Ablution

Her eyes were dark and drowning. Dimming rings sunken in twin wells of want. Demons stirring under her skin.

The Angel hadn’t smelled such hunger in a long while. It would’ve been intoxicating if it weren’t so nauseating, the flavour hanging in the air all taunting and infuriating. Because the Angel was not allowed to touch. To taste.

There were responsibilities, there were expectations, there were culpabilities, there were disappointments; and they were all the same, score after scarring score stockpiling into the deepening depository in which her eyes resided. Over her shoulder the Angel peered invisibly, keeping its wretched tongue in its mouth, watching in agony and waiting.

The Saturday was routine, like any other Saturday, unremarkable. Except, things reached an end, at long last. Her hands were empty. Her work here was done. She looked at her Angel first.

A blink, she gave it, and the scent of want burst like spice on the tongue. A slow, permitting blink, and the fumes invaded its airways until all its mouth could do was water. The scent swirled around her face like floating weeds, haunting, parasitical. Then, on this otherwise unassuming Saturday, the girl laid on the floor and closed her eyes. And did not open them again.

Crowding in close, shivery and sharp with elation, the Angel reached a long-yearning finger towards the edge of her socket. Tracing the desecration pooling below her eyes, the Angel’s fingertip came away smudged dark. Disappearing into the cavern of the Angel’s mouth, darkness dissolved on its tongue as easy as erasing tally marks across paper, a warped absolution. Gathered in its aching arms, the girl laid at rest as the Angel swallowed her demons, licking long lines above her cheekbones.

Afterwards, when she opened her eyes, mild and mooring, she would curiously ask why it let her awaken, and the Angel would lick the last traces of every old dream from its grin. Caressing above her cheekbone, where it would leave the seeds of new demons buried beneath her eyelids, watching and waiting again, the Angel would drown in her eyes.