Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex

His Angel ROBERTA LANNES

FRANK GARLAND KNELT BY a mound of soil, scooped a handful, and held it beneath his nose. He loved the smell of fresh, moist earth. It recalled a youth of camping trips with his father, playing in the mud with his older brother, and burying secret things. He chuckled. He hadn’t grown up much in thirty years. Here he was, still burying things that he didn’t want found. Before it was broken toys, uneaten food, and pieces of his mother’s jewelry. Now it was broken women.

Standing, he let the dirt fall into the depression, nearly full. He shoveled in the remaining loam and patted it down. There.

As he reached up to pluck a leafy bough for scrabbling the earth, he was distracted by a glint in the pearly gray sky. He broke off the limb and stepped into a small clearing.

Across the ravine, over the next ridge, a hang glider was falling. He knew the thermals off the granite quarry below often popped a glider up too fast for even the best aviator to recover. Light bounced off the white wings as they crumpled like origami. The pilot tumbled and the wings came open a moment. Frank saw that it wasn’t a guy wrapped in a polyester cocoon, but a woman dressed in flowing white. He blinked, then rubbed his eyes with his jacket sleeve. “Oh, Lord,” he whispered, “it’s an angel.”

She fell into the forest, swallowed by a thicket of trees. Frank closed his eyes, in his mind marking the spot where she landed as just beyond the boundary of the quarry works. The road up the mountainside from where he stood would take him to the bridge a few miles down, then across to the gravel strip leading into the quarry works. He knew the patch of land where she touched down. He’d get there before anyone else. This angel was going to be his.

A cassette tape of Roy Buchanan, his guitar screaming “Country Boogie,” filled the car. Frank drove in haste, warily watching the Sunday roads for errant traffic. He reached the gravel road quickly, sped up, his compact car shifting over the stones like a skier on icy snow. Past the quarry to a dirt road, into the forest, he turned his headlights on. The canopy of fir and evergreen blotted out the sun. His beams found a twisting path which slowed him down.

When he found the way blocked by fallen trees, he pulled over, his heart working like a jackhammer. He got out of the car to stand in the lush, still shade. His mind’s eye was on the area where the angel had landed, and he would let that image guide him as he wended his way through the dense growth of the forest floor. He was feeling what his father had called the “feral hunting mechanism.” Allowing himself to be led by pure sensation. A sensation of hunger, not for food but for something else: prey, love, release. It drove him forward, blinding him with an appetite he didn’t understand.

After a while, Frank began to spin in the shadowy light. Sweat poured through his scalp, down his neck, into his shirt. She was there, not far, but his sense of direction had begun to elude him. The ground had flattened out. He was no longer near the ridge-line. He was lost. Frustration grew until he howled out loud. The sound came from a cavern of sheer anger, rising up with the power of a child’s fear.

The sounds of animals scurrying away yanked him from his rage. He told himself to breathe. Relax. Turning to his left, he headed toward a shaft of light a couple of hundred feet away. The ground began to slope and he knew he had found his direction again. As he neared the light, he felt the frustration pass into irritation then disappear as elation filled him.

“There you are,” he whispered. He found her, resplendent on the mossy loam amidst ferns at the edge of an opening in the trees.

Frank slowed until he was just out of view, behind a tree. The shaft of light seemed focused on her. For a moment, Frank could swear he heard a choir of angels in the far distance. He stood there, watching, searching for signs she was alive. God was watching, too, he thought. Cautiously, he moved near.

Her wings were wrapped about her like a gossamer chrysalis. Up close, he saw that her wings weren’t made of feathers, but long thin flaps of pearlescent white skin. The angel’s face was turned toward the earth, her pale golden hair splayed against the ferns. Bare feet curled out from the bottom of her wings; the toes long, tapering to pink points.

He wiped his dirty hands on his jeans and reached out to touch her. As his fingertips alighted upon her wing, she quaked. Frank recoiled, then suddenly, without a warning of sorrow, fell to his knees weeping.

“Oh… my angel. God, please, don’t let her die.” A deep, barbed pain ripped forth from him, wrenching his body with spasms of anguish. He blubbered over her, a ten-year-old boy once again, mourning his father. Seeing him at the bottom of the cliff, his body twisted in ways for which it was not built. An accident. An act of God. He hadn’t cried since. Or perhaps it was at his brother’s funeral. He felt as weak and flimsy as a new leaf. His father would have told him to get a hold of himself. He had an angel to save.

All business, Frank began untangling the angel’s hair from the foliage. He put his hand under her neck and turned her face up. Her skin was so pale, he thought she was dead. He put his dirty hand against her cheek, full of hope. She felt warm!

“Come on, angel, I’m just going to lift you up and carry you to my car. I won’t hurt you.” He worked his hands under her and swept her into his arms. Incredibly, she was almost weightless. When he’d carried Sharon down from his car just a couple of hours ago, she’d felt like a two-hundred-pound sack of flour. The angel was as light as a loaf of bread.

With her life in his hands, Frank moved stealthily toward his car. The angel made cooing noises, occasionally forming her lips around a word. He thought she whispered “Lord” a few times, though he could swear everything he heard was like a thought in his own head.

Effortlessly, his car came into view, as if every frantic and false move he’d made before in trying to find her had been amended. He looked up, thinking God had the life of this angel in His interest as well.

Frank attempted to lay her down in the backseat, but she was a foot too long. Scrunching her feet, bending her knees, he got the door shut, cramming her in. He went into the trunk and got out the blanket he’d used with Sharon. It was littered with leaves and detritus. The bloodstains had turned nearly black. It disturbed him, having to put it over the angel, but there was no way he could risk anyone seeing her before he got her home.

“It’ll be all right, angel. I’ll just take you to my place and fix you up. Okay?” He cranked the car on, turned it around, and raced back into the city, to the privacy of his apartment.

Frank set her on his bed. He clasped his hands in reverence, staring down at her. She was like a huge, beautiful waxen doll.

He poured warm water and bath oil into a bowl, retrieved a towel from his linen rack, then commenced ablutions. Her wings clung to her until he began wiping them with the warm water. As they fell away, he eyed her body, draped in a diaphanous fabric. Her breasts were high and small, her mons hairless. She had no navel, nor did her rib cage extend below her breasts. Her torso was long, hipless; her legs also lengthy and thin. Her ankles were crossed, much to Frank’s annoyance. He wanted to see her precious honeypot. He thought even God would understand his curiosity. How often did a mortal see an angel this close up?

Lifting the material of her gown, he washed her body. He felt the spreading heat in his groin, hoping God wouldn’t think he was a pervert. He spread her legs, staring at the seamless flesh there.

“Sheesh! She’s a fucking Barbie doll.” Maybe if he pried the skin apart…

She moaned, her arms rising up from her wings, self-consciously pulling down her gown. Frank grumbled. He wiped down her feet, then brushed her hair. It was thick and felt fake, like thin nylon filament. Not the silky stuff he expected. Nevertheless, running his fingers through it was keeping him hot.

Just then, he remembered God, His ever-present love… and judgment. Frank swam in a torrent of guilt. “I’ll just leave you here and let you rest. Call out if you need me. I’m Frank Garland. Frank.”

He leaned over her, staring at her mouth, his cock still throbbing in his jeans. She had no discernible lips, but he could imagine her mouth opening, closing around his…Shit, he thought, he was acting like a pervert. As God was his witness, this was an angel, not some self-serving bitch!

Just the same, he didn’t want her flying off on him. He tied her up with clean nylon rope, then left her there while he took a cold shower.

Frank turned down the Charger game when he thought he heard her calling. Her voice had the quality of a wind chime tinkling in his head. When he hurried into the bedroom, she was wrestling with the ropes, her wings strained against the constriction. Her mouth worked, but no sound came. Instead, Frank heard her entreaty—frenzied, fearful—in his mind.

“Hey, hey. Don’t be frightened. I just tied you up so you wouldn’t try to walk or anything. I couldn’t tell how hurt you were in that fall. Here… let me untie you.” He noticed the angel’s eyes were black, like onyx marbles. She seemed to be looking at him with marked incredulity.

Once untied, the angel crawled off the bed and stood in the corner of the room. He could feel her wonder, where am I?, her eyes wide.

“You’re in my apartment. I found you in the woods when you crashed. You fell from the sky.” He put his hands behind him, full of humility. “I saved you.”

She searched the room until she saw the doorway, then moved toward it. Her movements were awkward, as if she was trying to stay on the ground. He watched her go down the hall, into the living room, and followed. She was staring at the television.

“It’s a football game. Don’t you have those in heaven?”

She shook her head, turning toward the kitchen.

“That’s my kitchen. Food? Are you hungry?”

She nodded, moving buoyantly in that direction.

Frank opened his cupboards. There were two cans of SpaghettiOs, an open bag of chips, a nearly empty jar of coffee, and an unopened box of animal crackers. Trying the fridge, he found a six-pack minus two cans, the doggie bag from the restaurant he’d taken Sharon to, and an apple so wizened, it looked like a large walnut.

He grabbed the doggie bag and set it on the counter. “I don’t have much. You can have the leftovers.”

Suddenly, he was aware she needed water. He poured her a glass. She drank voraciously, the sound of her gullet like a cricket chirping. She shivered as she swallowed, her wings trembling behind her. He held up the barbecue chicken from the bag. She turned away. With that, he started on the leftovers himself.

After she’d consumed two quarts of water, Frank watched her glide over to the sofa. Her hand went over the nubby fabric, pressing, testing, before she sat down.

“Hey, you want to talk or something?” Frank sat across from her in the vinyl recliner he’d inherited from his stepfather.

Her voice twittered and tinkled in his mind. Where on earth am I? Where is she, my OTHER, who I am to meet?

Frank grinned. “You’re in Denton. It’s a suburb of Henderson. The city’s about a twenty-mile ride northeast of here. I work in the city. At a big hotel.” Frank paused. “You’re supposed to meet somebody?”

She nodded. An image of a pale, stiff-looking, professor-type woman flashed in his mind. She wasn’t familiar to Frank. He didn’t travel in intellectual circles, he thought, chuckling.

“You must be her guardian angel, huh? Sorry you ended up with me, but I’m sure I need you more than she ever could.”

A question slid into Frank’s mind. He snorted. “How do I need you? As God is my witness, I’m having one serious shortage of faith. Started way back when I lost my dad. I’m a fucking spiritual nightmare, right now. That’s how I just know God sent you to me. That woman you’re supposed to meet? She has to be a mistake.”

The angel glanced around the room, disinterested in Frank’s banter. She put her hands to her nose, sniffed them. The angel wanted to know what she sensed on her.

“Oh, that. I bought some nice-smelling bath stuff for my last girlfriend and it was in the water I used to clean you up. Hope you don’t mind. It smells pretty good, huh?”

The angel cocked her head. He felt something searching under his clothes, over his skin, like a feather brushing lightly on the surface, from his feet up to his chin. The effect made him horny again. His erection did not go unnoticed. The feather touch seemed to concentrate there, lapping over the taut skin, then traveled up his body, and away.

“Jesus.” Frank felt as if he was about to come. He looked into and away from her obsidian eyes, sensing her curiosity with his prick, and displeasure with his scent.

“Oh, sorry. I took a cold shower. No soap. I forget shit like that. Go to the store and buy everything but…” His erection shrank. “I’ll pick some up later, really.”

The phone trilled, making Frank jump. He was suddenly wary, the boundary of his apartment walls dissolving into full exposure. Everyone will know. He grabbed the receiver.

“Yeah?”

“Is that how you answer the phone now?”

He slumped against the bar that divided the kitchen and living room. “Ma. What is it?”

She sighed audibly. Frank steeled himself.

“We missed you at church today. That makes three Sundays in a row. I wanted to know what in the devil you’ve been up to?” Her tone went from benign concern to grand suspicion in a few seconds.

Frank gritted his teeth. “Ma, I’ve got a life, you know. I went to another church. Across town. With my friend Andrea.”

“Oh?” It was her incredulous ‘oh,’ not her resigned ‘oh.’ “Which church was that?”

“Grace Baptist. I know it isn’t our church, but God was still there.”

“God, and apparently this Andrea.”

“I told you about Andrea six months ago, Ma. She’s the woman from the shoe store.” He’d buried her two months ago, September. It had been a Sunday then, too.

“Oh, yes. Well, bring her over to dinner one night. Your stepfather and I really enjoyed that girl you brought over last month. What was her name… Susan. No, Shelly. No, Sharon.”

“I don’t know, Ma. Sharon didn’t work out for me, and Andrea isn’t anything to me anymore.”

“Frank, you’re my only boy, now. Will you ever settle down and get married? Have grandchildren for me?”

“Ma, don’t start.” Frank glanced over at his angel. She sat still, her eyes on the football game. He turned his back to her.

“Lord, you’re just too picky. What was wrong with Sharon?”

Everything, he thought. She wanted what she wanted, when she wanted it, and when she couldn’t get it, she cut him off. Trying to control him. Regularly. Just like all the others. “She was looking for someone more ambitious. I’m happy doing what I do.”

“Well, then good riddance. You’re a baker. That’s an honorable profession. If that’s not good enough for her, then you’re better off. God…”

“Ma, do you believe in angels?”

“Of course, Frankie, why?”

“Do you think they ever fall from heaven down here, to earth?” Frank glanced back at his angel. When she began to look at him, he turned away.

“Why don’t you ask Reverend Dooley? He’d know.”

“But, do you think so?”

Her silence told him she was either going to make up an outrageous fabrication or admit she didn’t know.

“I believe they can fall to earth, but only after they’ve committed some form of blasphemy in heaven. Then they’re cast down to hell, but might hit earth accidentally.” She didn’t know. “So, why do you want to know?”

Telling his mother would ruin it. “The sermon this morning. Baptist stuff. I wondered was all.”

“Baptists. Hmph. Oh. I see your stepfather’s finished his beer and supper’s ready, so I’ll say good-bye. And I hope to see you next Sunday.”

“Next Sunday.” If he had ever doubted God’s existence, the angel had changed him forever. He’d go to church. He’d never miss it again.

He felt a light touch on the back of his head. He spun around to find the angel there, her fingertip drawing back from him, her face unreadable. He smiled at her.

“That was my mother. Nosy lady. I didn’t want to tell her about you. You don’t mind, do you?”

She shook her head. She sent him the thought that she wanted to rest, that she needed to be ready to meet her OTHER in the place where Frank had found her. Tomorrow.

“Uh, well, I was hoping you’d want to stay with me. I know I don’t have a luxurious place or anything, and I’m not much of a host yet, but I think we could get along. Besides, I really need you.”

She looked at him the way his fourth grade teacher had, the time he’d come back from when his father died. Then, the look felt like sympathy. Now he saw it as pity.

“Look, I don’t know what you want, but I’ll do anything. Anything.”

She projected the image of herself on the forest floor, crumpled and alone, then standing with the nameless woman, embracing her. Somehow, Frank sensed how terribly important the meeting was. Maybe, he thought, he would take her, let them meet, then take the angel back with him. Cooperate. Gain their trust. Let them both know he wanted to care for the angel.

She frowned. He felt the tug of her distress. Like Denise. Andrea. Sharon.

“All right, I’ll take you back. But I just want one thing.”

She floated around him, wings shuddering, her delight conveyed in the phosphorescence of her skin. Anything, she told him, anything he wished.

The image slid into his mind as easily as muffins off a greased tin. She and him, in bed, making love, him giving her something so good, she’d never leave him. Marking her with his semen. Truly making her his angel.

“Maybe God wouldn’t want it, though.” He was shy. Awkward. “I mean, I’m not pure like you. Maybe I’d pollute you. You know, make you unclean.”

She cocked her head, her eyes becoming black holes, drawing him in. With every cell in her being, she was letting him know it was all right, that he would be made clean by her. He felt himself losing his peripheral vision, then saw stars, as if he was fainting. Then there was nothing.

He regained consciousness slowly, swimming up from a syrupy deep sleep. He was naked on his bed. By the glowing numbers on his clock radio, he saw it was the middle of the night. He reached over for the lamp, his panic palpable, certain she was gone.

There, in the amber light, she was asleep beside him. He reached down and felt his flaccid cock. It was puckered with dried jism. His mouth tasted strange. As if he’d been sucking on roses. He remembered her lack of orifices, save one, and leaned over her. His fingers deftly probed the surface of her mons. Nothing.

He closed his eyes. In flashes, it came to him. Her floating ahead of him into the bedroom. Her bathing him, pampering him with her hands, her mouth. His wanting to ravage her, but her insistence on passivity, and his inability to refuse her. His paralysis. How she seemed to make all the parts of his body feel like his cock, erect with an unrelenting trapped heat that demanded release. And her providing it. Even his hair follicles knew orgasmic pleasure.

And then he recalled something stranger, more unsettling. Her taking his hand and putting it to her lips, then sucking it in, first fingers, then hand, to wrist, his arm up past his elbow. Then, there he somehow knew to strum a place inside her, flesh stretched like catgut, smooth as velvet, vibrating like the strings of a harp. The sound she made was like a choir, singing up to the Lord. As she reached her crescendo, a place inside her wept. When she released him, his arm slid slowly from inside her. He knew to lick off all the moisture that remained—moisture with the scent of roses.

Why he’d been put into some kind of coma to experience it, he didn’t know, but he felt different now. Redeemed. She had cleansed him. Forgiven him the horrible results of his temper, his intolerance, over the years. The little deaths, and the important ones.

“I love you.” He spoke to her sleeping form. He’d never said those words before and meant them. From the bottom of his miraculously rescued heart, he meant it now.

He slid off the bed to his knees and, for the first time in twenty years, prayed.

The hotel where Frank worked was not happy to learn that he needed the day off to show an out-of-town guest around, but Frank’s assistant could easily handle the Monday baking demands.

Frank showered and dressed as if for church. His angel watched. His mind was silent, empty of her thoughts. What the hell was going on with her? He resigned himself to the fact that women mystified him. What went on inside them seemed more trouble than it was worth to learn. Hell, he thought, he had enough to say for both of them. He talked to her of how he wanted to care for her, what kind of a life they could have together. She gave him no sign she was listening.

The angel drank an enormous amount of water, but otherwise ate nothing. Frank was so hungry he almost ate the gnarled apple. Instead he devoured the animal crackers, gone hard as wood. He wanted a beer, but a wonderful feeling infused him, giving him a deep feeling of satisfaction. As if he’d already had the beer. Quite a few of them.

“Let’s go.” He took the angel, wrapped in his raincoat, to his car. He saw Mrs. Levin peeking out her window, as usual. If he ran into her in the laundromat, she’d ask him who the girl was. Where she’d come from, as she had with all the others. The woman was nosier than his mother. Only more dangerous.

The highway was busy with Monday traffic and the road out to the quarry full of double trailer trucks hauling granite.

“We’ll have to drive through the quarry works. You have to hunker down then, or I’ll have to explain about you.”

The angel seemed to shrink until she was a lumpy pile of raincoat on the floor of the car. Frank turned up his tape of Buchanan’s “When a Guitar Plays the Blues,” as the sound of gravel under his wheels began to make him nervous.

No one paid him any mind until he reached the far end of the quarry works and the dirt path began. A truck blocked his way and he had to get out and ask that it be moved.

A man in a business suit stood nearby, talking with a worker.

“Hey, you the driver?” Frank asked the worker.

The suit turned. “Can I help you?”

“I need that truck moved.”

“You can’t go down that path, man. It’s quarry property. A dirt road. We don’t want to be liable for what could happen if…”

“I was here yesterday.” He thought fast. “Hang gliding. I left some of my gear there. Too heavy to walk it all out with me. I’ll be in and out. Promise.” He smiled reassuringly.

The suit checked his watch. He frowned, looked up to the sky, then down at his watch again.

“In and out. You have ten minutes.”

“Thanks. That’s all I need.”

The suit instructed the worker to move the truck and Frank was off.

“Boy, that was close. We almost got stopped.” She oozed back up onto the seat, her hair covering her face.

For the first time all day, he sensed her apprehension, anxiety. He felt her growing distress.

“Don’t you worry. We’ll get there. I lied to the guy, but I don’t think they’ll come in and get us. He’s probably too busy worrying about some granite problem.”

She looked at him plaintively. He patted her knee. Her wings fluttered a tiny bit under the raincoat.

He stopped the car at the end of the road at the felled trees. Another car, a huge sedan, was parked just off the road. Maybe that was her. The stiff, professor-looking woman, he thought.

“Let me scout ahead. I don’t want anybody to hurt you.”

She sent him her feelings of trepidation, then acquiesced. He sauntered down the mountainside, slipping in his Sunday shoes. He could see someone in the small clearing where he’d found his angel. A tall woman, dressed soberly, her pale hair tied into a severe bun. She began to turn toward him, so he hid behind a tree.

Just then, he felt a subtle vibration, a quaking of the air. His skin itched ever so slightly. While he was still staring at the woman, she looked up. Frank’s eyes followed hers.

The gray sky became strangely pixilated, as if all its atoms had expanded to an inch in diameter and were randomly dancing and jittering over him. The clouds thickened like marshmallow puffs, then grew skittery, too. The vibration in the air became more palpable. Frank looked back down.

His angel was standing beside the woman. They weren’t speaking with their mouths, but it was clear they were deep in conversation. The woman began disrobing. Frank felt himself go ramrod hard watching. When the woman was naked, he saw she was built just like his angel, and that she had deep long scars where her wings had been removed. The two of them embraced, their hands slowly tracing over the other’s body. Frank shuddered, ejaculating in his Sunday slacks.

After regaining his composure, Frank got angry. He’d made it clear to his angel that she was going back with him, but since witnessing this relationship, his doubts grew.

He’d just be patient. Yes, that was it. Once the meeting was over, he’d go in, introduce himself, and they’d leave. He might even have to be a bit forceful. Females required a firm hand, he thought.

The itching worsened, reminding Frank of how his nose felt when he brushed his teeth. The sky grew darker, gradually, until it was as dark above the trees as it was below. When he looked at his angel and the woman, they were staring at him. His angel gestured for Frank to come closer. She reached out to him, but it was as though his head was stuffed with cotton. What she wanted wasn’t clear.

Sluggishly, Frank walked toward them. His angel’s wings were beating a waltz rhythm in the air behind her. She was absolutely beaming with happiness, her body aglow like neon in the night.

He could almost hear his angel as he stood at the edge of the clearing. He thought he heard her call to him, “Come stand here.” He stepped closer, into the ferns.

He yelled to the other woman, “She’s my angel! I’m taking her back with me when you’re done.”

The woman shook her head, pointing to her back. Then she put her hands together, touched them to her lips, then to his angel’s, as if to pray.

Frank understood. God. God was coming to take this woman up to heaven to return her wings. It was as his mother had said, after all. The woman was an angel—a fallen angel. And his angel was her guide back. It would be up to him to wait for his angel to return. God would smile favorably on that. On his patience. Not one of Frank’s virtues before. But a virtue God wanted for all His children.

The faint sound of a choir filled Frank’s ears. The two angels seemed to hear it too, and gazed up. His angel reached out and took the other in her arms as a beam of white light thrust through the darkness like a fist. The light engulfed them. A corona of orange light cascaded down around the white.

Frank looked up, his hands together, his eyes full of tears, his heart full of reverence. The light was so intense he couldn’t see God. Still, he spoke to Him.

“Lord, I’ve been reborn. I never believed in you before. Not really. It was just to please my mother, and because my father told me to always listen to her. But, you’ve sent me proof. I’ve been saved. All the bad stuff I’ve done? Never again.

“I know maybe I should tell the truth, and go to jail. Do my penance. But, wouldn’t it be better if I just go forward and do your good work now? I hope so.

“Me and my angel. For you. Anything.”

Frank glanced over to the fallen angel, now wrapped in his angel’s arms in the center of the white light. His angel’s wings built speed until she lifted them both off the ground. The orange light seemed to pulsate around them. His angel scanned him, her black eyes glinting in the light. He heard her say loudly and clearly, in his mind, “Good-bye.”

“NO!” He screamed, racing toward the light. “I want to be with you! With God!”

He fell to the ground on his knees, arms outstretched, weeping.

“Please, God, please.”

His angel disappeared up into the light. Frank felt a deep sorrow. He didn’t know if it was his sorrow or hers, or both.

The very next feeling he had was of warmth. Radiant, soul-soothing warmth. It’s God’s hand, he thought. God, I’m ready.

The orange light swallowed the white, then intensified, focusing on Frank. He knew then that God had chosen to call him. Knew it in his very bones. Knew it, even as the light turned every molecule in his body to dust.