angels stick their fingers in electrical sockets

There was no name for what Jonas saw emerge from the bushes. He had been taught no sound to fit with the tangled calligraphy of hair and the expanse of body displayed beneath it, naked and dark with sun and dirt. 'Girl' meant the evasive pig tailed figures that had giggled together behind closed fingers at the taunts and punches sent in his direction by the bigger boys in his class. 'Woman' wasn't the right size either- it was those girls grown up, more alienated and alienating, willing participants in the strange game to which the sudden cartography of their bodies had bought them entry, played out in the nightclubs and the bars in town. The fog of perfume that clogged his throat if ever he came too close made him think of corpses.

His fingers tightened on his fishing rod and he realised he hadn't breathed. The kick of oxygen told him: you are not imagining this. She is there. 'She'- he used the word to systemise his thought for want of a better one. She is there, and she is looking straight at you.

The sky rested against the charcoal forest like a ripped sheet of paper. The sun buzzed, neon, electric, drawing the flying ants towards it where they banged their heads against it and expired in a flurry of gossamer wings. A solitary bird crowed once from a skeletal black branch stretched against the hyperventilation of the casement, then stuck its beak in its cloak and shuffled off. Silence cut his ears.

The girl- creature- she- whatever it was, had her impossibly tiny feet drawn together beneath her, the flat soles spreading her weight into the ground. Her arms were lifted away from her sides, her pose reminiscent of... he didn't dare to think it. Her shape was contoured with the immodest blanket of dark dappling thrown across her by the trees above her. He thought, with a swift look around him, that she was presenting herself to him.

His inclination as a child was inaction. Often he had wondered how it would feel, never to move a single muscle, to fade unassumingly into the backdrop of whatever setting he was in, to be overlooked, forgotten. He envied the chairs and rocks their solitude. Sometimes he would have to dig the nails into the palm of his hand until the sharp sting of blood prevented him from disappearing. It was the only means he had found of making absence as painful as presence. But after his mother spotted the thick spiral of scars up his arm, he was sent for 'therapy', which he soon discovered was worse than either.

He was forcing himself to take another breath. His nails ripped into his flesh, the instinct returning to him so abruptly it caught him out, and he glanced down in surprise. The wealds rose fresh to his skin as if all these years they had been lurking just beneath the surface. When that wasn't enough, he clenched the fishhook in his fist. Finally, imperceptibly, he began to move towards her.

A complex, unchartible choreography that brought them together. The light moved over their heads. He watched the reflection in her pupils, and felt the way his shadow was being seared onto her retinas.

So their first sunset together was there, in that strip of land between sky and choked up river, abandoned by man to a tyranny of TVs, castrated at the coppery holes where their plugs should be, but glorious, nonetheless, radiating the bloodshot sky. As if to say: forget the news today. Forget Eastenders and Celebrity Big Brother. Not today. Here is the sun.

A pile of forgotten fridges conspired together to achieve what failed at Babel; noiselessly they piled on top of each other, suspending doors like paralysed limbs, holding their words and constraining their breath, afraid to utter in the buzzing reports of their occupied cousins the burden of their task, lest they invoke the fate of their biblical predecessors. A shard of memory, abruptly, inappropriately: the school hall warning not to climb inside abandoned fridges- the threatened danger remained implicit, compellingly, so Jonas had searched for abandoned fridges all afternoon, chasing the salty thrill-fear of what he might find inside.

Another time, another town. The people there paid to have their abandoned fridges taken to places like these, so their children couldn't climb inside them. Suddenly the taste of the thought displeased him, and he spat it on the ground beside him, where it congealed with the ever-waiting dust.

Not the perfect location, then, but Jonas was suspicious of perfection. He said it was the opposite of life. He had seen perfect sunsets before, accompanied by choruses of camera clicks, and he found them vulgar, garish. He liked it here. It struck him that the light was enriched when it set on something ugly. Why? Because of its redemptive quality? Perhaps because it reminded him of the smallness of his circumstance, in the warmth of the red universality of the sun.

And her. Suspicious, at first, of the slightly splayed digits, extended towards her as one might extend one's hand to a dog, in order to give it your scent. But too quickly familiar, allowing touch- the wrist grasped between thumb and forefinger- not animal, not human, certainly-as if she knew something he didn't. Different to other females. He was alone there with her nudity, and he didn't find it difficult, or awkward, as he might of done, but he looked at her with a frank curiosity, and she yielded to his touch as he brushed his hand over the surface of her, to his eyes as he turned her around. She was hungry, that much was obvious from the acute protrusion of ribs, and he plunged a hand into her inverted reflection on the river and pulled a silvery fish wriggling from his net. Blood, and teeth, and muscles, and translucent scales. As the sky descended, she came close to him, rubbing the gory remnants of her meal against his shirt, using her senses on him. The fish and the man she consumed with ease. The cloth across his chest crumpled humbly away under her claws and incisors. Never before had he thought of the strawberry curls of hair as masculine, but she baptised them with her saliva then pushed her mouth against his, joining them in a saline, godless communion.

She had no memory before him. Where she came from remains mystery. The smell of damp earth, of torn grass, this is her heritage. A slice of light through dead branches that she moved towards, crawling, at first, and then pushing herself up, an unsteady bipedal gaining confidence with each step, until she strode through the trees, sprinted through them, sprinted away from- she didn't know what, only that she moved away from it. And this was all. The escape was the only baggage she brought with her. It wasn't heavy, he found it easy to carry, to guide her through the night away from the forest and the river. The darkness was enough to clothe her nudity (although it didn't embarrass him, he didn't want to share it), but as the greasy predawn spilled across the horizon, that unforgiving intimation of life, he found an old piece of rug to wrap her in. She rejected the smell of strange bodily fluids that clung to it, the itch, but he clasped it about her more firmly, lifted her inside it. He found her struggles like that of the spiders he found at the bottom of his bath and caught between his fingers- light, almost imperceptible, but they sent a bolt down his spine, as if he was carrying something other worldly. He was helping them, rescuing them from the suffocating scold of the bath water, but they never seemed to appreciate it.

He liked his home. It was small and inexpensive, so he could spend his time in it rather than making money to pay for it. His neighbours were quiet and elderly, and had soon given up on saying hello. It wasn't difficult for him to smuggle her in, unobserved, choking in her roll of fabric.

The flat had a deep layer of him on its surface. The pinboard was a centimetre thick with passport photos, articles ripped carefully from history magazines, and biro sketches of strange rare animals and animals that didn't exist with extraordinary powers- blueprints for evolution. Long disregarded filing systems regurgitated their cloudy contents on the unwatched shelves.

He had tried alcohol but he didn't like the taste of it. Smoking made him cough. Television terrified him, so he spent his time practicing sinking in and out of the walls of his home. A smell of man hung about the thick curtains where no air entered, as if he left a trace of himself there whenever he was forced to re emerge. He awakened it as he pulled them across the chunk of dust dancing dawn, and a large drowsy moth was unsettled from one of the folds of cloth. It fluttered wildly as if angered by the interruption of its meditations, and frantically crashed itself against the wall. She watched it in unmoving horror, he looked at her face, and at the end of a long held breath, during which the moth had determined its final resting place, she began to scrabble at the door she thought she had come in through. Escape. But door handles were a man made invention, and she hadn't got to grips with them yet.

Calmly, he took her hand and smiled. She smiled back. It wasn't something she needed to learn. The tautness of her snapped, and relaxed. Easily he divested himself of the clothing she pulled at, giving in lightly to her explorations. She rested against him as he took a wide toothed comb and ran it into her hair, where it jammed. He giggled and she copied him. She copied him as he walked, the low slung hip walk of a man, and then as he minced for her, an impression of how she should walk. Together they pranced into the bathroom, where he peeled the filth off her surface, amazing her with the new born scrubbed pink of her skin. When he showed her her reflection in the mirror, she searched for it in the vacant air behind.

How could he bear to touch her, knowing what he did about her sex? Could he touch her, peel her open with slippery fingers, take what he had learnt was the exclusive property of boys with more wit and muscles? But he did it, he did it all, because he believed in angels, who would come to him, not clad in white and glitter like a school nativity, but rise up from the ground, hair red with dust. Like She. She had gaps in her teeth and he thought he could see little flames flickering there where she had bitten off a chunk of the centre of the earth. He penetrated her because he thought she carried more fire inside her. He could feel its heat. And after all, angels, if there were such things, what were they for?

'I should not believe in an angel that did not know how to fuck', he said, out loud. She giggled, like she'd learnt. They slept, and when they awoke, many hours later, when the star was again low in the sky, he was still inside her.

They lay in the tossed sheets together, he forgetting time, her unfamiliar with it. 'Hello', he taught her. It is a greeting. You say it when someone walks into your life who you have been missing. Or who you should have been missing. Or who you think you might miss, one day.

'Hello.'

He said perfection was the opposite of life. But in those days it surprised him how perfection seemed to be a stowaway in life's pockets, how it would arrive, (unannounced and with little fanfare) as a damp bottom lip pressed into the small of his back. He found it in the unfathomable synchronicity of events, the mellow crack of a cricket bat on the radio rising into cheering, almost as if the crowd were cheering his similtaneous eruption into her mouth. Perfection could dwell in harmony with those like him, those with spots and short tempers, the asymetrical. It crept up on him from the deepest corners of her, even as he crushed her into him as hard as he could, even as she's begging him to crush her harder, trying to destroy the agony of perfection.

He confused her with 'hey' It is the same, but for people you share more with. It's softer. He said it to her when he pushed the door open, returning from an outing for supplies, shifting her weight from where she had wrapped herself around the last place she saw him. To her it sounds like a threat. 'Naked again', he sighed, lifting her goose- bumped body onto the bed and almost dropping her. How could she express the fearfulness of his abrupt absence, her gratitude for his return? Thinking sound betrayed her she said nothing. She had not yet learnt to trust the words he had taught her. She found other uses for her tongue and from the little shivers that pulsed into her through his skin she felt him understand. And since they must be parted, they snatched their time together like the breath of a drowning man, all wide eyes and gritty muscles.

More words. He tries 'my name is...', but stutters when he realises he hasn't given her one yet. Then her name is a stutter.

Perfection became an unwelcome visitor. In those moments he almost cried with fear of the certain knowledge of its imminent departure. This is perfection- transcient splinters of beauty, gone before they have arrived, received in the moment as memory. If he couldn't buy it and package it and take it home, he'd rather not bother. It was too heart breaking. He began searching her for marks, pocks or scars that would betray her. He thought you could recognise angels because in moments of ecstacy they skim the pavement with their toenails- if you were attentive, you would see what no one else did- their quiet defiance of gravity. But she was one of those angels ruled by gravity. As her muscles relaxed, she sank. He struggled with her weight, afraid that the ground would swallow her again. He drank the oxygen around him like it was in limited supply. In dreams he drowned, flailing his arms and legs about, and indeed when he woke the sheet..s dampness made him suspicious. He rolled on his side to see where she slept on the floor; his night time tussles had mad it impossible to be in bed where she had once curled into him, and besides the mattress made her feel unsafe- the sensation was of floating and it gave her vertigo.

One day he came home to find her squatting in the corner of the room, with the spittled bottom lip and vanishing vibrations of a masterbator. Her fingers were stuck in the electrical socket. She liked the feeling of power flowing back into the ground, through her. Conducted. It made her lonliness more bearable. It alarmed him how her hair stood on end. She was wild then, her aura static. When he swallowed his throat made a gravelly sound which she mistook for her own name.

How can you live with someone who sticks her fingers in electrical sockets? Can you love them? And here was one word he never taught her. He was nervous of its inadequacy, afraid of his poor tutelage, afraid she'd get it wrong. The phrases she'd learnt she'd tortured into strange shapes, into vessels with unfathomable meanings: 'howareyouowahyouowaaahhhhooooo' she would scream at him, clutching strands of her own hair, tangled loose in her palms, as he cowered against the refrigerator.

He didn't notice the life slip quietly out of her. She had always been thin, and darkly shadowed. She didn't like the food he gave her. She didn't like the words. She embraced his legs as he moved towards the door, and he arrived at work each solitary shift with bloody ripped trouser legs. A rattle in her chest was one of her unique, beguiling features. Her constant semi supine position submission to his deliveries of ecstacy. Her silence a welcome relief from her abuse of his native tongue.

And then early one morning, words arrived. Torrents of words, spilling like misplaced alphabetti spaghetti. She couldn't speak them fast enough. Bombastic. Gazump. Onomatopoeia. They were the kind of words that in another place, another time, another life, she might have used. She could have been the sort of girl who used those words. Euphoria. Gorgeous. Banana. Words people love. Anthologies of words. The best words in the world..ever! She spewed them from herself, her whole body shaking as if embroiled in the throws of an ejaculatory exorcism. Felicity. Chortle. Hullabuloo. They clattered against her teeth in their hurry to escape her.
He listened.
The sun shifted, the same sun that had marked them on each other all those months ago.
The same sun.
The words became sound, then vibration. They felt them rather than heard them. Her groaning was an earth tremour.
Finally, silence. One that seems without end. Streets storming with revolution shouts fall still. A thousand lovers are interrupted at.. the.. ah.. don't stop..I'm..going..to..
In the room next door, Mr. Fitzpatrick and Mrs. Fitzpatrick have just sat down to breakfast at their fold out Formica table. Mr Fitzpatrick looks at his wife, and finds it impossible to ask her to pass the marmalade. He can't open his mouth to speak. Mrs. Fitzpatrick catches the puzzled expression on his face, and is momentarily endeared, remembering in passing the feeling of sped up pulse that made her say yes all those years ago. She smiles.
'An angel passes.' She says.

Un ange passé.
Malaika pasi.
An angel passes.