Surface Detail

No longer. She rarely flew far from her roost to find somebody to kill and eat, and usually waited until she felt such pangs of hunger that she no longer had any real choice in the matter. It was a delicate balance and a tricky choice, trying to decide whether her grumbling, empty guts were causing her more discomfort as the day went on than the ever-present shoals and flocks of aches and pains that seemed to squall through her like some bizarre parasitic infection.

Her status as a soul-releasing angel had slipped, she suspected. People came from all around to be blessed by her, but there was not the same level of worship she had enjoyed before; she no longer appeared almost anywhere, to anyone. Now you had to be able to make your way to near where she lived. That changed things. She had become a localised service.

She suspected the demons had finally got wise and were arranging for certain individuals to be more or less presented to her for death and release. She did not want to think what unlikely favours or perverse rewards the demons exacted for this. And, frankly, she no longer cared. She was glad that it really did seem to release this or that particular soul from its suffering, but all the same, it was just what she did, what she had no choice but to do.

The last interesting thing had been when she’d gone to see the uber-demon. She’d been wondering about the glitch she’d discovered, the patch of hill and cliff and factory that had simply disappeared, and – after what had felt like weeks of mulling it over – had finally summoned up the strength to fly to where the vast demon sat and ask it what had happened.

“A failure,” he’d roared at her, as she’d flapped painfully in front of him, still careful not to get too close to those terrible, body-crushing hands. “Something went wrong, wiped everything from that area. Landscape, buildings, demons, the tormented; all just ceased to be. Released more of the undeserving wretches in a blink of an eye than you’ve set free in all the time you’ve worked for me! Ha! Now fuck off and stop troubling me with matters even I have no control over!”

Now this.

She felt different. The pod she was hanging in felt different, and it was as though all the pain she had taken on was evaporating. A sort of back-surge of relief, well-being – almost sexual, nearly orgasmic in its contrasting intensity – washed through her, sloshing back and forth within her as though she was the hollow presence here, not the pod-roost. The sensation slowly lost energy and dampened down, leaving her feeling clean and good for the first time in longer than she could recall.

She found that she had let go of the perch, but was still hanging where she had been. Her body seemed different too; no longer so great and terrible and fierce; no longer Hell’s dark angel of release. Trying to look at it, she realised she couldn‘t really see what she had become instead, either; it was as though everything about her had become pixelated, smoothed out. She had some sort of body, but it somehow contained all the possibilities of every sort of body: four-legged mammal, two-legged mammal, bird, fish, snake… and every other type of being, including ones she had no names for, as though she was some brand new embryo, cells so few and so fixated on simple, continual multiplication that they had not yet decided what to become.

She floated to the limit of the pod. It all looked and felt different: smaller, quieter – completely silent – and without the stink she realised had been in her nostrils for as long as she’d been back. The air in here now was probably completely neutral, odour-free, but that absence smelled like the sweetest, freshest mountain meadow breeze to her after what she’d been used to for so long.

There was, however, no exit, no way out of the pod, even where the hole at the foot had been. This troubled her less than she would have anticipated. The walls of the pod were neither soft nor hard; they were untouchable. She reached for them but it felt as though there was some perfectly clear glass between her and them. She struggled even to tell what colour the walls were.

Such relief, such relief, no longer to be in pain. She closed her eyes, feeling things wind up, wind down, go into a sort of static, stored, steady state.

Something was happening; something had happened. She would not even start to think about what it might be or what it might imply or mean. Hope, she recalled, had to be resisted at all costs.

A sort of buzzing filled her body and her head. Behind her already closed eyes she felt herself starting to drift away. If this was death, she had time to think – real, full, proper, no-waking-up-from death – then it was not so terrible.

After all that Hell had made her suffer and made her witness and made her complicit with, she might finally be getting to die in some sort of peace.

Too good to be true, she thought woozily. She’d believe it when… well…

xGSV Dressed Up To Party