you.” He cranes his head down to him — there are the rattles, like those of serpents — and his breath is cold, like the breeze of a hurricane. “Will I love you too little or too much?”

  “Any love at all,” Gabriel sighs, “is enough for me. I’ll meet you where you are.” Tlāloc takes his mouth, but nothing more than a press forward, slow, then pulls back. He murmurs, “I’m sorry that I couldn’t dress nicer for you. My Father has never let me own too many things. If I could, I would have put flowers in my hair and beads around my neck. I would have painted my face in the yellow your wives wore, and I would have put silver through my nose.”

  “I can dress you,” Tlāloc replied, “in all the jade of the earth.”

  The kiss that follows is deeper, pushing whereas Tlāloc’s arms are pulling Gabriel close by the waist, tugging him upward so that he can love his mouth comfortably. Gabriel wonders if he’ll become larger from this, if he’ll swell to the size of a universe, become like a god already; and he opens his mouth, allows Tlāloc to explore the tongue that’s never known more than the fruit and seed of a garden. The god seizes it, thrusting in his own tongue, then gripping Gabriel tighter by the hip bones that the angel worries will crack beneath the jagged strength. But, he doesn’t fight, presses needy, up against a deity he’s always thought to be frightening and lovely at once.

  Tlāloc’s fangs graze Gabriel’s plump lips, and if the angel could bleed, he knew he’d be spilling onto his white tunic, staining her, staining himself. He whines, high in a way he never has before, and then he feels the god walk toward the throne, realizes his eyes had shut, and he feels a ripple startle his body. Then, he feels the hardness of a throne’s seat, against his back. Tlāloc pulls away, looks down at Gabriel, and Gabriel stares up at him, feeling small but knowing it won’t be for much longer. He’s happy, he thinks, as Tlāloc hitches his alb far up to his waist, revealing the in-between of his legs. Divinity burrowed there, jutting out from there.

  Tlāloc is in a cloak, weaved with more colors than there are words for, the same as there is in the complex tie at his groin, hiding him. With one hand, he undoes it, and he shows himself to Gabriel, as if to ask if this is alright, and Gabriel doesn’t reply, but he parts his legs, plants his feet by the edge of the seat he lies upon. Not long after, Tlāloc takes his ankles, however, raises them so that Gabriel now feels too exposed to the wetness of the Rain God’s paradise.

  He asks, before it’s too late, “Can I have another kiss?” Tlāloc, eagerly, gives it to him — his lips are damp, contain all the downpour of the earth on them. “And,” he adds, this time against the mouth of the god, “will you let me live here, with you?”

  Tlāloc, instead of answering, leans into Gabriel, pressing in, slipping into the tight hold of the warm angel, who jerks and flinches. But the push is careful, delicate, and Gabriel breathes out, so slow and long, he believes his soul is leaving, and he’s becoming something else. More than spirit, more than even his god. He’s happy to be kissed again; their lips clash with a little playfulness, smacking and pulling, teasing each other to move. Gabriel kicks out a leg, tries to strike Tlāloc with it so that he’ll surge ahead to take him. There’s a part of the angel that fears his Father will wake before the deed is done, and he’ll barge into the temple, and grab his last child by the hair and drag him back to the empty heaven surrounded by an empty garden.