He calls himself Azazel, because he no longer has any need for subtlety, and he waits for a god to come and smite him, as he was promised long ago.

He has made himself a monster in a castle, and he lives in it like an actor in a theatre, waiting for curtain to be called. He sulks and sends armies to murder and pillage, and deals with the rebellions as they come. And he waits, with dwindling hope.

He was promised an end. He thought it would come soon, once he blackened the skies and blotted the sun, once he sent plague and war and ruin into what had been peaceful lands. He had looked down at the fires and mourning left by his handiwork, and sent a hopeful glance to the sky, and waited for the trumpets of war and a chariot of lightning to descend. When none came, he was confused, but he had his instructions, and perhaps he had not fulfilled them clearly enough.

Make yourself a monster, worthy of smiting.

He had made himself a warlord. He could make himself worse.

That was when he made himself new forms. A wolf who walked on two legs and had three heads, a man with pale skin and sharp teeth, a mist that smelled of rot and death. In these forms he would slink into settlements that hoped to rebuild, and he would kill with his own teeth, tasting the blood that had been once wasted on unhungry swords.

The iron taste of it choked him, and the memory of the tears and cries of his victims plagued his dreams, but he was content that it would soon end. His god was kind, and his god was dutiful, and his god rewarded work done well.

But he sat in his castle as folk-tales spread, and when the first rebellion came to kill him, it was not lead by his god. He searched for signs of his coming among the army, among the men leading them up the mountain, and finds none.

And so he crushed the rebels, and threw ther broken bodies down to their weeping families. The end, for him, had not yet come.

He tried new horrors then, found new ways to inflict pain. He waited for those who suffered them to cry out for salvation, and when he did, he felt hope in his chest that it would come to them, and that everything would end.

Break them, make them need a Lord and a god.

No end came, and he began to wonder if his god had forgotten him. But that was blasphemy, and so he kept on.

He chose men from among the sniveling cowards who served him and sent them out with rumors on their tongues, of prophecy and magic and holy things waiting. The men he sent were confused--why betray his weakness to the masses who wanted nothing more than his death? But then, these men were confused by many things, like why the lord they served detested them, and why he took no joy in the bloodshed he caused. They did not need to understand--they needed to obey.

For what is a god without followers who need him?

He had provided a need, perhaps he needed to provide the followers as well.

It took time for the rumors to stick, for religion to be born, for the people to speak of the god who would come and crush him. He suffered the time with patience, because he felt sure that, in due time, an end would come.

But centuries after he has crushed the churches they built and blighted the holy places they have designated, no end comes.

So he takes the name Azazel, and ponders in his castle. He thinks of the last words his god said to him, running them over and over in his mind. He thinks of the things he has done and the things he could do still, and yet no fresh torture comes to mind. He has exhausted his cruelty and his creativity both, it would seem. He has killed the servants he did not send away, for he does not need them.

He waits for an end, and entertains the uprisings in the meantime.

When he is not waiting, he is angry. Angry is safer than guilty, and both are safer than mourning. Where is the god for whom he made himself a villain? Where are the armies sent to destroy him? Where is the religion he has sinned to bring about? Where is his god?

Where is his absolution?

He cannot do anything but wait for an end, for if he stops waiting, he must confront what he has done, and selfish creature that he is, he cannot do that. He has made himself a monster, he has named himself Azazel, and he waits for an end, for a promise fulfilled.

Because the shirt is white, we can use bleach on the stains. Margo mixes a solution in the bathtub and dips the shirt in and out, in and out, scrubbing it, her nimble hands made clunky by the yellow rubber gloves.

“See?” she says, pulling the shirt from the milky water, “good as new. And the tub is clean.”

We let the water-bleach mixture drain, then hose off the shirt and the porcelain of the bath and finally Margo’s hands, even though no bleach touched her skin.

Just like that, Auntie is gone, and we are on our own in an apartment paid for through the month. Margo got a job at a store that sells silk scarves and I will be working at the library, and we should be able to pay rent and keep the lights on and feed ourselves, even if we can’t afford new shirts just yet.

“Soon,” Margo promises me, “once we get promotions or scrape together savings.”

I think that Auntie would have bought us new shirts, but I know better than to say it outloud. Auntie is gone, the last of her went down the drain with bleach and water, and Margo does not want me to stain our apartment with her. She worked so hard to get her away, after all.

Besides, I don’t mean it. I don’t need a new shirt because I would rather have a job and a good night’s sleep and no screaming.

Margo takes my face in her hands, the palms warm.

“Remember, she was dating that biker, and she went off with him. Happens all the time. No, we don’t know when she’ll be back. No, she didn’t leave a number.” I nod, and Margo goes to answer the door, which I did not realize had been knocked on. I’m staring at the drain we washed Mom’s sister down, until Margo clears her throat.

I walk to the kitchen and start to boil water for pasta as Margo greets the man in blue at the door.

Then it’s hello I'm Officer Davis are you Margo Munroe? And Yes I am her is anything the matter? And that’s what I came to find out has Lucille Beauchamp been home today? And No sir not since she left for work and mind if I come in and ask a few questions? And I suppose so but please try not to disturb my sister she’s a little restless she’s got- and the rest is cut off by the whoosh of the pasta into the pot.

Officer Davis is there with Officer Robbin and I tell them what Margo told me I know, and watch them take notes. I tell them I did not make enough pasta for all four of us so they’ll have to leave before dinner. They do, but they leave a little card with their number if we hear from her. Margo pulls me into a hug and rests her chin on my head.

“Soon she’ll be gone and we’ll start fresh. Not a smidge of her left.”

That night the bath I take smells too clean and I imagine the water tingles my skin even though I know we did a real good job washing away the bleach. I think about the life Margo has painted for us and how she got us both jobs and we’ll have money and run our lives however we please. I won’t be yelled at for not understanding things easily and Margo won’t be hit every time her face looks too much like mom’s.

It’s a fresh start. It ought not to smell like bleach, but that is inevitable.

When my mother dies, she leaves me her wings.

They are tawny, mottled things, three and a half feet long and with a wingspan of a little over seven feet, a bit too big for me. At the place where they connected to her back, little wires and metallic plates gleam, and these I focus on most. They are the only part of the wings not familiar to me, buried as they were in the muscle and sinew of her back. The Mortician has scrubbed them clean of bodily fluids, though I search them thoroughly. No part of my mother remains on the wings, and yet she is heavy on them like a scent.

Of course, her scent to has been scrubbed clean, too.

“You know,” says the mortician, handing them to me in a blue zippered bag, “You could get a good price for those.”

“I know,” I say, and I do. I heard the offers my mother got, five thousand, ten thousand, twenty, higher. And I watched as she shook her head and rejected lawyer after lawyer, even as the numbers they spoke called to mind the houses we could live in and the meals we could eat and the shiney new shoes we could buy. But my mother kept her wings, and we stayed in a series of ramshackle little homes and lived off of canned food and I could have poked pencil-leads through the worn rubber of my souls.

Things stabled out a bit before she died, but even so, she had nothing to leave me but these.

I suppose I should be grateful--there are people who would pay good money to be left a pair of wings in a will, knowing they might die long before the seller. My mother could have kept them her entire life and still been able to eat well and own a winter coat. But she left them for me, the one person who had nothing to offer for them.

Not even gratitude.

They say Sultans used to give white elephants to men they wanted to ruin; the gift couldn’t be turned down or killed and yet was too expensive to keep. I am sure my mother had some romantic notion in her head when she left her wings to me. If I bothered to look through her journals I am sure I would find pages of poetry about legacies and metaphors and dreams and wings. I am sure she never thought about how much it would cost to have them installed, or the time I would need to take off work for the procedure, or that I would need to re-buy half my wardrobe to accommodate them, and that it would take weeks to learn how to keep them folded, let alone how to fly.

I pop the wings into the trunk of my car and try to forget them there while I go about my life. I plan my mothers funeral, a small and cheap affair. I go to and from work, eat underwhelming food, spend some time with my friends and feel guilty when I leave early. I don’t sleep as much as I would like. I sometimes think with guilt of the wings, and I search the internet for buyers, and then I think of the way my mother would stubbornly shake her head at every suit-and-tie man who came to our door, and I close the webpage.

Her dying wish was for me to have them. Maybe she thought with more nostalgia than I did of the times I was small enough for her to carry with ease, and she would bring me to school high above the rooftops and the tiny moving figures that other people became from her vantage point. When I think of those times, I mostly remember the wind whistling sharp and cold, and the too-hard grip of her arm around my stomach. Every time we landed I was so caught up in gratitude for the return of solid ground beneath my feet that I barely felt her kiss my forehead or noticed the awe of other students.

Maybe my mother wanted me to get from them what she did. Maybe flying really was spectacular, freeing. But you cannot eat freedom.

Eventually, a respectful length of time after my mother’s obituary was published in our local newspaper, I receive a letter from a lawyer working on behalf of a businessman. He offers me his condolences, and then eighty-thousand dollars. I balk at the number--but then, most of those poor enough to accept smaller sums have likely already sold. According to the internet, his offer is not far from the going rate.

I meet the lawyer in a stuffy office and he slides me a check. I hand him the bulky wings, still in the blue bag.

“Crazy, how long she held onto ’em,” he says, once he’s inspected them.

I shrug.

“Most folks they did the first experiments on were druggies, you know? Sold the wings the minute they were offered enough for their next fix. Guess your mom got clean?”

“Something like that,” I say. Of course, most of her sobriety was the result of depleted funds, not any genuine desire. She loved the high of flying more than the other kinds, at least. I suppose that was something to be glad of.

“Well, good for her.” I nod and smile.

We shake hands and he gets on the phone with his client, and as he zips the bag up I have one last glimpse of a white-brown feather. For a moment, I find myself thinking back to that feeling of the wind in my face, my mother’s mouth next to my ear as she points to all the familiar buildings below, and we play a game of guessing which is which. Her wingbeats made a comforting sound, and her arms around me are the closest thing to a hug I have received from her.

That night, I deposit the check in my bank account. I don’t feel much richer, though I am, and I am already running through a mental list of bills. Still, I force myself to stop at a nice restaurant, and I pay for a meal and an appetizer and a drink and dessert. The number on the receipt makes me balk, but I have never been so full.