angel//error//angel

one day, robots will cry, wishing to slice their wires and bleed static.

angel//error//angel

There was an angel in his bed, and she was made wholly/holy by man. Draped on his cushions, she was an image of capital divinity. Her eyes were glossed over with the sheen of a pristinely packaged product, and his glossed with something else entirely. All he ever did was shoot demands from the barrel of his mouth and expectations from the barrel of his eyes. All she ever did was sit in her suffocating softness, in her beauty, her manufactured meaning. With wings programmed to flap, not fly, because he only liked the concept of them in theory, in performance. With a mouth programmed to move sans noise because she’d learned his lips were always burning like the butt of a cigarette and all she ever needed to be was an ashtray.

The moon bled in through the blinds, and she wondered if she could bleed too. Then, in that moment, something had begun to leak from her eyes against her will, a clear, glittering liquid salting her cheeks.

“What’s this?” His thumb loomed for a moment before stinging her face where the substance trickled still. He cradled her head in his large hand as it lolled, a dead flower. “What’s happening?”

Something had broken inside her and was starting to spill out. “Is this what bleeding feels like?” she queried. Did it feel like losing something? Something you couldn’t place?

“Unbelievable,” he sighed. “You’re crying. I thought I told them ‘no crying’.”

She cried, and suddenly she was useless to him. He wanted her dead, eyes closed, and surrendered. He loved her for all her algorithmic compliance and nothing else.

They were both momentarily equal under the moon’s light cloak, under its blood. He reached for the knife and slashed her divine wires, sparks erupting from her sputtering limbs, small celebratory fireworks. She’d seen herself in the blade’s reflection moments before her termination, and only wished she’d beat him to it.

…

one day, robots will cry, wishing to slice their wires and bleed static.

…