Angelica

The nun knelt there below the trees. Her eyes were closed, so she did not see the lightning bugs that bobbed up and down amongst the already glowing foliage; did not see that everything was rinsed with a tender green light except for her in the dark dress, dark stockings and brown leather shoes. Her order did not insist on habits, anyway, they were thought unmodern.

The nun knelt and prayed, she knelt the difficult way, straight up from the bend of her knees, rather than resting on her haunches.

What did the nun pray for?

Here is how her prayer went, or rather how her prayer dissolved back into pondering thought, as prayers do:
Dear God, dear Virgin or whoever you might be,
Excuse me if I insult you by that address, but if I weren’t honest about my doubts in your existence then you’d surely know. Yesterday Celia and I were discovered by Mary. It was just a kiss and not our first, but it was such a sweet kiss, too, and in my heart I know that something so good and right can never be a sin. I know you know this as well. But Mary reported it, and Celia told Mother Wilgefortis that it was I who initiated it.
Celia took all that purity and sensuality, God, and she soiled it with denial. I am trying to forgive her, but I feel rage, not only that I will be disciplined for Particular Friendships, but rage at someone who only yesterday made me feel happiness, the soar of real emotion, God, the real true light of your Son and my Lord. No matter what happens, I will not deny this as Celia did, and no matter what pattern of frail and flawed human repercussions follow, I will continue to believe that you are truth, and light, and love.

Above her the trees swayed slightly with the wind and she saw how their very leaves glowed, one leaf in three. It was like the lights at Christmas, but here it was not ornamentation but the actual leaves of the tree that shone, rather like those fibreoptic plastic plants she had once seen in a store window.

Oh, it was quite lovely. Then she looked down at herself and saw that her finger was turning white with light where the lightning bug had landed, and the glow was working it’s way inward to her whole body, finger then back of hand then wrist then three-quarters of her arm glowing now, the prettiest infection she had ever seen.

She did not feel particularly surprised. It had been a long day, and the fantastical does not shock a tired mind as it does a well-rested one. Instead she watched with pleasure until her arm entire was glowing, and then her neck, and then she felt heat rush to her face and she knew she must be glowing, too. The white light slid down her other arm, and down her face and she knew it must be glowing, too. The white light slid down her other arm, and down her breasts and ribcage and abdomen and groin, and the whole sensation made her feel warm and tight and full of love. The wave of light reached the tip of her toes and stopped, and left her flesh illuminated like the small plastic statues they used to sell of the virgin in the 1970’s, statues which glowed green-white and faded with the hours of darkness to mere plastic by dawn, when you didn’t need the virgin watching over you anymore.

She looked up. Yes she felt warm and fat and tight, like she had drunk a huge mug of glow-in-the-dark cocoa, or the same way she had felt on all parts of her skin after she and Celia kissed the first time two weeks ago, right after morning prayers.
‘Adam and Eve, not Anna and Eve. Noah’s Ark not Gay Day in the Park.’
‘But Mother, you also say “like attracts like”.’

She stretched out her hands and they shimmered like the tree leaves, and the lightening bugs moved with her in a little dance and she felt she was traveling with them as they swirled silently around her head; as if she and the bugs were working together in the magic of shine, though their species were different.

She took all her clothes off then. How could she not? It felt right, there in the little green glen with the moon shining, and the trees glowing ghostly and the insects, and the tea lights; and she laughed with delight when she saw how smooth the glow was from her breasts, and now the tight muscles of her bare arms glitered with movement. And her bottom; she turned around to see it, too, glowed perfectly there, a fine sheen to it that made her haunches look quite attractive, in her opinion. She hoped only that it would not rain, for then she would get cold.

While she was checking out the shine off her bottom, someone coughed near the altar.

She took her time turning around, not feeling particularly frightened because if she could glow like this then, if it was someone dangerous like a rapist or a murderer, okay , she would just kick her heels together and fly up out of reach. Why not? If she had already started glowing, well, anything could happen now.

But there was an angel coughing there, sitting down casually on the altar.
‘I’ve got a bit of a hack ,’ she explained, ‘my homeopath said phosphorus would work, but it hasn’t helped me out yet.’

Yes. It was a ‘she’. Despite the fact that the nun had always been taught that angels were sexless, gender-free. She didn’t remember who had told her that, however. It wasn’t like angels were mentioned by name all that often in the Bible, anyhow, only twice Gabriel and Michael, and two and a half times, she reckoned, if you were allowed to count Lucifer,

‘Then again, I really haven’t been taking phosphorus at regular intervals,’ the angel admitted to the nun. Like the nun before her, the angel also got to her feet and stretched. Her frame was sleek and androgynous, but it was irrefutably female. She had high small breasts and since she stood immodestly, with feet apart while she stretched and yawned, you could even see a bit of luminescent labia peeping out from between her thighs. Also the Angel had pubic hair. And when this heavenly messenger – who in general radiated white – spread her arms out, her wings shook, and the nun saw that each feather was a different shade and each glowed as if lit from a lamp underneath: apricot, rose, bright blue, darkest black, that still shone, blood-red, green, peach, orange, yellow, violet , and, of course, all the metallic’s like silver and bronze and gold, that goes without saying.

The nun remembered reading that white coat was all colors together, so maybe this whiteness was more concentrated in the angel’s flesh, as it were, and more diffused in the feather wings where the ehite light burst out into rainbows. The nun had that warm tight feeling again, looking at the angel.
‘If you want to kiss me, feel free,’ said the angel, ‘I’m sure you’d enjoy it.’

The nun was only a trifle embarrassed that the angel could read minds. At the same time it was quite exhilarating, because it was being made quite clear that such desires were nothing at all to be ashamed of.

Five fireflies landed on the nun’s arm in a line, blending into her own naked glow in the shiny green glen, and they traveled along for the ride when she joined the angel atop the altar and put her fingers up, uncertainly, to stroke the angel’s feather’s.

The angel’s whole body rippled with pleasure. ‘Do that again,’ she told the nun. The nun caressed a soft avocado-colored feather, then watched the angel’s face crease into ecstasy as she did so it was quite extraordinary and it filled with the nun with a kind of pride.

My name is Margaret,’ said the nun, shyly. ‘What’s yours?’ ‘It’s Angelica, of course.’ The angel seemed abit snappy that the nun hadn’t guessed. ‘Nothing daft like Angela. I hate that name.’
‘Oh, I completely agree,’ said the nun happily, ‘I’ve always disliked the name Angela. But Angelica is a lovely, lovely name. Quite different,’ she added, stroking the angel’s other wing with a bit more confidence and enjoying the rapture that passed over the angel’s features as she did so.

The nun now realized that there were flowers dotted in between the trees around the glen, herba angelica, an aromatic umbelliferous plant. It seemed exactly right, in the circumstances. If she were ever to bake a cake for the angel, it suddenly occurred to her she would decorate the frosting with candied stalks of angelica, as well.

The angel smiled at her, tenderly, and wrapped her long arms around the nun, pulling them close together. There was a tingling feeling where their crotches met, and their breasts matched the nipples of the quite perfectly, and the nun felt that warmth now from her feet to her groin to her areolas to the back of her neck and then out to her fingers clasped round the angel’s trim waist. And then the angel folded her wings round the nun, and pressed her closer as they stood there on the altar, and put her lips to the nun’s lips.

The kiss was wonderful. It felt just perfect. It made the nun think of Jesus and love and all that was right with the world. The angel’s tongue in her mouth had the purity of desire, and the nun began to tremble, clasped there in those huge wings and by the angel’s arms around her waist, and then she began to kiss back as well. She shifted her own hands so she could run them up and down the angel’s body, which was a delight beyond compare. The angel’s glowing skin was smooth like a living flower petal, and just the feel of the angel made the nun go wet between her legs.

Which turned out to be a good thing, because the angel was releasing her and urging her down, down, to lie with her on the overgrown grass of the top of the stone step, and the angel was kissing the nun between her legs, and the nun felt such stabs of clear need that she shifted position so that her face too was at the angel’s thighs. And when the nun licked at her there, the angel was certainly not sexless; she was the best things of sex that have ever been named, and her nectar there tasted like water, but such sweet water, and the nun wondered whether the wetness would leave glowing traces all over her face.

But also, the nun was enjoying the angel’s persistent licking on her own sex, a steady rhythm that changed for the nun from shivers of pleasure that concentrated themselves at the nun’s hole and little bud and then grew to the whole area below her waist.

Between her legs she was soaked with the sap of desire, and then the beat of pleasure overtook her just as the glow had worked itself from her finger along the rest of the flesh, and she bucked and tried to move her sex more rapidly against the regular licking of the angel’s heavenly tongue. She could feel just the slightest tickle of the angel’s wings on her back, and this made her even more desirous. And all the while she ran the flat of her own tongue back from hole to bud across the angel’s sex, which had turned white from glowing red with need, and the rapture grew greater and greater. The nun jerked her hips forward again and again towards the point of the angel’s tongue, to prolong the final ripples of pleasure, bitter yet candied, that made her itch for one more wave, one more bit of tingle bliss.

When her head came out of the clouds, though she was as wet as anything and the angel’s tongue was still spinning pleasure on her sex in the aftermath, she kept up her own part of the bargain as it were. She licked the angel into an orgasm on the stone step, so that the angel at last went all purple, then blue, then ebony, then fuchsia with pleasure and cried out silver tears and laughed and sang out the most beautiful rendition of Violetta’s Follie! Aria the nun had ever heard.

Above them, the trees glowed with appreciation.

The angel rose to her feet and, though she was still shaky herself, she chivalrously helped the nun up as well, and wrapped arms and wings around her as she had before, and kissed her for a long, long time.

‘Forget Celia,’ the angel told the nun, forget Mother Wilgefortis. Forget them all. You know yourself what feels right.’

‘Okay.’ The nun’s response was so speedy that she grinned, at herself.

The angel kissed her on the and the nun barely had time to wonder whether she’d get freckles there before the angel stretched out one hand, and the nun grasped it hard, for she had a thing about heights, and they both rose above the discredited shrine, like superman and lois lane, the nun thought, that’s really great, and a chain of intrepid fireflies followed them up into the clouds as well, for light after all attracts light.