Even more die:


Four mountains ring the lake. The lake is deep, half-painted with light. The kingfishers dive for rose tattooed mackerel. In the shadow of such mountains, angels take off their wings and swim. The wings are left to hang on the branches. The angels swim only a little, then raise their voices into a wail. The wings have blown away. Without these, they are nothing.

Years pass and a strange, lifeless civilization forms upon the ice.

The angels forget where they have come from and begin to suffer. They begin to shiver, to grow old. Their shoulders rise and they sit in the small hollows that they have dug out in the rocks. They rarely swim. They begin to eat. They snag the kingfishers, the fish, and scrape the lichen off the rocks. Hungry, they wither into a stick. They are reduced to drinking ice, each others blood. In the last months, they are consumed with sleep. When one sleeps, the others begin to gnaw on the sleeper. Within months, they have finished each other off. Only the torsos and heads remain, biting at each other, into the ice.

God found the angels and delivered the wings. The angels looked at the wings and began to weep. They could not fly back from where they came. Their bodies, flooded with food and sleep were too heavy, their bones had congealed, hardened. Their skulls had burrowed themselves into the ground. The package floated upon the water for an hour, then sank.

God looked down and began to weep. His tears are a deluge. The angels die.

They all die; their deaths are small torches. I extinguish them one by one, to show you that my characters, suffering, still listen, and, listening, die. What I want them to do is what they do.
Because if there is a God , then we are expendable, we are 'too many'.

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