Your Orisons May Be Recorded Read Free

client.
    â€œSome of them have a lot of problems,” I say, inspecting the carpet.
    â€œThey all have a lot of problems,” says Uriel, who used to be a big shot back in the days when everyone with more than six wings got to call themselves a Duke of Heaven. Now that there are so many more humans and we’ve had to move with the times and go to full automation, he wears a suit.
    â€œWe’re not here to fix the problems,” Uriel says. “We’re here to deliver the maximum amount of spiritual satisfaction in the shortest possible time period. That’s why we have the seven-minute target. A target you haven’t been meeting.”
    â€œLook,” I say, “sometimes it just takes longer than seven minutes. Sometimes these people really, really need someone to talk to. I listen. Until they’re finished. It seems to make them feel better.”
    â€œYes, we’ve been noticing a lot of dead air on your side of the line,” says Uriel. His voice is milk trickling over smooth marble.
    â€œHow many of my calls have you been listening to?”
    â€œDon’t get snippy. I checked the database. It’s easy enough to monitor the quality and content of the call load. It’s standard procedure. I can’t believe I’m telling you this again. You’re not a special case.
    â€œWe’re stretched thin,” says Uriel. “I don’t want to bump you down to maintenance, when we’re getting a higher call intake every day, but I will if I have to.”
    The conversation is over. My hands shake as I return to my desk. It’s probably the coffee.
    *   *   *
    Why do we do this? Why do we keep on picking up the phone?
    Because religion is a necessary drug. It takes the pain away, for a while. A little candle to nurse in the chest cavity against the darkness. Except some of them burn too fiercely, and it eats them from within.
    Only love comes close. Only love.
    I loved a mad nun once, in Castile. He had come to the convent the way he was born, with a woman’s body, until he was bricked up in the wall of a convent, where he starved away his female aspect in secret. The nuns never found out. Only I saw him as he truly was, as a man entire.
    He never left that cell. He was there to burn hard in solitude. The nuns had a system for this, and left a small opening at the bottom of the wall where they could push in water, ink, and dry black bread, which my lover fed to the birds.
    He prayed and fasted on his knees until the bricks sliced through to the raw bone. He shaved his head and covered the walls with poetry.
    I was all over it.
    He did not seem at all surprised to see me when I appeared in his cell. I took the form of a woman at first, but I soon realized my mistake, and put on a man’s skin, tanned deeply from the sun my lover had not seen for years. I held his birdlike head in my hands, feeling the contours of his skull. His mouth opened and I fed him crumbs of passion.
    He drew me a hundred times over. He called me the body of Christ, but wouldn’t let me fuck him. Instead I pushed into him with my fingers, reached deep into his cunt and beckoned, beckoned, as if I could coax him out to walk with me through the wall and into the world of light.
    I thought I could keep him alive with my love.
    His flesh withered and clung to the bones, and eventually those gave out, too, and he wasted further until all that was left was the heart, beating wildly on the floor of the cell, and a voice raised in fervor. He craved that holy passion so hard that it cannibalized him.
    Wants versus needs.
    I walked out through the wall and mourned for a century. Then I went back to work.
    *   *   *
    When I return to the cubicle, Gremory is spinning around to Sabbath Bloody Sabbath in his desk chair. He gives me a thumbs-up.
    Ten minutes to go before the end of the shift. This is the time when you hope to—well, you just hope that