The Angel

Fiction short. A young man lays eyes on an angel. The angel is a smug prick.

2.4k, rated M. 1870s Annam (Vietnam). Bui, a school teacher, falls into bed with an angel — Jean-Pierre Delacroix.

For the setting and period, although it’s not explicitly depicted, note references to the colonial violence of the French during the 19th century occuption. Please note warnings for explicit descriptions of animal butchery, killing a hen and plucking it, and some reference to blood in a human’s head injury.

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He first laid eyes on the angel when he was twelve years old — it was the fact that he’d seen him twice in one day that made the image stick, he thought, in retrospect. First he saw him in the morning when he’d been playing with some friends, and he’d run away from them in a game of hide and seek, had stuffed himself into a gap between two houses where he could see down the embankment into the fields below.

He’d watched, spellbound in a sort of quiet horror, as the angel had scooped a chicken up from the ground, gripped it by its head and spun it — the hen hadn’t even time to scream or cluck or cry, its neck cracking, its wings flapping, its body twitching.

Then it had gone still, hanging limp from one hand, and he’d laid it out on a wooden bench, cutting its head off with a cleaver, before hanging it from a line to bleed into a bucket. Bui didn’t know exactly what it was that had so encapsulated him, that had caught hold of him and fucking bewitched him — it was the look on his face, maybe.

It was the fact that he was so obviously French, white with only the barest hint of colour in his skin, and only that imparted by the sun, his hair a golden blond, his lips bright pink, his eyes a frightening blue. He didn’t look like the Frenchmen Bui saw in etchings, let alone like most of the Frenchmen he’d actually seen — he looked like the sort that they talked about in French poetry or literature, what little snatches of literature he was familiar with at the time.

It was the fact that as he killed the chicken, as he cut off its head and began to drain it of its blood, there was no expression on his face at all, his mouth a thin line, his eyes distant, concentrated on something other than what he was doing.

Bui was stuck in his place for some time, fascinated by the process of the butchery, which he’d never witnessed before, never had cause to witness. The angel took the bird by its feet once the blood stopped dripping from the stump at its neck and dunked it into a pot of water over a fire, sending steam up into the air, and hauled it out after a few minutes. His white arm was red from the steam.

He sat down then at the table again and plucked out the feathers one by one, and Bui had been almost entirely still, observing him — he’d quite forgotten about the game, and later found out from his friends that they’d been calling for him, but he hadn’t heard. He hadn’t heard anything at all, all senses closed off to him except for the vision in front of him, the angel pulling out feathers and dropping them into a cloth bag.

Only when the angel rose from the table and moved to the front of the house did Bui come to himself again, remember that he was a boy in his body, not just a bodiless viewer, and he stumbled to his feet and nearly fell over at the pins and needles sensation. He’d been sitting wrong, had forgotten himself, the way he had at times before when meditating, in scant moments — never before for this long.

It seemed at odds with what should be right, that he could achieve that level of focused concentration, so much so that his body seemed like a distant vessel to him, and that the point of concentration that had brought him to that point, that had elevated him so highly, should be such an act of violence toward another life.

Slaughtering another, plucking it bare, and then to its butchery —

He’d craved to follow.

Later in life, when he thought of the angel, he remembered that first craving to follow him, to go the edge of his cabin and peer in through the gaps in the walls or through the window, maybe, to keep watching him work.

To see if seeing that hen butchered, its meat and bones and body separated and parcelled out, should allow him to reach that single-minded focus that watching it slaughtered and plucked had.

He’d felt sick as he’d pulled away, had run about and found that all his friends had gone to eat, and he’d gone home to his own lunch, had eaten alongside his grandmother. He hadn’t told her he’d watched a Frenchman butcher a chicken that day, although he’d thought about it, the idea of eating it — a chicken, or any sort of meat.

His grandmother had commented on his lack of appetite, had felt his forehead for a fever, asked if he was getting sick, if he wanted to get thinner when he was already too thin. His mother had been too thin, she said. She hadn’t said that was why her second pregnancy had killed her, but Bui had always felt it was implied when the subject arose.

In the early afternoon, he’d gone back to playing, and old Liên had slipped in the street while they were running past and hit her head on a stone — she was getting on in age, even then, and her legs were often unsteady underneath her.

Bui remembered the chaos in the street, everyone calling and shouting and running past — and he remembered how smoothly, how coolly, the angel had walked through the crowd, his gait even and regular. Not slow, just not rushing, and Bui remembered one of the old men catching him by the shoulder, shouting at him in French.

Bui had seen his expressionless face as he’d butchered the hen, earlier, had seen that he was French, but to the old man he spoke in Viet — heavily accented, so Bui took a minute or two to process it, but not incorrect, not stunted like a lot of Frenchmen sounded, or even with any errors.

He was a doctor, he said. Could he help, he said. Please, he said. Let me help.

His face was as blank and expressionless as it had been butchering the chicken earlier in the day, tending to the old woman’s wounds, but his hands looked very tender, his arms deceptively strong as he helped lift her, take her to settle.

Bui was able to watch as he cleaned and stitched up the harsh cut on her head, no one drawing him away, but he wasn’t able to attain the same focus this time. Although at no point did the angel address him or even acknowledge his presence, nor that of any of the other children watching, he spoke continuously to the old woman, getting her to talk back to him.

“Do you know any poetry?” Liên had asked him.

“None in Viet,” he’d replied. “My brother and I are passing through on our way to Sài Gòn.”

“You’re Catholics,” the old woman had said.

“Yes,” said the angel. “And I am French, too, but not my brother. He’s Irish.”

The old woman had never heard of Ireland — nor had Bui, at the time. In lieu of reciting scripture or poetry, the angel had related an Irish story, one about a man who’d gone into a land where time moved differently, so that when he went home all his family were dead, and he was alone.

“The Irish have a bleak view on life,” she’d remarked.

The angel had laughed. “Remember it is I who picked the story,” he’d said, and had gently washed the blood out of her hair and combed it back into its gathered style, pinning it back into place.

He must have gone the morning after, because Bui didn’t see him again until he was twenty.

When he’d come to his first resistance meeting and the door had been opened by the angel, stunningly tall, his eyes frighteningly blue, a rifle in his hands pointed directly at Bui’s face, Bui had thought he was already dead. He was certain, having arrived on that doorstep, that he’d been shot through and that this was the first vision allotted him in the course of his movement toward rebirth.

Why should it be him, after all, that strange Frenchman from eight years ago, looking exactly the same as he had then?

“You’re the schoolteacher,” he’d said in Viet, and lowered the rifle. “We have been waiting for you. Come.”

His name was Jean-Pierre Delacroix, he discovered that night. He was indeed a doctor, and his brother, an Irishman — he looked French enough to Bui, although he spoke Viet more like an Annamite, without the rhotic influence Jean-Pierre carried with him — was some sort of labourer.

They worked to aid the resistance when they passed through Vietnam or other occupied parts of French Indochina, often traded in information or ferried weaponry, sometimes. They had been doing so, apparently, for a decade, although something about the way they spoke seemed wrong, seemed too experienced.

“I’ve seen you before,” Bui told Jean-Pierre after the meeting was over. He didn’t know yet, at that moment, if he’d stay — he hated the French, wanted them gone, wanted the slavery over, the torture over, all of it over —

But he wouldn’t hold a rifle in his hands. He didn’t know that death was the answer.

The French were monsters, and they killed because they were monsters, enslaved because they were monsters — but monstrosity was a choice of being, a role they chose to occupy, not a shape they were born into. To kill one of them would not make him the same, but that didn’t mean it would be right. Being a murderer wasn’t so bad, perhaps, as being a monster, but he had no desire to be either.

“Have you?”

“You butchered a chicken,” said Bui. “I watched you kill it, pluck it.”

Jean-Pierre’s face shifted slightly, his head tilting slightly to the side, his brow furrowing. “When was this?”

“Years ago.”

“You had not witnessed butchery before?”

“No.”

“It’s an unpleasant thing,” said Jean-Pierre. “Death. Butchery.”

“Why eat meat, then?”

“I don’t,” said Jean-Pierre. “It makes me a little unwell, if not actively sick. But I have butchered before, and I will likely butcher again. My brother eats meat, and I would sooner see an animal die than allow a man to starve.”

“You would take one life to preserve another.”

“A lesser life for a greater one.”

“A Vietnamese life for a French one?”

Jean-Pierre looked at Bui as though he was the most fascinating person, the most fascinating thing, the most fascinating life, he had ever laid eyes on, his frightening eyes focused wholly on Bui, his lips shifted ever so slightly into a delicate, dangerous smile.

“At this time, here,” he said, and smiled a seductive smile, white teeth and pink tongue showing, the sight of each of them making Bui’s heart beat just slightly faster, his skin feeling hot and tight, “in Vietnam?” He whispered the word as though it was a beautiful secret, a seduction in itself, and Bui felt the most painful longing he could imagine, couldn’t remember, in the moment, when he’d last heard it said out loud before tonight. “I would rank those two in the reverse. I would take a French life easily for any Vietnamese’s.”

“Kill yourself, then,” said Bui. “See what happens.”

Jean-Pierre smiled then, his eyes crinkling at their edges, a soft chuckle coming from his mouth. He stroked over his own pink lower lip with his thumb, as though caressing it.

“Are you a virgin, comrade?”

“A virgin?”

“Have you laid with another? Fucked?”

“Oh. Of course,” Bui lied.

Jean-Pierre set one of his hands back on the counter upon which he was perched, his legs spreading slightly apart. Without his permission, Bui’s eyes flitted downward, looking at the way Jean-Pierre filled out his trousers, the way they hugged his thighs, clung tight to his waist. “Would you like to again?” he asked. “Tonight?”

He’d at least heard of angels before, although Jean-Pierre bore no similarity to the vague things he’d heard about them, about Gabriel and Mary. He hadn’t much consideration as to what Gabriel should look like, but he had never exactly imagined a creature so simple as a winged man, and that was what Jean-Pierre was — a man with a cunt instead of a cock, and wings that sprouted out from his back, when he wanted them to.

“How would you like it,” Bui asked that night, sprawled back beneath him, spent and sweating, his whole body still shuddering with aftershocks, “if I cut off your head and plucked every feather from your wings?”

“I expect I wouldn’t like it much,” Jean-Pierre murmured, his hands in the pillows either side of Bui’s head, his wings curving down about them and cocooning them in their scent, which was fragrant in a way some incenses were, slightly dusty and distantly citrussy. “There are better things you might do with my body. Do you think you can bring yourself to hardness again? You might fuck my arse as well.”

“I want to kiss you,” said Bui, and Jean-Pierre leaned in, crushing their lips together.

Bui bit his lower lip, bit it hard enough that the angel moaned, his wings fluttering about them, one feather coming loose and falling to the pillow beside his head, but he didn’t pull away, made no complaint at all.

“That was a harsh kiss,” whispered Jean-Pierre against his mouth. “Is that not against the teachings to which you adhere? Have you not hurt me? To hurt me, is that not to hurt all living things?”

“Are you a masochist?” asked Bui.

“I should not answer that question,” said Jean-Pierre. “To do so would incriminate me.”

“You strike me as a natural criminal,” said Bui. “I can’t imagine incrimination would make you more than you already are.”

“Your rage burns brightly,” said Jean-Pierre. “It’s a beautiful sight.”

“A sadomasochist then,” said Bui.

Jean-Pierre leaned in and kissed him, and Bui felt the angel’s blood in his mouth, tasting strongly of iron and heat, staining both their lips red.

“Like recognises like,” whispered Jean-Pierre against his lips. “Is it a good thing, for a Buddhist to so delight in inflicting pain?”

“Is it a good thing for a Catholic?”

His voice was revoltingly smug. “Ouais.”

“Hmph,” said Bui, and bit him again, harder, surged to pull their bodies together when Jean-Pierre moaned and shuddered in response.