ISSUE VI

Angel-Dust

            An angel crawled out of a soot-blackened womb. She wriggled her way through the chimney and tumbled into a hollow sky. Dozens of minuscule inkpots burst open in the air. Spools of charcoal smoke unravelled and knitted themselves into unlikely shapes.​

            An angel could not survive in this world—but she did not know that yet. The smoke-angel drifted heavenwards, not knowing what she was seeking, only that she had not found it. She gazed hungrily down at us below. Gliding birds trembled as she tried to grasp their wings. Renegade rags turned ashen-faced as they brushed against her skin and wished they could return to the clotheslines they had deserted. Apart from these airborne creatures, nobody noticed a thing. An angel could never know that she had not been the first.

Charred and befuddled, this smoke-angel blinked hard. Stairways in the air collapsed and dissolved before her eyes. Eternity snapped shut like a heavy book, perhaps with a fly squashed somewhere between the covers. The air grew tighter, just as bridges between words crumbled. Another fly drifted beneath her feet. She felt something else tug at the hem of her dress, and wondered whether it was time.​

            I watched an angel melt into the sky, painting it a deeper shade of grey. But this angel had been late to arrive. Dusk creeped over the chimney like a discreet mesh and settled in the horizon with a red tinge of shame. But it allowed one last smoke-angel to clamber out. Moments washed over moments and each washed over her volatile skin, until she was drenched, then invisible, then gone. Nobody mourns a smoke-angel’s death. Last to fade were her lips. She spotted me in the corner and puckered a kiss. Now I’ve got angel-dust on my face, and a little more of it tracing murals with coal-tipped fingers on the walls of my throat. That way, at least, her story would bleed into mine, settling into the cracks in my voice. We’ve all got angel-dust in our throats. They tell us that we’ll die of angel-dust.