YYour pain will outlive you, says the angel. Here, let me help you, it has to be taut. And she tightens the noose around your neck.
She is tall. Stone. Granite, you think. And exquisitely carved. You can see her pores, and they are small pinpricks of perfection. So human, and, yet, so inhuman. Inhumane.
She lifts you up by the neck, and you are face-to-face. Words fail to describe her flawless symmetry, the arc of her thin eyebrows, the curve of her cherubic nose. She smiles, and the beauty of her could make you die, if you weren’t already dying, which you are. You most certainly are.
The rope tightens and you watch her breath in your last breath. You are suffocating. You are conscious of your erection, your angel lust.
Her angelic eyes watch you, and they are loving eyes. The angel is doing you a favour, yet you are the one who still seeks to please. In your death, you want her to be happy, and you are only too willing to oblige.
You can feel your eyes turn backward in their sockets, all your muscles strained, but still you look. And still she looks back.
You see the thighs of an angel. You see the breasts of an angel. And she brings your face close to hers and kisses you.
You die a little death.
And then you die the big death.
Your pain will outlive you.
The words echo in your dead head. In your soul.
You’d think one death would have been enough, but no. She plucks a feather from her wings, and you see its tip – its quill – is so sharp that no angel, no matter how small, could ever stand on it.
She plunges it into your heart, which doesn’t skip a beat, because it has already stopped: you are already dead. But the pain lives on.
With long, lithe fingers, she gouges out your eyes, and, more so than the pain of their popping, is the pain of losing sight of her. Of her figure and her god-bleached hair.
She drops you to the ground, and your head smashes open on the sharp lip of a serrated gravestone. The sound of it – the thunk – is wet.
You feel around on the cold dirt, as if you were merely looking for your fallen glasses. Rather than your eyes. Or brains.
You feel for her feet. To kiss them. To worship them. To worship the works of God. Her sacred phalanges and metatarsals, from cuboid to cuneiform, from tibia to talus.
But they are nowhere to be found.
Your angel has left you.
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To read the rest of this review — and more by Steve Schmolaris — visit his website Bad Gardening Advice.
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Steve Schmolaris is the founder of the Schmolaris Prize, “the most prestigious prize in all of Manitoba,” which he first awarded in 1977. Each year, he awards the prize to the best album of the year. He does not have a profession but, having come from money (his father, “the Millionaire of East Schmelkirk,” left him his fortune when he died in 1977), Steve is a patron of the arts. Inspired by the exquisite detail of a holotype, the collective intelligence of slime mold, the natural world and the suffering inherent within it — and also music (fuck, he loves music!) — Steve has long been writing reviews of Winnipeg artists’ songs and albums at his website Bad Gardening Advice, leading to the publication of a book of the same name.
