Author: Rainbow Heartshine

We have enough feathers for a couple of mattresses now.

I’m not such an awful person as to use so, but how are you supposed to dispose of angel down?

Whether they count as the real thing is over my head, theologically. It shouldn’t be. When she showed up and explained, I could get it. Ancient saints might’ve made some mistakes about her kind, but Spock would be able to do the math–and what a beautiful calculation. When we meet, the shape she takes is the optimal solution to the equation of her nature and my desires.

The shining silver demon that produces is out of my dreams, but the kind innocence on her face, that’s her contribution, I could never have imagined. It gave me pause the first night, but she assured me not every stereotype about her kind is wrong. The demon and innocence are both the truth. We play the games you’d think.

Usually.

Then one night instead of shining silicone bat wings that glowed with starscapes when the lights were off, she had feathers, sparkly and pure, like something off a Christmas card.

It was alright until I got my hand in them.

I pulled every single one out. I have every night since. Things taken off her body still exist when she stops manifesting, so the fluffy irony builds up–my succubus girlfriend’s as gay as I am, and it’s filling my closet with angel feathers.

She says it’s delicious catharsis, but I worry. Hatred is poison, to her kind. She says she would choke if it was her I was hating, but some poisons are so subtle. I loathe myself for desiring this. I can do the math that lets her bear the violence for me without becoming the object of my hate, but I worry, not well enough. Never has that stupid “Lesbian sex as sushi” metaphor been more apt as my hope I’m cutting this spiritual fugu right.

Her answer to my fear is confusing, or at least I want it to be. She says if we stop this here, that will be the hate that brings her death.

I say I’ll never sleep in a bed made of hate, and beg her to find other food, the nights I’m like this, but it’s no use, we’re in love.

Can you see the flaw in my math? I can, tonight–sorry if you hoped this would be one of those riddle stories. I just got the answer, so I’m telling you.

I’ve built a new life, replaced everything church gave me, even, I find myself thinking, as she walks through that door perpendicular to everything she uses to get into my bedroom, spiritual transcendence. Yet something misses. An ineffable comfort I can’t give a name to. If I can’t find it with her, where will I ever?

She has the answer, tonight. It freaked me right out when she showed up looking entirely human and dressed in a wedding gown–until she took my hand and laid it on her body and the fabric burst into flames like I was carved from the core of a star, and revealed her unearthly demon-flesh underneath. The fire is warm, like kisses, but looks as hellish and dreadful as the darkness I feel inside, playing this game. Smoke rises and ash falls as we slowly, relishingly destroy the dress. The smoke smells of roasting marshmallows, and vanishes through the ceiling like this is a videogame.

The ash is the solution. Where it lands, it reassembles itself into beautiful, silk bedsheets.