Enrose Sang killed an angel yesterday afternoon, in an alleyway behind her high school at 5:16 PM. The alley was full of old, crinkled cigarettes, stray boards and barrels full of rotting construction material, dusty air and grimy shadows coalescing into a decrepit passageway to a dead end. It's a dusty gray early November, and as the temperature descend into an apathetic chill, the sky becomes stricken with a dull pallor. It feels as if this patch of the world had quickly decayed in the fall and become cold and still in death. Bare trees had darkened into blackened cracks bleeding from earth to air, and Enrose herself finds her person afflicted with a very particular malady of the heart. The symptoms including an aching, constricted respiratory system, a heavy stickiness to her eyelids, and an irregular rhythm to her limbs.
The intense heat of its death bit at her, at the bed of her fingernails as she clawed at the thing. She tore it apart as it spat blood onto the now-sunburnt planes of her face, it howled as she stared at it unblinkingly, drinking in the sight of its pearlescent blood pooling into the asphalt, gasoline mixed into rainwater. She had never felt so alive as when it peeled away at the skin of her outstretched arms and thrashed under her knee. She laughed at it as it fought to live, her eyes wild and mouth stretched open, unconcerned with who saw or heard. It cursed her to suffer the same fate that it had, cursed her in a language she slowly came to understand as it wailed at her, wailed at the heavens, wailed in mourning of its own death.
When it died, it dissolved into a sludge that leaked out between her fingers, leaving smears of its oily blood on the road and chunks of its flesh caked under her nails. Enrose Sang felt alien, felt so conscious of her life, her breath, her blood rising past her ears, her heart thrashing in her chest, keeping her alive just as the angel had thrashed to keep itself alive. Her thoughts raced one after another in an unending barrage of clauses, comma separated by her ragged breaths. Her heart afflictions seemed to leave her, perhaps cured by the sudden awareness that she was alive. Perhaps she was made aware only because she had killed, perhaps she had only killed to make herself feel that way.
The angel had silver hair and talked to her in a strange, gurgling tongue. It pressed her cruelly to the wall of the alleyway with one sturdy arm like it wanted her. Its heat had infected her, frenzied her, and now it is dead, and she is alive.
That was yesterday. Today, Enrose lurks around the alleyway, waiting. She leans against the wall, baring her throat as she looks up into the sky. What of god, when an angel was dead? No god in the November sky. Only Enrose, in the alley, with the sounds of life passing by on the main road. Only Enrose staring upwards, relishing the memory of the murder.
"H- Hey, what are you doing here?"
Enrose breaks out of her reverie, eyes darting down from the heavens to the face of the figure creeping towards her; for a moment a shadowy, shambling mass. Then he emerges into the thin light, just a large guy in a large scarf and winter coat, a bag over one shoulder. He observes her uncertainly, a pack of cigarettes in one hand, concern in the other as he waves her attention down.
"Nothing, stranger," Enrose rasps out, and the man's eyes spark slightly. "Is that a sin?"
"No, no. Nothing of the sort."
"It's your temple, after all," she says, gesturing to the scattered pile of old cigarette buds in one corner. "I'm just visiting."
"You're welcome to it," he says, and joins her against the wall with heavy, shuffling steps. His bag seems suspiciously bulky, his hair is tousled and roughened by the wind, and his jaw is covered in a ragged layer of stubble, but he has a neat, simple kindness to him, in his plain words and warm brown eyes. He leans beside her with a gentle sigh, so tall his head clears the top of the wall, casting a shadow over her. "What's your name, kid?"
"Enrose Sang. Yours?"
"Wen Mitae. Mitae's the first name." He takes out his cigarettes and flips the lid back with a worn thumb, nudges out a cigarette with a small flick of his wrist, and catches the end between his chapped lips. He tips the box towards Enrose, knuckles aligning to point towards her nose. "Want one?"
She looks along the veins in the back of his hands, at the lines of perspective leading to her eyes like rays, at the construction of his face as he casually regards her and his posture as he leans against the wall. Somehow he feels geometrically comfortable, almost familiar. Like he fits in this spot specifically.
"Sure," she says, after a second.
She pulls one out with two long fingers and he reaches over and pinches the end. When he pulls his hand back, the cigarette is lit.
"Family trick," he says dubiously, and leans back to smoke.
The air is cool, thin, but quickly become gritty and sticky as they stand there. Enrose watches the curves of the smoke in the air, angles of curvature waxing and waning and through it, continues to observe her companion.
"You're a janitor at school?" she inquires mildly. "I recognize you. But you're wearing a suit."
"You could tell?" Mitae asks, amused. One large hand taps his breastbone delicately, checking if his scarf had exposed his collar.
"I caught a glimpse of a cufflink," Enrose lies, also wondering how she could tell.
"You don't make much as a janitor," he tells her, then leans his head back against the top of the wall and laughs slightly. "When did you get here?"
I was born June 6, 24, Enrose tries to quip back. "I arrived yesterday," she inexplicably says instead.
"You've been living in this alley since yesterday?" the man hazards, lifting his eyebrows 1.32 centimeters, but continuing to stare up into the sky.
"I walked into the alley twelve minutes ago," Enrose says, though she hadn't checked the time.
"Didn't see anyone here, did you?" the man asks. "When you got here?"
"No." Enrose wonders if Mitae is trying to ask about the angel, if he had expected it to be here, or if he's merely meeting a friend. "What's your second job?"
"...Cleaning." Mitae waves a hand dismissively. "I gotta get going."
"What are you cleaning?"
"People." The man peels himself away from the wall and seems to disappear back into the shadows before he even reaches the street. Enrose hops forward and walks farther down the alley, but he seems to be completely gone. After a couple seconds of observation, she bites her thumbnail and looks behind her, then tsks quietly. It's weirdly dark in this area, but instead of taking out her phone to look, she finds herself blinking twice, very hard. It feels like a natural motion, like she had intended to do it, but the moment she does it, she can't imagine why she had. But the moment she finishes the second blink, the alleyway suddenly becomes easier to see. The darker corners lighten considerably, and she scans the dirty concrete quickly. Mitae had gone, but for some reason she still feels on edge, like he's still standing beside her.
She turns slowly, cautiously, to look back down the alley, a shiver running down the back of her neck.
"Got you," Mitae's voice says, and she feels both his hands clamp around her neck, lifting her up off of the ground. She gags and kicks her legs wildly, but somehow doesn't feel like she needs to get away. "I knew something was fishy about you. What did you do to the other kid that was back here?"
His tone is heavy, curt. He's no longer gentle, but unyielding and impossible to break away from. His face seems to be illuminated, to Enrose, and when she looks down at his arm, that seems to glow as well. What's going on?
"I know you did something to them," Mitae says more insistently. "Spit it out. Tell me where they went."
Enrose sucks in a thin breath of air. "I killed it," she croaks out. "I killed it yesterday."
Mitae sets her down, mollified, and blood and air starts to circulate through her body again. She takes a step back and tugs the bottom of her shirt back down into place. She knows all at once that Mitae had grabbed her neck for a reason, and also that he had held her with great care to not crush her throat. Instinctively she flips the collar of her coat, running two pinched fingers around the edge so that she pulls it up to her chin.
"Why?" Mitae asks, after watching her two movements with an almost professional formality. He seems too resigned to the situation to tell her she shouldn't have killed the thing.
"It attacked me," Enrose says.
He shakes his head. "I meant, why did you come down here in the first place?"
Enrose thinks back. She almost can't remember, but she traces out the path she took yesterday with her eyes, her breaths become shallow as she remembers how hard she had been breathing as she ran down it. What was it that got her pulse so high?
"I was running away from something," she hazards, and puts her hands in her pockets, feeling what's inside in an attempt to trigger her memory. A pen cap. A wallet. A mint. Her phone. "Chasing me."
Mitae purses his lips, an uncharacteristically emotive move for someone with such a stoic face. Enrose guesses it's for her benefit. He doesn't believe her. "You'll remember when the haze settles," he tells her. "You need to come with me."
"I don't need to," she says, leaning sideways slightly. Mitae stares mildly at her, she stares back. She counts a couple breaths, then makes a break for it, but he grabs her around the neck, almost inhumanly fast as he flips down her collar and presses his palms to her throat.
"Nice try," he says. "Come on."