“Are we human? Where do we come from? How did we get here? Why do I have wings?”
He closed his eyes and found that they’d welled up with tears. Once the first tear slid down his cheek, the rest came, and he was crying, weeping silently at first and then braying like a donkey in sobs that started in his balls and emerged from his throat like vomit, gushing out with hot tears and hot snot.
Mimi enveloped him in her wings and kissed his tears away, working down his cheeks to his neck, his Adam’s apple.
He snuffled back a mouthful of mucus and salt and wailed, “I don’t know!”
She snugged her mouth up against his collarbone. “Krishna does,” she whispered into his skin. She tugged at the skin with her teeth. “What about your family?”
He swallowed a couple of times, painfully aware of her lips and breath on his skin, the enveloping coolth of her wings, and the smell in every breath he took. He wanted to blow his nose, but he couldn’t move without breaking the spell, so he hoarked his sinuses back into his throat and drank the oozing oyster of self-pity that slid down his throat.
“My family?”
“I don’t have a family, but you do,” she said. “Your family must know.”
“They don’t,” he said.
“Maybe you haven’t asked them properly. When are you leaving?”