Angel And Devil

By Purti Sharma

She asks for him to meet her at the ransacked museum that holds their memories, in the hope that the time frozen there, that sweet time, can somehow be lived all over again.

Her soul screams at her being for a monster, for committing the unforgivable sin so as to ask him for his precious time. His Time. So she can taint it with her mundane, mediocre, and minuscule. With her dull, plain, bland, downright unremarkable. It kicks her heart, thrashes it, and splotches of blood burst over the sternum. His eyes dip down there, his fingertips brushing over reverently, concern spilling out when her devilish red deserves anything but. She reassures him it's the blush her skin dresses in, every time he is around. A smile adorns his sacred lips and her own teeth rattle with the rage of how wrong this moment feels. A saint worshipping a goddess who is the most wicked of devils. Bottling his sunshine to melt off the icicles that pierce her heart, driving right through to the other end, so it doesn't hurt anymore. Drinking the goodness, sucking it off his skin where it caresses her bones, to satiate the thirst she was exiled to for eternity. Drowning into his heavenly voice to shake off every grain of lint the desert of retribution has crushed down on her.

A dome held by crumbling walls, bricks cemented with reminiscence, under which the angel and Satan chance on.

The parasite in her awakens from the dead, barely contained in her, ready to infest his golden soul, but her arms and legs betray her, staggering her, and deforming her every step. So she deceives her demons yet again, who infinitely warn her of his touch, and grazes her angelic lover with the paint resting on the bristles of her brush.

She bites off a steak of her forearm and plucks her dark hair a few, only then, she convinces herself, will the portrait of her beloved give her the permission to yield his divine contours on that slate, coloured with his wings’ hue. She dips the strands of dark hair into the scarlet of her unholy river, which drips down her limb to corrupt the hallowed ground he walks on.

Frustration burns her lungs as she fails to mimic the innocence brimming in his honey-brown orbs, no matter how hard she tries, and she is only able to embody the hollowness that plagues her insides.

His nose, she notices, glancing at him from the tortuous distance, is thin and straight, and disappointment pricks her foot soles when her vignette portrays it as rugged and crooked.

The grail dips down on his holy lips, supple with love and pink with joy. And obscenities ring into her ears when she paints them pale and doomed, all wrong.

Hot acid runs down her eyes, inferno whipping her scarred skin, as she draws her broken nails out to slash them across the board, which holds the grotesque outline of the consecrated love she worships.

The shards of wood sting into her nail beds, and writhes of pain escape her foul mouth, her devious eyes take in the helpless, glassy-eyed angel, which she raved and raved about.

The emptiness feeds onto her liver and kidneys until she is but a haggard mosaic of calcific stones shrouded by a grim dermis. The disappointment digs bottomless holes into her feet, through which the blood seeps. The obscenities shatter her eardrums and the acid eats away at her cutis cover. She is brought to her knees, the thread tying her ruins of a body and the dark of her soul snapping, and she bows out of this prosaic of a romantic tale, right in front of her angel.

By Purti Sharma