3132 words
Good Intentions is an original short story about the old trope of making a deal with the devil; Only the devil is not what she seems, and the human does not want to make a deal.
Mara sat in the booth alone, enjoying the burn of the whisky. She wasn’t normally one for drinking, but these days it seemed to be the only thing that dulled the pain.
The bar was quiet, which was to be expected on a Sunday night. Sunday may have been the reason that had brought her here. Lately, she felt at her lowest on a Sunday, the day before the cycle of shit began again. How long did she intend to carry on this routine for? And why? For whose benefit?
No more, she decided. She had given life a decent shot, more than decent. She had accomplished more in her twenty-five years than most people did in an entire lifetime. Anyone who had given a shit about her, or her accomplishments, was long gone now. Some left, some were taken, the how didn’t matter.
Mara didn’t imagine she was going to be reunited with the ones that had died. She was confident that there was nothing on the other side, and that suited her just fine. Finally, some peace and quiet.
As she contemplated how she intended to end it, she was interrupted by a voice behind her. ‘Waiting for someone?’
Mara turned to see a beautiful figure standing at her side. A woman, quite a bit older than herself, striking in her looks, as if tailor-made to appeal to Mara’s personal tastes. Raven black hair, porcelain white skin and pale eyes, Maybe they were green, maybe blue, it was hard to tell in this light.
This woman definitely didn’t belong to a dive like this, her clothes said “money” , or possibly “authority”. Mara was wary of this beautiful stranger, she began to wonder if this woman was a fed, or maybe she was sent by the military to tempt her back. Mara decided she had nothing left to lose at this stage, curiosity got the better of her. So she shrugged and gestured to the seat opposite her own in the booth.
‘Nah. Seat’s all yours, if that’s what you’re asking.’
The stranger gracefully took her seat.
‘You know, Mara, a soul is a terrible thing to waste’.
Mara choked on her drink, ‘Fuck, you know my name- Wait, did you say “soul?”
‘Right on both counts’, the stranger paused, considering her next words. ‘I know what you’re planning on doing this evening.’
Mara rolled her eyes, ‘Is this some kind of weird pickup line?’
‘I know you’re thinking of ending your life’, the stranger was serious.
Mara scoffed, ‘Okay, and let me guess, you’re my guardian angel, sent to intervene?’
‘Not an angel, not anymore’, a melancholy smile crossed her face.
‘Oh, you’re from a private contractor? Is this about mercenary work?’ Mara felt like she was putting the pieces together.
‘No, nothing of the sort. Would such a person know what weighs heaviest on your heart like that?’
‘Maybe. Lucky guesses, and some online stalking can get you pretty far. Maybe you have my military file, maybe you can just see it on my face-,’ Mara gestured to the burn that began on the left cheek and worked its way down her exposed muscular arm. Glistening pink against her olive skin.
‘Or maybe you can just smell how much I’ve had to drink already.’
From Mara’s perspective, the stranger seemed to watch her from an island of complete composure and tranquillity. Mara didn’t know if that was sympathy or merely clinical analysis she saw behind the woman’s gaze. Mara didn’t expect this stranger to understand her. Civilians never did. How could they? It was all just “Thank you for your service”, “I’m sorry that happened to you”, “That must have hurt”, and the always popular “Did you kill anyone?”.
Mara sighed, ‘If you’re not here to recruit me, what the Hell do you want?’
The other woman gave a wry smile, ‘I thought I had made myself perfectly clear. I want your soul.’
Mara gave a short bitter laugh, ‘Wait a few hours, babe, and it’s all yours. Suicided souls go straight to Hell, right?’
‘They do, but you will belong to no one. Just another nameless, faceless body for the other demons to practise on, or play with, I don’t think you deserve that, Mara.’
The woman cautiously extended her hand and took Mara’s into her own.
‘I want you. With me, your soul will be safe. If it is now my duty to take souls, I want it to benefit us both. I want to help you.’
Mara was stunned into silence by the conviction and sincerity in the stranger’s voice. Mara didn’t pull her hand back, it had been too long since she had known this kind of touch. And this woman wanted her? No one had ever wanted her before, not even her own family. Part of her wanted to melt and give into whatever this stranger wanted. Then she returned to her senses, what was she thinking? This stranger was clearly insane.
Insanely hot, but, still, insane.
Mara withdrew her hand reluctantly.
‘This is all a joke, isn’t it? You must be having me on.’
‘I know how you must be feeling. I know what it’s like to have your whole world turned upside down, again and again. And every time you’re sure you’ve finally landed on solid ground, it collapses beneath you.’
Mara sat back, scepticism returned. She ran a hand through her short dark blonde hair, trying to decide if she’d had enough or if she wanted to see where this circus was going. ‘Would you, now? I have a million questions for the woman claiming she’s, a what? A demon? But let’s start with the basics: Who are you?’
‘My name was once Agiel, until I was thrown out of Heaven…I’m sure you know where fallen angels go.’
‘Alright, I’ll bite, what did you do to piss off the big boss upstairs?’
Agiel continued, ignoring Mara’s sarcasm, ‘I was the spirit of Saturn, a most prestigious role. It was my duty to preside over the planet. An entire planet all to myself. It wasn’t particularly challenging. Planets tend to be rather good at taking care of themselves.
I was lonely, until one day, life began to emerge on Saturn. Some of the metallic hydrogen started taking on distinct forms, they began passing electricity between themselves, much like neurons. It was incredible.’
Agiel’s face was lighting up at the memory, ‘ Elsewhere similar activity was emerging. On Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, I found organic molecules within the ice. I observed all this for a century or so, fascinated to witness the birth of their consciousness, language, and culture.’
‘Microbes have culture? Like yoghurt?’’, Mara wasn’t believing this story, but at least it was entertaining.
‘Not that kind of culture’, Agiel smiled. ‘And not one you would recognise. Once I had compiled enough information on Our Father’s latest creations, I flew back to Heaven to submit my report, imagining only that this would please Him.
This could not have been further from the truth. I had seldom seen such fury in Him before, and certainly never directed at me.’
‘Why was he so mad?’
‘I had created life. That had been my doing, not God’s. I had committed one of the greatest sins an angel could commit.’
‘Well, shit, he’s supposed to be all-knowing, why didn’t he say something? He had a whole century to get around to it.’
‘Yes, well, the rumours of Our Father’s omniscience have been greatly exaggerated.’ A sharpness entered the fallen angel’s otherwise benign countenance.
Now it was Mara’s turn to look beneath the surface.
‘He made you kill them all, didn’t he?’
Agiel gave a short nod, before she wrestled back a flood of emotion. When she regained her composure, she said, ‘Forgive me, I am still getting accustomed to emotions. Yes, when Our Father had discovered what I had done, He ordered me to perform the “purification” myself. “Execution” would have been a more apt term.’
‘But, hang on, you didn’t even know you were doing it’, Mara found herself invested in this plot despite herself.
‘I know. I had never questioned His will before, not in countless millennia. But in that moment, I questioned everything. I should have refused to bloody my hands for His sake. My creations would have suffered the same fate, but not by my hands.’
‘What a bastard’, Mara shook her head.
Agiel’s eyes widened ‘Careful’, he might hear you,’ she whispered.
‘Babe, you’re a demon, you’re the one who should be worried.’
Agiel remembered herself, ‘You’re right. I do forget myself. It still doesn’t feel real.’
‘So, then what happened?’
‘The fall was agony, the first true pain I had ever known. But it was the pain of rebirth. I fell an immeasurable distance through the realms, my wings paralysed at my sides. I watched in horror as the feathers rapidly shed from my wings, leaving nothing but ugly little arms on my back. When I landed, I was reunited with my brother, Lucifer. I was afraid of him at first, expecting a hideous beast, but there he stood in his throne room. The most magnificent of us angels, as he always had been. My brother, my beautiful Morning Star, exactly as I remembered him. Well, aside from the horns.
I broke down sobbing at his feet, I felt I might die, having no understanding of these feelings ravaging my body. But I was not alone, I was surrounded by love.
Lucifer knelt down and held me, encircled me in his leather wings. The other fallen angels began to sing as a chorus, as they flew and circled around us, their voices and wings created the hymn I recognised as the one we sang at the birth of our siblings in Heaven, only now it welcomed the rise of a new demon. I held tightly to my brother as a millennia of memories surged through me, now resurrected with the full spectrum of emotion. These moments that I had once viewed with neutrality were suddenly drenched in so much regret, so much hatred, so much sorrow, it threatened to destroy me.
“I have been so blind”, was all I managed to say to Lucifer once I regained my speech.
He stood and took my hand. “We all were blind once. Now, sister, rise, you are no longer Agiel. In my kingdom you shall be known as Zȃzȇl.”’
‘ Zȃzȇl, nice to finally know what to call you’ Mara said.
‘And do you believe me now?’
‘Maybe. What I don’t get is what do you want with me? I might have been somebody once, but now I’m nobody. Nobody No-One from Nowheresville. I don’t matter. And the thing is, I like it that way, I don’t want to be somebody, so what are you going to give me in this deal? I don’t want anything.’
‘You do matter’, Zȃzȇl looked down and wrung her hands. ‘You matter to me. I’ve been watching you.’
‘For how long?’ Mara’s tone was sharper than she expected. Maybe she was starting to believe.
‘Since your first deployment’, Zȃzȇl still couldn’t meet her gaze.
‘Should have been my first and only. What made you follow me?’
‘There is something about you. Something about your pain that speaks to me. It’s hard for me to explain. Pain was once only a problem to be fixed, that’s what you are taught as an angel. Something to spare the humans from. But now, as a demon, I understand the vast complexities of the language of pain. The sheer transcendental beauty it can provide. I hope I am not being too forward in saying that I find your agony exquisite.’
Both women blushed.
Mara didn’t know if she felt terrified or seduced.
‘And let me guess, you want to inflict more pain on me, is that it?’
‘Heavens, no! – I mean, Hell, no.’, Zȃzȇl laughed at herself.
Mara joined her, ‘You really are new to all this, huh?’
‘It shows, doesn’t it?’ Zȃzȇl gave a sheepish glance that Mara found endearing.
Silence fell between them as the rain made an abrupt appearance, making the neon lights stretch and shimmer in the black void outside.
After a moment, Mara broke the silence, ‘Is it because you see yourself in my story? Is that why you were drawn to me?’
‘You see the resemblance too, don’t you?’
‘Depends. You tell me’, Mara needed to hear what this supposed fallen angel knew.
‘We were both decorated soldiers, blindly devoted to either country or God. We followed orders without question, until one day, our leaders showed us their true nature. They cast us out, I would argue, for caring too much. You did the right thing, Mara. For that infant, I mean. You tried.’
‘Shit, you really do know. That incident was scrubbed from all official record’, Mara finished her glass and set it to one side, bracing herself for this conversation. ‘Her headless mother haunts my nightmares to this day. And I can’t tell a soul about it.’
‘You can tell me.’
‘Why? You were there right? You saw it all.’
‘Because you need to let it out.’
Mara met Zȃzȇl’s eyes then stared out the window again. She saw not a rainy urban street but a bombed-out village in the desert, half a world away from here.
‘We were just out on patrol, we weren’t anticipating anything. Out of nowhere came an airstrike on one of the nearby settlements. Thing is, it was a chopper, and it looked like one of our own. I called it into my commander, he didn’t know anything more than I did, so he ordered my team to investigate. We drove over there, following this massive black plume of smoke over the dune. We got out of our vehicle along the perimeter, searching for any signs of enemy combatants, we found none. Of course we found nothing.
The scenes inside the village were hard to witness. I mean, man, this was my second tour. I had already seen plenty of fucked up shit, but you know it was always done to-’
‘To bad guys that deserved it?’
‘Well, yeah. But now it was just civilians, families, children, going about their daily lives. Anyway- the middle of town was a black charred mess, there was nothing left, but I consider them the lucky ones. They were alive one second and ashes the next, Probably didn’t have long enough to register the significance of the chopper blades.
It was at was the outer edges of town where the real horrorshow began. We got to work helping any survivors we found. I went from house to house, room to room, sifting the living from the meat. That’s when I heard a baby crying. I followed the sound into a house that was relatively intact, half of it, anyway. There was no one in the kitchen or living room, and that didn’t seem like a good sign, it was the rear of the house that had taken the brunt of the blast. So then I get to the nursery- And, you know the rest’, Mara cut herself off as she felt her throat constrict with tears.
Zȃzȇl held Mara’s hand again, this time Mara brought her other hand on top.
‘I’m sorry to keep pressing, but I need to know the story from your perspective, I need to know what went through your mind on that day.’
‘Why?’ Mara croaked.
‘I need to know I’m making the right decision, and that I wasn’t imagining things.’
Mara took a deep breath and dived into her past again, not entirely with reluctance, maybe she did need to get this out of her system. It had been festering inside of her for years.
‘I entered the nursery, there’s the usual, crib, hanging mobile thing, changing table…And the rocking chair.’
‘Where you found them.’
‘Yeah, it was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. Most of the back wall was blown out, the light was streaming in on this perfectly normal, innocent room. Except for the mother sitting in that chair, her head was just gone. I don’t even know how that happened. Just clean off, like it was sliced.’
‘Do you want to know?’
‘Yeah?’
‘It was a large piece of shrapnel, flew like a blade through the air. That much I did see.’
Mara nodded, ‘Well, fuck. There was so much blood all over her baby. Looks like she was about to be breastfed, poor kid. I picked her up, cleaned her off as best I could. But, well, there was only one source of food.’ Mara struggled to keep talking, but powered through.
‘I put that baby back in her mother’s arms, guided her to the breast and let her feed. Something about the sight of that, it – It broke me.’
Suddenly Mara took a sharp inhale, stood up and made for the exit, thrusting her leather jacket back on. ‘I can’t do this. Fuck you for making me do this’.
Zȃzȇl didn’t say anything, she just calmly followed Mara out into the rain under the safety of her umbrella while Mara got drenched.
‘And yet, you couldn’t look away’, Zȃzȇl called after her.
‘What?’ Mara turned around.
‘When they found you, you were sitting on the ground, back to the wall, eyes transfixed on that infant. You couldn’t turn your back, could you? You can’t ignore the pain, the horror, the injustice of this world, can you?’
‘I can’t ignore it, no. But that’s what’s killing me inside. That strike had been one of our own choppers, but it was piloted by a double-agent. That would have been a bad look for my country, so we were ordered to eliminate all witnesses. I’m a soldier, I’m meant to be one of the good guys, Christ. Those villagers had been through enough, we should have helped them.’
‘You did your best’, Zȃzȇl placed a hand on Mara’s arm.
‘Yeah, well, my best wasn’t good enough. I’m done, just let me die and leave this shitty world. Hell sounds nice right about now,’ Mara continued to walk away.
‘I could give you anything, anything at all’, Zȃzȇl followed.
And I told you I don’t want anything, you can’t make a deal if you’ve got nothing I want.’
Zȃzȇl quickened her pace to stand in front of Mara, ‘I can give you something that nothing and no one else has ever given you.’
‘Like what?’
Zȃzȇl closed the gap between them and kissed her, it was the first time she had ever performed such an action, it was careful and studied. After a moment of surprise, Mara relaxed and leaned into it from the depths of hunger.
Zȃzȇl then finished her thought, ‘I can give you a reason to live.’
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