Scene Six: Love Me

“ROACH.”

the scream is so loud it could be heard for miles, but only by him. it screeches in his head until his ears ring. fuck, fuck, did he forget something last night? he trudges out of bed and runs as un-runfully as he can towards her. she forces him to know where she is at all times, a deep red aura that can be seen and felt through all barriers, including his eyelids. Sister Elbis, matron (only via next-of-kindship) of the angelhome. this angelhome. he doesn’t know if there’s any more of them outside. anymore. he isn’t allowed to know what’s outside. it doesn’t stop him from trying to peer through the half-inch-wide slits between the planks in the windows.

“this is FUCKING DISGUSTING.”

i can hear you i can hear you i can hear you you can stop screaming directly into my cerebrum now please.

“did you do this?” she hisses as he instantly shrinks beneath her. she points at a collection of cockroaches scrambling across the kitchen floor and cupboards.

“n-no? these are just more bugs-”

“WHAT kind of bugs?”

“roaches..?”

“mhm. like you, isn’t that right, roach?”

it’s not my fault you let this house become a hovel. it’s not my fault you killed the archangel. it’s not my fault we’re down here. it’s not, right?

“well, clean it up.” she demands. he goes to grab the vacuum from the closet, where there’d no doubt be *other* bugs that she wouldn’t even scoff at, but she grabs his shoulder with all the force of her twisting claws before he can make any ground towards it.

“where are you going?” the tips of her black nails dig into his shoulderblades. “do it with your mouth.”

“wwhat?”

“get rid of them, yourself.”

“ii’m not gonna- just use the vacuum. i’m not gonna eat bugs off the floor.”

“yes, you are. because you know what happens if you don’t.”

he does. he remembers more than he remembers anything, even heaven, only feeling the darkness and the spines and the constriction for weeks, months, however long she wouldn’t tell -- time is controllable when you don’t teach it, after all -- and he felt it all every second as his bristles stuffed and bent at the edges, each hair feeling like a little knife stabbing through the follicles and he couldn’t even picture what was still outside or where he was or a world existing behind the emptiness of visual void. she’d move it sometimes, just so he’d never be sure of where they were, or what was happening in the outside world, the real perceivable world, while he was in his little pocket. he can practically feel it still, now. but no, that’s just her.

smacking him over the head. “Get to work, roach.” and he drifts to his knees instantly, fucking coward.

a boot or paw or whatever the fuck pushes him down by the back, purposefully digging into the messed up bend in the back of his spine that he got from his fall that he’s permanently stuck with now. the matron pushes his head down into the corner tiles, where most of the bugs have coalesced over time, hiding under food or running in circles, behind boxes, playing or nesting or whatever it is they do. clueless little beasts.

it hurts, please don’t make me do it. they’re so cute, so stupid. what did they do what did they do what did they

his tongue drools out and picks one up on its own. the roach crawls in of its own volition. leaving his tongue and crawling down his throat, little legs scratching like the edges of a tortilla chip all the way until gravity takes it and he has to feel the plunk of it falling into his stomach acid. feels it scream. it tastes like mold and paper and liver and nothing and it makes his stomach beg to throw up but he has to swallow that when it comes up too or else it’ll be worse. it can always be worse and it will be worse if he doesn’t. he clenches his eyes tight so he doesn’t have to see it, close off one port of entry and pretend it isn’t happening and he’s not doing anything wrong, if you can’t see it it’s not real and if it’s not real there’s nothing to care about, nothing’s happening. even as more come faster and faster too fast to crawl on their own and because of which crowding at the entry hole of his esophagus, all trying to force their way through the tiny gap but streaming over each other like an enraged crowd, but he can’t stop, and his mouth fills. and he lets them slowly, agonizingly find their way down one by one, stretching his throat and shaking his entire body with the weight of their acidic death throes.

“hhheeehehe, goood little roachie.”

he doesn’t stop until he feels nothing in his mouth and nothing entering it, and he opens his eyes to find himself licking the bare floor clean. so much so that he can now see the reflection of his dust-matted tongue. if he could stop shaking at least. he can’t keep himself up any longer. he curls inwards, huttled in the corner, seizing from disgust. he shuts it out but he can still see her, still feel her staring. sees her getting close, closer, through his shut eyelids, no good deed ever.

“no no no, get the fuck up.”

the red specter grabs him and the whole world starts moving. he can only see it, so the world starts to revolve between it. he tries to open his eyes, but now he can’t.

“if any of the other angelings see you out here.. it’s gonna be a fucking thorn in my side. you, we only keep you here cause you’re fun, else you’d be kicked out on the street and swept off in within minutes. y’know that?”

it throws him somewhere. it feels soft, but he can’t be sure if he can even feel. it could be a box of caltrops or a closet filled with spikes or a. a.

he feels levitated, distant. a brown specter thats shaped like him appears crumpled next to the red one. the red one touches it and everything zooms out. he feels something, way off from his body. the brown specter curls in on itself. the red one gets on top, by the little aura’s face, scarred with achromacity, open-mouthed from a swarm. a pillow appears, stained wet by- something.

and echo. the only sound he’s ever heard. resounding. “perfect.”

the red ghost never stops. the red ghost goes and goes until the brown one is crushed bit by bit, dimmer and dimmer, until it dissipates into the black ether, as dust.


in the morning he’s still nothing. he’s only graced that ‘nothing’ is alone.

Scene Five: roachrage

he’s awoken to the loudest screaming he’s ever heard. inches from his ears and only getting louder. he hit something hard, and now his body aches to move, even just to push himself back up. his twigish joints creak and when he stands up, he opens his eyes, and he’s standing smack dab in the middle of a main street intersection.

the worst
possible place
for an angel
in the city of life.

his landing must’ve shocked some systems, if no one’s tried splatting him against the hood of their car yet. the people crowd around and he can feel their eyes all rave at him, searing into his back and his front and everywhere he looks. most already left their vehicles to watch The Boy Who Left a Crater in his Wake. that’ll be a fun story to tell their kids before they drown in black death. he hates being stared at so much.

more honking, incessantly so, from cars in the back that don’t know the gravity of the situation at place here. they all look at him and he knows they can see what he really is, its so obvious, so blatant, so unhideable. he vomits out black and blood and there’s no question left. he needs to get out of here before someone does the rest of the world a favor and puts him down. his legs struggle to even stand, wiggling like poorly crafted stilts, but he has to run out of the way as fast as he possibly can no matter how much it rips through his nerves, no matter how much it should be impossible. his wings spread out on their own and he runs for it. he hears indistinguishable yells directed at him as he gets further and further from the source, but none dare follow- you never know what’ll happen when you follow a talbite. his only form of protection, like a real bug, is pretending to be one of the predators. but even that doesnt work well, always. when they see the bristles and the limp antannae and the way he crumples in on himself, unhideable unhideable un-

blinding streelights begin, stunningly so. against the blackness of concrete shadow it’s the only guidance visible, so he runs further into them, dashing through the vision-fogged streets as his legs scream for him to collapse again, until an alleyway appears a ways ahead, scuttled in between two busted up shitholes, spotlit by a small crack in the highway roof. he runs for it and throws himself into the brick wall with all the built-up force of his panicked sprint. he falls into the ground. sweet, cold, real ground -- even if concrete -- the bottom, where everything good as in bad rests. perfect for him, why did you even look up in the first place? it’s so far now he couldn’t remember if he tried.

rebar stars scatter in a steel sky. a concrete abyss littered with hanging threats, streaming in nonsensical directions. a greyscale null. he thinks of the birds, circling and swarming and singing and screaming. his stomach growls in pain. oh how he’d feast on a bird. pluck out its feathers and rip open its chest and shove the meat in raw, devouring every piece of the carcass until it was only bone. it would taste divine. his teeth chatter. cold and predation.

something bats at his face, buzzing around like a retard on adderall and whacking roach over and over. he hisses, but it cant hear him. he readies for it to come back as it patrols the alleyway’s dumpsters. honestly, a cute little dumpster diving spaz. it may be cute, but he learned at least one thing up there. it comes back to ram into his head and SMACK and in one second it goes from buzzing brimming with joyful -?- life to the most miniscule benign death. his palm is now left with the corpse, and the juice. green splatter and little bits of black flesh. fly’s large enough to fit in your palm, but when they splatter they’re almost nothing. the meat glistening with blood is

lapping at it, getting all of it inside. trash-tasting flesh with a hint of tangy steak. he doesn’t care, he’s so hungry. he crawls on all fours to a couple bits that fell onto the ground and licks them up. he can’t think. so hungry. so full. every little bit feels like a piece added back. we’re so empty and we need to be filled. he’s in the street. moving without thinking again. he’s lost, but there’s more trash, and in the trash there are swathes of flies. marinating in it. waiting for him.

i’m tired. so tired i can’t feel anything. there’s rustling everywhere, and i’m terrifed of what could be inside any of the sound bubbles. this is my place, my trash, but one bug’s trash is another man’s trophy kill. have to move all the time, can’t stay in one cesspit for too long. stagnation, hibernation, cocooning, all spread yourself into reality. like spores, infectious invisible mold in the fabric of reality itself, they say. and that’s what they hate the most. i move a lot anyway. its safer, and full of more potential, more than i take from it.

corpses of tiny insects lie before me, on my level now that i’m down on the ground. vivisected, torn to tatters, all. how you cut something so small is-

my claws drip with viscous green liquid, bright like acid. too much to look at. i put my hands down on the ground to push myself up and i feel pools of the same blood. but i need to get up so i let the stain seep into my skin. everything is astray, dumpsters lie emptied while their contents lie scattered and ripped through by something feral or insane. the trash is trashed, haha. so am i. i see puddles from recent rain which reflect myself as i try to leave wherever this is. my reflection’s left side is taken by acid-bath-victim green splotches and the usual filth over the rest of him. roaches on his clothes, also torn up. if this were a cartoon i’d be emanating visible stink lines from all sides. i couldn’t imagine what it’d be like if i didn’t love the smell of filth. the specific designation of filth not your own but filth taken with you- rippling through everywhere you go from where you took it. a virus of filth-stink. i miss gathering up bugs and leaving them in human’s housing. child angel games, no time for goblinry when those bugs could be food and those houses could be food danger.

at least they have trams. i tell myself every single time i’m at a tram stop. they’re amazing, four dozen cars attached so you can move to another at any time, emergency button to open doors, back seats where it’s easy to hide with a hoodie, and dimmed lighting. what’s not to love? the people, the staring, the noise. that’s why you go at night, when there’s always at least a few empty cars, and all the stragglers just want to get to whatever normal people do at the end of their days, and have no energy to notice two spiny little bumps in the top of your hat or the claws on your bare feet. who can afford shoes nowadays anyway?

i take it until it ends, blaring red “LAST STOP. EXIT NOW” and loud electrohydraulic hissing into my sensitive ears. i’m the only person who gets off onto the small wooden platform, the only person left on it, evidently. the ocean extends out for miles forward and on both sides, a clean little ending point with railings and benches and binoculars for looking into the emptiness. this is probably the closest to ‘nature’ you can get, down here. and despite the unknowable amounts of tar oil and chemicals swirling in the water along the border, it’s gorgeous.

he sits on the middle bench, where you can experience the depths-adjacent on both ends. he shifts a little and hits a spike meant to ‘separate seating’ and pokes himself in the butt. already going awry he sits and huffs and regains his calm before he explodes in a pufferfish burst of spines and bristles. the smell of the sea and of gas overwhelm his nose but that he loves, that is the best part of it all. focus on that, and everything else can go away.

it’s dark, but there’s enough of the moon peeking through now that he’s at the edges of country and time that it glimmers off the surface of the ocean beautiful and celestial. he can even see himself easier, without the separation of mirror falsities. his arms are boney and burnt, like his legs. his chitin protects his insides from another death he would no doubt experience without it. parts of it are chipped, or cracked, some small, some large enough that you can see the dying pale flesh hidden behind it. he needs to see a doctor, but has no reference of where something like him would find one. doctors are just proxy cleaners. where could he even start? his phone had any and all of his contacts, and he hasn’t seen that in months- she still has it, probably. and hopefully he’ll never see her again.

it's so much easier to think here, his heart isnt even screaming at him. it’s impossible to get a fully clear head anywhere in the city. that can be good but-

a shiver shakes up his spine. not having to sense anything except your own thoughts is nice, but it’s so easy to get lost in it.

the moonlight ahead of him disappears. darkness takes hold and his heart begins its rapid jumping again. he can’t turn around.

he tries, but he can’t.

a sharp, all-encompassing whisper.

“lovely to see you again, darling.”

his body locks him to the bench. he can’t do
anything,

“c’mon roach, even you’re better than this. running away? going up?”

long, red claws lock around his throat from behind him. he can’t even feel the pain, only the constriction. it clenches with each of her drawn out words.

“insects. dont. escape. the hive."

Scene Four: The Sky is a Hole.

a pleasant green liquid sits steaming in an equally green mug. it emanates a thick miasma of strong matcha, it’s so much better than the coffee at the chain cafe. the smell of distaste doesn’t dirty it a bit, it doesn’t even exist. it is so perfect to roach’s senses that he’s scared to take a sip. to chance risking the loss of the aroma. it makes his antannae twitch.

“drink up, it’s not that hot.”

roach curls into himself on her beautiful red couch, which might be one of the softest surfaces he’s ever felt in his entire life. it’s like a bed, and a couch, and a pillow all wrapped into one. he could just curl up and die here and he would be so comfortable. but, fuck he wants that tea.

“do you- have more?”

“at least try it first, before you make judgments.” she laughs a little. soft and practiced, but shining with a little bit of throatiness from the same ichor roach has in his. its a nice change of scenery for once. “but yes, there is.”

he picks up the cup and he can’t force the shake in his hand to stop. anxious picking it up to his lips, knowing all the consequences spilling can bring. he drinks a sip of burning hot liquid, and the heat is nothing compared to the taste, he’s never tasted anything so good before, anything not hinted with a teaspoon of pollutants and trash- he drinks more and more, squirming inside at the delicious liquid scalding its way down his scaly throat. more and more and more right as he’s about to finish Velv reaches forward suddenly and he jumps backwards into himself, throwing the cup forward and oh fuck she’s gonna hate him already after they just met and- she catches it in the bottom of her wing. she gently places the cup on the table, making no noise in doing so. she stares at him in the manner that forces you to return it. he has no idea what could be behind her eyes.

“why’re you so skittish, roach?”

easy question. “lot of angels following me... you never know what they could do, anything could happen, n-no offense of course-”

“but are you not one yourself?”

“well... look at me. not exactly angel material, a cockroach.”

velv looks deep in thought. anxious thought.

“but you are. am i not an angel for being built in the image of the rodent, a fellow pest? the ziotithe ecosystem- the collective. it has many parts. and all are necessary for our advance.” she reaches out a distinctly humanoid arm, with ratlike claws for nails, and pets roach’s wildly unkempt hair. “you are a sweet thing, bug. like the moths and the rats and the mantises and the flies and the anythings. you are full of potential, like all tablites and all non-humans.”

he shuffles in place. it feels like a class on religion, or an archangel’s whip.

“angels aren’t different than any other creature-”

“exactly!” she perks upright.

“no as- as in, i don’t think i care if i’m an angel.”

“well you are.”

“i’m a bug.”

she nods at the obvious statement. the questions are rough, but the tea is so good that it makes it okay. it's strong, and chokes, but part sweetness and a mint miasma bleeding into your eyes. he needs every last drop of sweet nectar. he lifts the cup higher and higher and lets it flow until he knows every last drop is gone, and he savors the aftertaste stained on his tongue. the second he places it down Velv fills it to brimming, before the steam can fully escape his throat. the topic of Andrea stings. he can’t tell when a good time to bring her up again will be, if there ever will be one.

he uses the break in conversation to look out the windows at the new surroundings he was suddenly placed in. several tiers up, at a level he couldn’t know, the view stands in utter defial of what stands below them. the moon shines down on the hollow middle of a circling megabuilding, where it lights up the multiple nest-cabin attachments built on afterwards into its sides. trees litter the pathways circling down and down and up and up, trees and flowers and plants that didn’t only grow in concrete. he can’t fathom how Velv had her girlfriend staying down there, when this was right here.

cawing sounds screech from somewhere above them, moving faster than roach or velv could. birds. birds, up here? this entire time, in a land of no animals, the birds were waiting up here? this unlocks so much- what other animals could be here, now unleashed for me to study? and then, why are they here? a thousand cullings of a quadrillion animals, the extinction of multiple species and the locked hoarding of multiple more, and they left them up here? the cleaners kill the angels, but if the avians are here, the most infectious creatures other than humans, why are there angels? why is there any life when their enemy sits this close? he misses when he had his notebook. when he had a bag. he’d keep it in that, write down all these thoughts, draw everything into reality inside of it, all these new discoveries. things he ought to remember that’ll do him good, those things his rotting little ichor brain alway refuses to remember by itself. his head feels like its going to crack open in two.

“quite different up here, huh?”

“y-yeah it’s.” the question bites again. “i’ve never seen anything like it.”

“i’m glad you like it.”

she smiles. she assumes. and just as quickly, the smile turns to a frown. “it wasn’t always like this. these huts used to be bullpens for angels, in the times when we first came. huge cages grafted onto less-important civilian buildings to imprison us, keep us close to those who hate us. before they found out how it spread. the worse ones, the ‘dangerous’ ones, like the ziotithe still on the lower levels, were kept all in spaces like this. hell, everything up to here used to be considered lower zones once, and it took many, many years of movement and reconstruction after the exodus for it to be made a safe place for anyone, and especially to make it hospitable enough to construct these little havens for these angels, us angels, to nest, against everything.”

“but what if they find you?” it’s always the nagging question, everywhere as far as he knows. its a known risk at any moment. any second your veil could be pierced and in moments they’ll be on you. its a fact of life. but here feels so separate, so different and displaced from every aspect of life roach knows to be real. but they’re still ziotithe.

“they don’t.”

its impossible to hide from the cleaners, he knows that much. any disguise can be beaten through. they know how to force the evil out of you, angels would say, have you rip yourself apart so all they have to do is clean up the stain. he knows that’s in part not true, just fearful rumoring from newer exiles, but their fiendishly searching eye is unwavering, at all times. they are always searching for you.

she speaks so he doesn’t have to. “they leave us alone, here. as long as we stay in our nests, and don’t go near the humans, they let us rest, here.”

“how’d you come down to see Andrea then?”

“you can only go even lower. and you need to be careful still.”

he shuffles, he feels less safe with each word that spills from her face. and her face. it's so clean, so porcelain white, so angelic. untainted. is it a mask? if not, how else could she have rid herself of their filths? ziotithe are the dirt.

“i,” she speaks utterly as if she can read his mind. most likely she is. “have cleansed myself of such disease.”

she’s careful not to look him in the eyes as she says it, but he can see the smugness in her cheeks. another fault of anthropomorphism, the body language. he’s sick of people being able to tell what he’s thinking with movements he can’t even control, and he’s sick of the assumptions a lack of such afford you. constant looks, assumptions of illness. the only good is that it tells you what others are thinking as well.

drones sweep down the centre through the window, running to patrols of which he’s watched and heard scream overhead of him for years, trying to put him down. they don’t for a second stop to survery the dozens of outcroppings of talbisal hovels. it wraps around like a veil, half-made, unwoven but hanging on by tattered threads that are not allowed to be resewn or undone. a cracked two-way mirror.

his wings flutter in the small space between his back and the couch, the feeling of plush cushioning encasing them is driving him crazy now that the soft quiet peace has broken and he can feel all the senses everywhere in front of his mind again, and they’re tingling at every one of us bristles and the smell of the tea fades by the second. he doesn’t realize how long they sit in silence until she breaks it.

“you could stay here, you know. they have many- many rooms, many roommates, many vancancies in the holes in the blanket. i could find you one.”

she looks down at him and he looks up at her, and the distance has never been more pronounced. she sits on her armchair, one long, muscular leg crossed over the other. her wings drape around her shoulders in a shielding gesture. and even though she’s right here, only a few feet across from him and his seat, she feels a mile away. further than his archangels and further than the Him. roach shakes his head, there’s not many words left in his head, the day has consumed so much of him that he can only feel himself and the twinging pangs of exhaustion eroding his nervous system.

his face slams into cushion, and he’s ripped from his thoughts, startled straight.

“you can sleep here tonight” her blank mask turns into a smile again, as if it had finally remembered what it’s supposed to do. “we have an empty room right now, and we can talk more about this in the morning. i need some rest too after.. all of today.”

down the hall they go, up the tightly wrapped stairs into a group of rooms that reek of forgotten-death silently. he settles into the bed he shows her, it looks nice. the moon shines directly through his window, and its truly a sight to behold, the way it shines on his chitin, waxing iridescent. she says something else about potential that can’t reach his ears. when he sleeps he hears static, becomes static, her voice is white noise.

you won’t be seeing me tomorrow. you know that. don’t you?

this is just like the cleaning homes, just like the exodus. only slow and hollow instead of quick and vicious. well roaches aren’t dying whispers. roaches are unkillable, roaches withstand the blast.

Scene Three: Angel Blood.

the street was arid and empty, like a desert ghost town was plucked and placed right in the middle of a city. it isn’t normally this empty. it can’t be. just last week he was crashing out here on a strangers couch, and the streets bustled with ziotithe galore. led lights streamed from inside windows, bathing it in beautiful colours other than the city’s yellows, and the talk was never-ending, a never-ceasing proof of their existence. roach can never truly be safe here, in the city of life, but it felt like for a moment, here, then, that there was a pocket of reality carved out specifically for something like him, and it was blissful.

and now, it lies dead. a trash can rolls through the street like a tumbleweed with a random gust of wind. the houses creak like a dead man, all. he knocks on the door of the girl he stayed with once before. she was always up at this time of night, making some music or making tea for another trash angel she dragged through the streets in the middle of the night to sleep on her couch. he knocks on the door harder, louder. now she might think he’s the cops though.

“Andrea? it’s roach..”

he knocks again, twice, but he never recieves an answer. he knocks again. black tears welling in the bottom of his eyes obscure his vision but he keeps knocking. he’d break the door if he tried any harder. maybe she can’t hear because his fists are too small and she’s on the second floor. maybe she’s at a rave, maybe she’s finally playing it, maybe-

maybe the black stains on the front steps are new.

the concrete hurts his feet, but it always does. the constant stinging in his ankles another droning noise in the whole of it. he never bothers to look at the bed of coals he walks on. and it is, black as coal, here. and it burns like heat death. down the street, all the houses look the same. beige, two-storied, bifurcated, dead. no colour except the searing orange of the lights which even they are dulled here, unable to reflect off the mass amounts of stained ichor in the asphalt.

roach screams and its the only sound. he feels the whole neighbourhood, while standing on just one person’s porch. using his battered chitin-armoured body, he forces the door down. exertion almost sends him to the ground immediately but he needs to see her. he’s never felt worry like this for another thing before, and it fills him wholely. he tramples up the cramped staircase to the top level. vines of tar creeps up the walls as he creeps up the staircase. he slows with each step. does he actually want to see whats up there? you can still go back down, leave this street and be the last to forget its name, roach. but that’s never truly been an option. so he keeps going.

☢

a beautiful insect is pinned to a corkboard. its bright scaled wings of red and orange and thin little streaks of gold, iridescent under the table lamp, splay out on the soft surface. while it’s body- tall, black and segmented, lies centered and striked through. a gaping hole, pinning and evaporating chitinous flesh so all may see it. its wings spread as if alive, but in its eyes are nothing but black. a shining thousand pupils made dead and lightless. it will never buzz again. but at least its colour grants wonderous, shining life to the walls it has been hung upon.

☢

roach didn’t know her that good. but she was lovely for the moments he did. she had this, little rabbit keychain on her belt that would jingle whenever she was moving around messing with her synths or cooking. she told him she loved rabbits. she was sad she never got to see one before the zoo closed down. she wouldn’t have made it inside, since they always watch the animals more, just in case. he didn’t tell her that, though.

he doesn’t know the rest of them. most must’ve been carted off in the night, for there to be this little of them left. these are just the stragglers, the ones that didnt fit and got to die close to home. is that a comfort? that at least they weren’t taken to the cleaning stations? thoughts choke and he vomits black bile onto the street like his brothers and sisters and everyone did as they fell. the bodies stack on top of each other in his mind as he walks to the beginning of the road, footsteps heavier than they’ve ever been.

he took andrea’s phone, when he was searching through the houses. it’s this cute pink one with not much inside, not even a pin, definitely stolen. but it was hers then, so i look inside. dozens of phone numbers, dont know who’s from this neighbourhood, and whose call would get picked up by a cleaner in a belongings disposal site in some lab. he calls the first one with hearts next to its name that he sees.

ring

ring

the street is even quieter when one sound pierces through all.

ring

“babe? i’m in the middle of cooking right now, whatdyou need?”

he can’t believe it actually picked up. he doesn’t know what to say. never planned for something like, this. just say the most important thing first, i guess. “hey.”

silence responds from the other end.

“who is this?”

“it’s- uh- my name’s roach.”

“i found your girlfriend. dead.”

and what a terrible way to say it.

“i’m so sorry”

“what happened?”

“they- they cleaned out the whole street. everyone’s gone.”

“everyone?”

“as far as i can see. i looked-” he chokes. he doesn’t want to cry. the black tears only burn the image deeper in his head. “everywhere.”

“no, no. they wouldn’t- that’s. they just left em there??”

“they took the rest away, i guess. its dead. not even a single fly left.”

“i’m on my way. i need to see her.”

“i thought so”

the phone hangs up abruptly. roach sits on the curb.

☢

visual static appears, burning through reality in approach from above, and so he knows she’s here. hiding, as he should’ve been. it falls flying onto the ground next to him. droning buzzing takes over, and his vision turns to black, before everything is normal, and a woman stands before him, in the middle of the road. she towers over roach sitting on the curb. her wings are ash and she’s wearing torn-up jeans and a loose graphic tee with the words “ANGEL BLOOD” written on it, despite her majesticity, she looks like she just got out of bed and ran here. her eyes are beady white pearls and they stare down at him like she’s not sure what he is, or what any of this is. he stands up.

“i’m roach”

“Velv.”

he scratches at himself, putting to rest his bristles’ panicky whining.

“she’s in her house”

“yeah. i saw”

“oh.”

you can barely even hear the wind here. because it’s not here. it’s so still, like everything even remotely related to life had been wiped away in one slate, and the air and the mere idea of presence was included.

“i didn’t know you could-”

not the point

she’s sitting on the curb now, and so is he. next to each other, but far enough apart. just in case. its getting darker, you can tell because the orange lamps burn brighter.

“how’d you know her?” she asks.

“she helped me out when i got jumped one time.” you can’t even remember the whole truth of the story now. but it’s close.

“sounds like her. we did that a lot. it’s how we met, even.”

“that’s cute. like a, saved each other type thing?”

“like she got me out so i return the favour. like i learned from her what loving as a person and as a whole really are. like. like. like i wouldn’t be what i am without. her.”

this one isn’t your story

you’re just the messenger.

she cries into the pavement. she was just at home, cooking breakfast for herself because she was too busy to be there today. and now everything is gone. everything here. everything in her heart. everything that was about to matter. she can feel all the ichor of the dead inside herself.

he, slowly, cautiously, wraps his arms around her. they’re warm and light, the bristles brush her neck nicely. he seems like a nice kid.

Velv stands. and picks the boy up with her. he’s built like a bag of bread.

“you have somewhere else to go, right?”

“not really. i don’t even know how i got here today.”

kids. always so mysterious.

she pulls him over her shoulder. easy weight for her huge branching wings to carry.

“um-”

she pulls off the street, slingshotting into the air. she looks down and sees Andrea’s house, smashed and slated. she sees the alter she built as she first landed, next to her body again. she sings the prayer Andrea taught her, a prayer to the dead to invoke the living. she can’t think about the friends gone and the whole deleted. the less they’re known, the less they will hurt. so she thinks about

the stew waiting at home.
the last angel on a street of the dead, about to be having it with her.
she thinks about the wind on her face, and the birds who’d once be here, as they fly tiers up, all the way into her nest.

Scene Two: Angelfate.

black liquid swirls in a cup. watery foam trickles at the top, even though he didn’t ask for it, it contaminates it. for a second he gets so angry he thinks about throwing the cup at the barista but then he thinks the word “barista” and he’s inside their head and he just wants to get these orders fucking over with so he can go for a smoke because in this body he’s fiending so goddamn fucking bad and then he’s back, and remembers his place. it’s not their fault. a person probably doesn’t even care about something like this, maybe they even like it. he forgets he’s not a person, sometimes. even when it’s obvious. he puts the lid back on the cup so the filthy aroma of dried-out cream doesn’t creep its way to his face.

it feels like everyone’s staring at him, but he’s not even tweaking right now, hasn’t had the coffee, hasn’t had his- god he wishes he had his meds right now. okay maybe he is tweaking then. but the man on the laptop keeps looking up and he can’t tell the difference between different human facial expressions because he only learned how to do them himself not read them but it looks like the man keeps staring right at his back, right at his “collar”, and won’t stop, and the barista looked at him for a really long time when he delivered the coffee and more people are starting to flow in by the second and any could see him and look at him and ruin him, halo buzzes with his emotional peak and he has to leave before anyone notices before a barista calls the cops before cleaner comes in before whatever his bad luck sends him next arrives so he practically runs through the front door and back into the intersection. his buzzing is nothing compared to the sounds of the city, at the very least. it could just be a phone, or a butt plug, if its even heard under the crashing of construction and the bleating of the thousands of metal sheep. the way it drowns out his buzz soothes him so much more already.

he grabs hold of a light post, buzzing almost as loud as halo but doing the opposite of his, gleaming warm orange down into the dark streets. he asks a stranger for the time and they hiss at him to get away and he cowers away until he crashes into the walls of some shop. he needs the time. to know where to go. you can never accurately tell the time yourself here. shadows of tiers of highways and brutal infrastructure that loom on top ruin any hope for a natural clock for every single living thing stuck in this place. roach only comes out at night, normally, when there isn’t even a crack of a sunlight, because the heat of the day and the bustle of the workday and the everything of human routine built around the day still persists through it, where in the night there’s only the nice calm of stores owned by other night owls, comfortably buzzing neon, and the bustle of nightlife only if you go to the right streets. he misses it so bad now, he can tell its not night because everyone’s driving and talking and there’s not an inch of space for quiet and he can feel the heat in his insides and in the hundreds of little bristles of ‘hair’ covering his skin. its not like he can’t handle the pressure but they scream at him hothothot loudloudloud too wet and he cant think through it and has to move without thinking and

in his daze, he tumbles into something bigger.

it stares down at him with wide eyes, rimmed with centennial raccoon bags just like his. except theirs are bigger and the white of their eyes is blood red and they seem to shine off the sun where his get dulled. he can’t stop staring. you’re not supposed to stare at people. it feels like a hypnotist’s trap. though he’s never been to a hypnotist. that’d give up too much control, seems like letting yourself get taken by the psych ward nurses. the personthing ahead of him stares back and roach shivers. its hard to appear normal and non-targetable when your minds going a mile a minute and your body panics at every particulate.

“you’re interesting.”

“am i?”

“mhm.” it nods.

words spill from his mouth, he doesn’t ever have enough time to think about what to say next. “idon’tknow what you mean”

“little roach.” its claws wrap around his shoulder slowly, one by one, emphasizing it’s creeping clench. it leans in closer, so no one passing on the street could hear their voice, which hisses out fire like he seeps ichor.

“i can show you what a real angel looks like, roach.”

“ohthatsokay i can seeyourightnow you’re very-” he moves his face out of her flowey red coat-robe-thing and he can now actually get a good look at her and her form is so large and encompassing and shadowing miles above him and “-taaaall holyshit”

“HA” the angel bursts out a chortle so loud roaches eyes scamper around them in fear. can’t be heard, even now. especially now- how can no one tell this is an angel? the humans are all walking past them still, around them like they’re just a modern art statue placed in the way of the pavement.

“you’re a funny one. no wonder you look like... this” it keeps chuckling like theres an inside joke roach couldn’t know. her hands claw deeper into roach’s flesh as she laughs.

“hey.. don’t say that..”

deeper.

“what? you’re the one who chose to look like a roach.”

“i didn’t! and i like it..” you’re not even talking back to her. you’re just comforting yourself so you don’t cry from her claws.

“and do you know what cockroaches are good for, roach?”

he’s good for a lot, actually, he thinks. he can play mario kart crazy good and cook when he has the chance to have ingredients and- ok thats about it but-

“feeding on, and killing.”

“um-”

“which are you?”

“idon’t know what you want me to say”

“you know what you are best.”

“feeding.”

“that’s what i thought.”

now they’re in a building, probably somewhere on the same street, maybe across the city. debris and filth lie across the worn and dusty floors. trash left in corners, slots for modern lights and candelabra absconded and erased, or taken by the slipping tar which wraps around the would-be living room like a sheet of plastic film. while he’s still taking the whole of the nest in, its voice comes from behind. he doesn’t want to look at it. it whispers into his neck.

“mi casa. su casa, little bug.”

a disembodied force sends him tumbling into the blackroom. he crashes and immediately his wings flutter and his vision turns grey and he tumbles to get up out of the ichor, but his legs are weak and small and aren’t strong enough to pull him up before he slips and falls again, and this time his body sticks to the floor like a rat in a glue trap. it burns at his skin. pulling his arms up, trails of burning black immediately pull him back down. if only he’d hit leg day enough.

she pulls his face out of the tar before he chokes, its strings yield to her presence. a mirror appears in front of him from nowhere, resting against squalid rotten countertops, and he’s forced to watch as she pulls his mirror image’s hair -- black as her ichor -- taut and his spine bends just as tightly as she folds him backwards.

“p-please don’t kill me we’re both angels, you don’t have to-”

a boot crushes down on the back of his neck, digging spinningly.

“you’re not like me, roach.” it’s like she’s trying to peel his head off his body. “but of course i wouldn’t kill one of ‘my own’, we’re in this together after all-”

it leans in until its dripping tongue reaches for his ears, reaches in.

“though, there’s still so much bad that i would do.”

he’s baking in the liquid. her boot jamsand his face is forced into it and then his eyes are burning from it and its running down his choking throat and he cant force it back and he can’t move his limbs, it fills his throat and he’s filled to the brim by an uncontrollable, unformable mass.

the fluff of her wings drag around his underside and pull him backward through the ichor as she enters behind him. pulling, tearing through the ink with his claws does nothing but occasionally scratch the waterlogged floorboards. she grabs onto him with the soft of her red wings and the sharp of her dirty nails and he’s choking down ichor from all sides, everywhere. his bristles matte underneath it, his body clenches around the sheer force of it. he can see nothing but he can feel only her. his limbs tremble and the earth around them shatters in half and her eyes are staring at him even though he cant see and and he

wakes up in an abandoned building, on a dirty, bloodstained mattress. nothing exists in it but him and it, and a boarded window bleeding with the sounds of cars and people. his collar lies silent around his neck, cold. he opens his mouth and tar trails out where bile should be. water. so thirsty. his mouth burns like he’s never tasted it. he bolts out of bed and for the door, he barely manages to have enough force to push it open but it cracks off a hinge and outside is the hallway to the door the sun gleams off most. but he smells wet. smells something fresh, something fetid, he can always smell so many somethings but the water smells so much more now. he runs on all fours at the smell and white cracked ceramic lies before him, encircling a puddle and a live spritzing spring of freshwater. all he has to do is dunk his head in the bowl.

and he does. he laps every drop he can out of the toilet. it tastes so good he can’t feel anything but the nice slight cold and the water soothing the burns and bruises all along his insides. more water stains the floor after he pulls his head out of the ruins than before. new clarity reveals his drenched clothes and waterlogged hair. he curls inwards and keeps lapping at the source, hair falling down with him like a mop into a bucket, until every last sense of the burn is gone. only then he notices a little scribble in sharpie on the wall, above the tank.

“good job
little roach”

Scene One: Trashbait.

roach clenches his last tab of xanax inside the pocket of his hoodie. he holds it tight so he knows that there’s no chance it’ll fall, and it’ll stay there with him as he walks. it’s like a fire exit in the back of a supermarket- he needs it. if he put it in his jorts they’d fall out the tiny pockets and he had to think explicitly about every safe option cause if you lose your last thing what are you? nothing? a person needs things. but more than that, he needs this. this is his.

he enters the alley and the smell of abstract trash and the littered little brown speckles running across the everyground makes his wings flutter beneath and between the fabric of his clothing. he throws himself into the piles of trash bags -- inches from the dumpsters they were supposed to be thrown in -- and lies in the muck for a while. if you do it enough, it becomes really interesting, honestly. you can parse the differences between a discarded apple core or a maggoty banana, now. the flies and the roaches all have their own smells too, like the difference between shit & vomit and sweet & sour. and same with the sounds, oh how many sounds there are in an alleyway. sleazy squealching squeaking sliming the ringing of cleaner drones sweeeping overhead on their daily scans the droning sirens of ambulances and cop cars in a nearby sector the tumbling of empty trash cans and debris in the slight breeze that gets in because of the occasional car going down the street. though the street is one of the bad ones, where not even cars want to come often, and so his alley is even worse, even more unholy. but its something. a place to take the pill out of his pocket and eat it and crawl into the corner deep among the trash where your body mushes into it all just perfect like it’s meant to be there and by extension you were too, even though it’s so inhuman- but you love that so much, don’t you? how far away it takes you- it’s so hard to hide beneath the fabric and the mask and the skin, to hold an ultimate facade for the rest of your years even if it comes natural akin to a language learned as an infant. the huge grey pill rolls down his dry throat like a bug. tickling legs down the stringy fleshy desert of his throat, long tumbling through the entirety of his sore, tiny organs into his stomach sending a wave of knocked pain through him before it is caught and dissolved in the web of his gut. he can only wait for it to come.

theres enough space between the brick walls and the overhangs of the neighbouring abandoned stores that he can still see the sky above him, peering through the trash. its dulled by a million sodium-vapor lamps and neon gasses twice as potent as the oxygen he gets to breathe, but its the sky, still. its not black, its not empty, its an ocean of midnight blue, given fake stars by the spots of orbital colonization, and their own lights. it’s beautiful, a constant show of colours and dazzle that tries to hide the gross but only spotlights it.

they force themselves into him and he throws up around it before it even gets inside. his eyes clench tight so he can’t see it but he can feel the chunks of bile and meat sticking down his chin and he can smell the mold and pipeline punch and whatever other gross shit abomination on the ground and and he can feel the anger whoever the person in his mouth was is feeling from his place beneath them. they yell at him because they know no one would hear and if they did they wouldn’t care anyway. not with his kind. “faggot” “fucking pest” “disgusting bitch” “rotted whore” any combination of words for disgust they could spill out. but they still pick him up and put him back in a good position, filth is filth, he still has use. he stares at his shorts on the ground, tattered and discarded. torn. he really liked those shorts. they hide him well. hid. he doesn’t know how he’ll find new ones. this train of thought hurts.

he doesn’t have to hold himself up this time at least. they fuck him into metal while one holds him up so the other can mount his face, they had to mount him so they could force his mandibles out of the way. they’re always a problem, poking out at the wrong time, wrong thing, wrong place, he gets yelled at about it a lot. but when people like it it makes being this so worth it. but these ones don’t like it. he can’t breathe since they need to keep it stuffed all the way in the back away from his teeth. his mouth is the part of his body he can feel the most, so he can feel the ichor and spit dripping over the man and his throat clench around the tip and he can still feel it the most just resting and thrusting and leaking almost over-stimulatingly even as the other one pulls roach’s little split tails up out of the way really hard and forces himself in his ass. no lube. never any lube. the back of his head bangs hard against the steel with every thrust of the man in his throat beating the back of it, stuffing the little hole where he needs to breathe so tight that he loses control of it. they grab at his hair holding him so he’s as close to his base as possible, and so its only his chitin slamming into the dumpster now. chitin cracking is less obvious -- less annoying -- than hair tearing, after all.

he doesn’t know if the flies and the roaches and the centipedes and the worms on his arms and shoulders are real or not but he likes that they’re watching. he wants them to see. red neon from a slowly passing vertivehicle hangs above, it glows on him and makes him look like he’s bleeding. maybe he is, he doesn’t feel it anymore. all liquids are the same, his blood is ichor is spit is cum is energy drinks is piss is ichor is blood. bitches hate me for my black-red tar blood and fat fucking roach ass.

humans taste like antithesis, like what HE said roach would feel coming to this plane, all coalesced at once. maybe thats what keeps dragging him back to them. it’s irresistable, when you’ve never got to have it.

his carapace folds crush in on each other as they squish his body even smaller than it already was between them. it hurts like youd expect, like bones moving and crunching and flesh bent wrong, but the sliding pieces inbetween shakes him just right, forces the ichor flow, makes him feel *something* something great something that rocks him alive and breaks him open and lets the other roaches inside finally and they can all together feel the two slam roach harder and harder and faster slamming his worn body into the gross like they want him to break and it feels like they’re gonna keep going until his spine shatters and he crumbles to bits but right when the bending before the snap comes they both suddenly stop in place, his face crushed into musky black tangled hairs and skull smashed as far as it’d go into the dumpster, his body bent into a right angle. they shudder and thrust mindless until he drops off of them both.

he lies in the alley, waiting for what comes next now that they’ve left. he talks to the roaches, not much left to say especially with his jaw slack, muscles utterly battered, but he mumbles and they always respond with the same nice little chitters no matter what. except this time they respond, and then they pick him up, and they turn into the people who were just inside him? and he’s up and the air hurts like a broken nose and he sees graffiti behind them and wants to look at it so bad because its so colourful and would be so much nicer than the pressure digging into his insides but THUNK. everything is grey, or green. or green darkened to grey? he knows where he is even when he doesn’t know. like with the city. there’s only a few roaches here, and no trash, he feels bad for the dumpster, btut then he remembers he exists so in a way, there is trash. thats really nice, its so nice to be useful- for him and the dumpster! he curls up as liquids seep from his holes, the only non-achromatic existence in the bin, and decides he’ll rest here until something comes to take him wherever trash goes in it’s next place, and then he’ll get a good look at that graffiti, and then-