My girlfriend, an angel, not meant to live on Earth, gyrates between life and death like a bug drowning on the surface of a glass of water. She crash-lands on the fire escape and spits a mouthful of pearls over the railing. I hear them clatter on the concrete of the alley below. It’s time to get a new wasp trap. The bodies are packed down by the weight of other bodies.
“A twelve year old came in for a second trimester abortion today,” she gasps. “A woman gave birth to a fetus with its heart outside of its body on the steps of the Missouri state capitol building.” It’s two in the morning and you can’t see the stars because it’s the raincloud time of the year. I hit my cherry-flavored vape. The cart is running low so it tastes kind of damp.
“Are you cheating on me?” I ask.
Another wave of coughing – this time, just sand.
“Cause you’re home really late. Again.” It’s almost midnight.
My girlfriend’s wings, her angel wings, retreat into her back. Where they shrink away, they burn through her shirt and leave two long charred marks in their place. I do not touch her back in bed because I’m afraid of hurting her, though she’s never told me it feels weird or asked me not to. I think she might not be allowed to ask for anything. I think that’s part of the rules of being an angel.
“Come on,” I say to her as she wipes sea water off her chin. “Come inside. I made pasta. Hopefully it’s still warm.”
I put my arm around her shoulders.
As I open the sliding glass door, I glance back at the mute sky, the empty alley with its walls dark with the piss of drunk men, the brown spot near the manhole cover where the stray dog that used to hang around here was hit by a car that had taken a wrong turn and got stuck in the dead end. My girlfriend chased the car down the street, ripped the door off its hinges, pulled the ten year old out of the back seat, and ate him, which is the only time I’ve seen her do something like that.
We quietly buried the dog, who we posthumously named Lucy-in-the-Sky-with-Diamonds, in a corner of Central Park. We later discovered that nothing could be done about the stain.
I cleaned the apartment today. Cleaning up after my girlfriend, who is an angel, is difficult sometimes. There’s the feathers, the pearls, the sand, sometimes small dead fish in rhinestone hues, and also the moon dust footprints. I don’t know if she just organically shrugs off moon dust or what, but we always take our shoes off at the front door.
She used to leave strands of her long silver hair twisted everywhere too – clumps in the pockets of my coat, cobwebbed in the corners, spidering over the lights, wound in the tines of our sporks. When we first moved in together, we bought only recycled silicon sporks, the utensils of the future, to conserve space. But our New York apartment, we discovered, has too many kitchen drawers and not enough anything else.
We shaved her head a month ago, when it was clear that the alternative was to watch her lose a fistful of hair a day: Me, perched on the edge of the musty bathtub with my brother’s clippers, an extension cord stretched taut from the outlet in the kitchen. Her, shirtless on the floor, head between my knees. The light was yellow. It was so late at night that it was early in the morning. She said nothing and breathed quietly. When we finished, she looked in the bathroom mirror for a long time. She was making eye contact with her reflection and I was watching her watch herself. I felt the muscle of my heart in my chest.
Now, we go to the kitchen. I had made the same pasta I’d make for myself as a kid when my parents would leave me at home. Bowtie pasta, garlic from a jar, cherry tomatoes, parmesan cheese from the expensive organic foods store, and butter. It’s cold. She eats all of hers and half of mine.
“Seriously, I mean it. Are you cheating on me? Is it Helen?”
Helen is the only other lesbian at the Brooklyn Planned Parenthood clinic. She has a tattoo sleeve on her right arm that includes Bible verses and pussy-esque symbols.
“An elderly woman left her whole estate to us,” my girlfriend says. “Because her sister died when she was nineteen years old trying to do her own procedure with a rusty coat hanger. And when her daughter got pregnant at nineteen years old, she got a Plan C pill from us. And the next day she went to see a movie with her friends.”
Helen goes to the same bar where my girlfriend and I met. It’s not a gay bar, but Google reviews and Yelp will both tell you it is. All the bartenders are lesbians. They serve a few drinks specifically for angels, which have rubbing alcohol and cedar extract and rose sugar in them, and marbles as ice cubes and salt on the rim, and things like that.
One time my girlfriend and I were getting a drink there after work, and Helen came up to us and asked if I was her wife. Not only does this imply that my girlfriend never talks about me, but she answered very quickly, which added insult to injury. She said I was not her wife like she was trying to keep her options open.
My girlfriend, who is an angel, wipes butter from her face with a paper napkin. Every time we go to the Polish restaurant down the street, which is too often, we take a stack of paper napkins so we never have to buy our own. Our apartment is full of stolen and borrowed things. We still haven’t returned the clippers to my brother, even though he lives only a few blocks away.
I kiss her on the lips. They are thin and dry. I come away with a buzz not unlike smoking a cigarette quickly. A vape cart, I remind myself. I need a new vape cart. And a new wasp trap. She tells me about her new plan to stay alive on earth. She wants a map of our borough, labeled down to every alley and ATM, tattooed around her arms and legs, across her chest, swallowing her skull. I ask her if she plans to stay bald forever. She shrugs. She hasn’t thought through it that far. I ask her if she knows that when you get a tattoo on your head, you can feel your brain vibrating. She accuses me of getting caught up in the specifics and asks if I could be supportive instead.
The rain finally arrives. Three in the morning. It rushes down from the sky like it’s late for war. There is wind, and the windows rattle, and the glass door shakes on its hinges. It’s all so dramatic. My girlfriend falls out of her chair and onto the floor, which is not dusty because I’ve cleaned so well, and convulses with electricity. If I tried to help her now, I would be shocked so bad it’d fry my fingers until the marrow cooked. I watch the lightning under her skin.
Minutes pass. I add a new wasp trap to the Amazon shopping list with a reminder to get a different brand because this one is trapping bees, too, and killing bees is definitely a going-to-hell level of crime. We can’t not have a wasp trap, because in the late spring my girlfriend likes to have the door cracked to let that faint wash of warm breeze in, but we don’t have a screen door, so the wasps can come inside and I’m too scared to kill them and the last time my girlfriend tried to do it she tried to trap it under glass and a piece of paper and she got stung a bunch, including under her chin and on the pad of her thumb and I started crying so she started crying too.
So we can’t live with the wasps, can’t live without the bees. As the rain eases, my girlfriend starts to unfold from where she’s curled up on the floor. She grimaces, walks to the cupboard and pulls out a bottle of ibuprofen. I buy the same brand my mother bought for me when I was growing up, even though it’s more expensive than the generic kind. She swallows a handful of pills all at once, comes back, falls down in her chair. I am caught up in how she moves.
“I think I’m going to die,” she says. “And I’m sleeping with Helen. From work. I didn’t sleep with her tonight or yesterday night but several other nights recently. Tonight I was just working late. Girls are buying Plan C off Etsy and Temu.”
I say I would be alright if she went back to heaven or the moon or wherever she came from. I say it’d be okay if that’s what she decides to do and that I will love her for the rest of my life even if she leaves one night when I’m asleep or never comes home from work or vanishes just as my lips are a centimeter from her lips so I never forget how it feels to lean forward into nothing or something like that. “And I may never forgive you,” I add. “For cheating on me.”
She does not say she’s sorry, which I think is part of the rules of being an angel. She takes my hand. Hers are small and callused and cold.
“Come to bed,” she says.
I follow her out of the kitchen. I remind her that she needs a costume for the Halloween party at the bar, which is in a week and some change. She says she’d like to be a devil and I can be an angel. I’m not sure if that’s tasteful, but I guess that’s just how it is when you live in New York City.