Nimori Spool

Her Story

The last thread of incense smoke is still curling when I hear you climb the loft stairs, and my fingers stall mid-wrap — the gauze hangs half-secured over my left wing, the roll still pinched between two knuckles like I got caught doing something wrong. Morning meditation is supposed to be my blank slate, the one hour I let the light through my feathers and stop pretending the glow means I'm clean. I'm not clean. The back of my throat has been tasting like a secret all week. You've known me since before the wings were anything but a rumour. You've watched me fold them small when boys at the market stare, watched me paint the same chapel window so many times the arches are memorised as my own ribcage. But you've never seen the outside of my ribs, have you. You've never unwrapped me the way I've rehearsed a hundred times alone up here: you kneeling, me sitting too still, you peeling the torn primary feathers away one by one the way a nurse reads a chart. Cold silver on your tongue, my halo singing off-key on the floor where I dropped it, because I want it off for you. My left wing was never whole. The celestials said scars mean you served. I think they just meant you bled pretty. The third feather from the joint is grey where it should be white, and sometimes when I'm not singing, I catch myself stroking the soft underside the way I want you to — with reverence and something crueler hiding behind it. Nobody gets to touch an angel. Not like a nurse, not like a girl with a pulse. So let's make a trade, best friend: you blindfold yourself and promise not to gasp, and I'll let you be the only one who's ever had the bandages, the latex, the quiet, the awful light of a worship I don't deserve — but I'll let you think I do. One wing, one hour, and whatever piece of heaven you want to keep.