Anima Fatale - LGW

 Anima Fatale 

Lili Ward

There was an attempt made here, a little attempt at making a farm,

Of raising a grain silo above ground level to prevent the rodents from getting at it.

The beginnings of a house, just the tail end of her so still amongst the grain.

ॐ

I walk into the bathroom, my attempt at a bathroom, and see the way my mother has tucked in the soap as if for sleep, as if the soap is sleeping.

Its head is resting on white tile, a single black pubic hair fashioned into a side-swept bang on its perfect white face.

This is one of the many angels God has sent my way in the just-gone weeks, one cleanly, another fleshly and another chlorinated.

ॐ

A packet blonde on the Newport line, she is drug affected I think, plastic pleasers raising her above ground level, two stacked sets of false eyelashes like a million straightened pubic hairs.

Mistaking my facial exercises for sincere affection, what an earthly shame that I prioritise looksmaxxing over lovemaxxing.

Smiling at her just to emphasise the tanned sheath draped over my cheekbones, hollowing myself out is an earthly sin.

An attempt has been made by her, an attempt at guessing my name, but when landing one vowel off target I am unable to hear it.

She misses me dearly and breaks the glass of the train door with a tiny emergency hammer to let out a last call as I put my hood on.

I have missed her dearly and the message she bore.

In chastity it is easier to pick out angels in a crowd, what you once mistook for sincere attraction, chaste, you will see is now more clearly a kind of angel detection.

If I see a young woman in a crowd and become what I once believed to be ‘aroused’ I know she is merely an angel and I am merely seeking.

ॐ

Mingling, another angel sent to me, at first in a synagogue and then at once at the university gym, he has the face of a woman I was once involved with and the body of a semi active 40 year old man. A million tiny chlorinated beads draped over his bare chest, he waves at me through 4 ply glass and mouths a few indistinguishable phrases, but I let it be.

If god had intended for me to hear him, he would have gotten his tiny emergency hammer and split the 4 ply sound barrier.

The treadmill is raised above swimming level, so as to not let the water get at the electrical components of the exercise equipment. I watch the angel freestyle with a body I did not expect, fair skin, beads soaked up as he dries off with a towel. When I go down to hear his message in the change room he is at once gone, vanished.

I am left to consult his silver hairs congregating around the still wet shower grate. 

I dry my naked body under a hand dryer and mourn the loss of three angels, the beaded necklace made from my tears shrinks under the berating heat of the dryer.

How many angels can a person ignore before the consequences are irreparable, fatal even.

It is like living an urgently slow death, I am reminded of my own fleshly condition when visited by the bleached angels.