Angelic Iconoclasm
Knee-deep in the silence’s nerves, the petals traced the vanity of calligraphy, and the wreath of thorns cowered with all its bristles at the vestiges of this established beauty. Of spicules and their insurrectionary names, how they are utter usurpers of the pellucid silicas.
To detruncate glass is to anatomize its joints, and yet I desire to inherit carpentry for it is the most intimate thing to the creator. Staircases, furniture, and wardrobes are crafted from the Godly hands bestowed from above to the mighty village I come from. But how much does the carpenter slaughter to fit the narrative of sight perfectly? How many pieces of wood get butchered because they are simply unwanted in this chosen piece of craft?
We have survived the Andalusian caliphate’s cavalrymen, and the Excalibur hangs on my wall. It is almost ludicrous for a weapon to be that protracted as a revelation that our skeletons can travel sprightly and annex the sword. Perhaps, the sword extends not to pierce, or kill, or bring about another martyr, but to rehost.
The blade has earned my trust more than a sword; it is dependent on its emcee that it does not dream of another knight’s armor. The mirror within is a deaconess to silk and a novice to confrontation, it calls for my requital.
I have used it to gash the angel statue and its earthenware binding, so I slit its head. And the wings, which were adjacent to its empyreal halo, began to shed feather by feather as though each feather was its own person, its own soul in a wing.
The angel bled as if someone were watching. The blood fell in solid droplets, metamorphizing into red beryl gemstones, onto the polished, lustrous ground. To dread beauty is to manifest Beliar himself in the form of a huntress.
The blade is too magnanimous, perhaps. I held the pistol and struck the bloody crystals before my discalced self. The gemstones smeared my reflection like a mutinous riot on an apartheid wall. I, then, started shooting its praying palms, but because of my fading imagery, now transformed into a life of a Reconquista’s battle, my misguided vision miscarried and could only sunder one of its hand clasps.
How can an angel be a protector when it cannot even contend or shield itself? And if anything, these weapons have been molded by the fickleness of human hands and lusting power, not by divine intervention or a messiah’s miracles.
It was once a delight to drape what was left of that guardian, it was as though I had conquered divinity. On my wall, like the threnody of the crucifix and the liquefying candle. The head of the boar at the Yuletide feast and its scarcity, does the Lord keep his subjects rare so our palms can decorate them betwixt the knots of a garland?
Angels are confined in marble, and like any artist, I hoped to manimut their scepters and commemorate them on my walls. But the angel I decimated had its life intentionally guarded within the ceramic as a chance of survival.
That is intent- a very godless human ability. I would despise to bleed before the masses and yet I bleed open when my thoughts are read. I would commission anarchy in the wasteland of assured menarche, but I had no choice but to have once bled.
My massacre of the angel has impaled its protective layer, and to what liberation is worth, the left of the mosaic divine crystal attended to avenging the consternation I had struck it with. Its elements were seen flowing through the chamber of its eleventh hour, its silica-molded eyes now necrotizing into dust.
The sage I had placed beside it, as the old fashion of a charlatan would, has failed to portray masquerader beauty. Its aroma has blessed the air except for mine, for I was short-winded with my palms clutching the wooden hook I had been working on.
My pride could be seen floating around, like Botticelli’s Venus above her shell, with the falsely equated weight of her bodily reality and billowing hair because of intoxication. I have always, even as a child, held nothing towards that painting, for it was devoid of life and infused with dull-witted scenery. She looked, to me, as though her agency lies not in the sensible acts of being born as a deity, nor within any purpose that straightens her gaze. Did she, too, murder an angel and swap her soul with the innocence of those deafened beings in exchange of playing God?
I could not stop looking at the wounded shawl the angel had been wearing, or the ombré effect I had caused of the first pearl-rubellite transition in history. The angels, we were written to in tales, were spiritual beings with no blood. They were never casted out of heaven, so how could they bleed?
But I am witnessing that by the oath of all the prowess that I have bred, and I can tell you I maimed the angel till its form bridged with the life we have to sustain and then nourish, like the mortal path. The angel, in its final hours, was chained by life. The angel, then, pled for water.
The angel pled for water and not for a divine scripture or a replacement for its incomplete praying hands. It knows I am a carpenter; it has lived with me. The angel pled for water and left its mainspring. The angel hierarchized sustenance over reverence, bread over choir.
That is the response to persecution: You starve a population for a means to weaken their cause, for a means to make them fixate on survival instead of resisting and upholding their creed. You starve a population to reframe what they really need.
