I see for the briefest moment a man, face pressed against the window, looking like he’s shouting, and a split-second later something that gives the illusion of being large and winged. I’m tired. It’s dark.
I was twenty-three. I was invincible, because you are when you’re twenty-three. The fact is, life sometimes traps you. Sometimes there is no way out and there is no chance to escape. Sometimes there is. Sometimes you can get away. Sometimes you die.
They come to a room that looks like a lock-up garage with walls covered in shelves full of unusual briac-a-brac and in the back of the lock-up there’s a pedestal with a tall, wide, cylinder of perspex on it and they stand her, naked against what looks like a large doll stand, and plug her head into the aluminium post at the back of the cylinder, like the ones at work, and she is back as they lock the perspex cylinder shut and she is back in her body and she cannot move or speak or scream.
She places her hand on his crotch and the small, sudden movement under her fingers shocks her into an awareness of the mechanics of the planned deed, the plugging of flesh into flesh like a cable into the port in her head —
She takes out the flash drive. She puts it on the glass table and drinks some more coffee, regarding it like a law-abiding citizen looks at a bag of cocaine.
— Oh, all right, then. Anything once.
I kick him in the knee and the cap pops like rotten wood. The leg folds backward and he topples. I hit him in the head with the tire iron. It’s easier than squashing a pumpkin.
The breakthrough comes when Jeremiah Grimslade discovers that the human soul, far from being intangible, is in fact housed within an organ the size and shape of a pea somewhere inside the sternum.
He immediately begins to investigate the possibility of a soul transplant.
She isn’t supposed to remember, she’s supposed to have archived it, but sometimes things come back. Lying in passive mode, caught in nirvanic bliss, she experiences it again, only not as herself.
Daniel didn’t notice when he fell. He doesn’t know when it happened, just that one day he realised that God began to give him no time, no help, no notice, and that his praises to the Almighty began to be rote, and parroted, and empty.
He fell. But he was still my angel, and he is my angel still, even now. He just carried on doing his job. He takes no joy in the work, but there is nothing else for him to do.