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 close, 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-