Red juice stains her fingers. Clay moulds between her fingertips. The eyes are made of glass, the irises made of stars. She breathes life into this soul. 

Her eyes open. 

Daughter, Goddess says, as her creation comes to life.

i.

Goddess has made everything; the stars, the sky. The wood on a hardwood desk, the digital particles of a DVD. Glow in the dark stars. Plastic toy watches. Muscles. Cells. Sharp, sharp knives; dull, rusting blades. I could be any of them. And yet I was made into an angel. 

ii.

I think I’ve outlived my life; that’s what happens to most angels, they burn. Satan must have dropped from the sky out of boredom. All the white and happiness. Because heaven is like earth. They’re both boring. I want love, or death, or rage, or something to bring me out of this and choke me with feeling. I want something. I’m not sure what.

ii.

There’s something about him. I like looking at his past because it reminds me that he existed before I knew him. It reminds me that God didn’t pluck him out of my ribs. Didn’t shape him into existence just to teach me a lesson, to make me suffer. He was a real human being. And he is out of my mother’s shadow.

I know she doesn’t like demons. 

iii. 

But I kiss him anyways. 

I know he expects the kiss to taste like ambrosia, dripping with the divine. He expects to feel ichor coursing through my veins, thinks he can taste the stars that were plucked out of the sky to create me lingering on my lips. When his hand slips through my hair, he expects the feel of a barbed wire halo, expects to dream about death, expects his body to burn up, shot with gold. But there is nothing; just warmth, and love, and the storms quiet down. Perhaps, I have always been human.

iv.

She made me, I think. It’s a terrible, terrible thought to know you owe the skin on your bones and the thoughts in your mind to someone else. It’s a terrible thought to remember that you did not choose your own being, that it was given to you and now you cannot fathom being without it. It is terrible, to be a daughter. Why would Goddess make something that she herself cannot look at? And if that was the case, why would she not make me into something else? Could she not have given me a bigger heart, a lighter soul, a smaller want? Why did she have to be me? Why not somebody else?

I could have been a better daughter. I could have been a teacher’s child who spent her days reading books under an oak tree in her grandfather’s farm. I could have been, perhaps, a girl who had too many brothers and sisters and passed time chatting with them in the soft morning light as my parents roused from sleep. I could have been born filthy rich, my mother a queen, so lavish in her wealth that I wouldn’t even have to do anything. I could have been born as something less, so that I would not constantly be wanting something more.

That night, throwing up (really throwing up – not any of that symbolic stuff, not vomiting my misery, or my hate, or my love – people think throwing up is a metaphor for purging out the terror, the shame, the guilt. In movies it’s a by-product of earth-shattering revelations, overstimulation; sometimes, though, throwing up is just throwing up. Crouched over the toilet-bowl, wishing your body would sink to the slimness and mystery of a snow-covered streetlight), I wish that someone would sink their nails into her nape and yank me away. Tell me that no, Kira, you are not a child. No, Kira, you are not a ghost – I cannot see through you and watch the frightened girl you once were bang on the sides of your brain. No, Kira, I love you. I love you. I love you. 

‘You,’ I stare at the blood coating my hands, thick and red, like that of a newborn fresh out of the womb. My lungs feel raw, as if my throat is coated in thorns. ‘You created me. You sculpted me out of wood and clay and breathed air into my lungs; could you not have created me with a little more hope? With a little more happiness?’ 

Something like remorse flitters into Goddess’ gaze. Like a mother. For the first time in a million lifetimes, she looks like a mother. ‘Please, Kira, please don’t do this to me.’ It is almost a whisper.

But how could I stop? How could I stop the bombs that have been raining on both of us for decades? How do you stop something, that was, from the beginning of time, always starting? Gods are not mothers, and mothers cannot be Gods.

And then something else flickers into Goddess’ gaze. She is not angry; she is not disappointed. She is afraid.

Tears cascade down my face like stars, shining and glistening and I stand, horrified, staring at my hands. Like a frantic creature searching for meaning, for something, perhaps even searching for God.

I wonder, hysterically, whether Goddess has created an angel so broken that even she cannot fix it. I wonder if that human is me. 

vii. 

I think I have outlived my life. 

Vii 

Creation weeps. 

Goddess sits upon her throne, her mind a million different places at once. In these moments her eyes are stoic and blank and buzzing with the makings of the universe. But when it happens her heart – or what might have been her heart – clogs up. Like a wet cheesecloth had suffocated it. She knows, she knows everything, and that had been her only sin. Whoever had created her had not done a very good job. 

The angel falls.