Gabriel was in the air when he felt her die.
A tall flaxen haired stewardess was offering refreshments, whiskey and hot towels, her eyes a million miles away, hands moving in slow and listless motion, going through the motions, faking any feeling, when he began to vomit.
He coughed once and clutched at the back of the seat while she fumbled for the paper bag and tried to get it under his mouth. Another convulsion took him, arms folded across his stomach he doubled up in pain, his legs drawing up towards his chin. He put his hands up to his mouth as if trying to force it back into his stomach. The vomit just spilled through his fingers.
She pushed the bag beneath his face again, trying to coax him into its paper maw. It wasn’t happening. Gabriel swallowed a lungful of sick smelling air, tried to hold from vomiting again. Through the sickness an overwhelming sense of loss, of something simply ceasing to be, suffocated him, and emptiness like blackness bit back, forcing its way out of his body this time as the hot wet rush of urine from his bladder and the stench of feces as his sphincter gave out in a sympathetic death as —
The angel stepped forward... reached out... the rasp of agonized breaths.... A sheen of blood clung with lover’s intimacy to thing’s face, blood that washed all trace of humanity from its hating eyes... Claws that should have been fingers pushed into her, gripped her, and pulled her close so that the sting of the angel’s over sweet breath brought tears to her eyes... And in that second it tasted the spectre of Gabriel’s presence... tasted his nearness and gazed not into her eyes but at the face reflected in them, back into its own eyes, and deeper, inside, into Gabriel’s... “Do you want to live?”
— he heard the angel’s goading question echo inside his heard, it’s voice drowning the stewardess’s concern. He struggled to blank it out, stifle the angel’s nearness but it was all he could do simply holding himself, the pain too wide and too deep. As he tried to hold himself together Ashley’s screams gave way to the smells of his emptied flesh as they corrupted everything trapped within the confines of the plane with their cloying reeks.
He looked at the stewardess, wanted to explain, but all she saw was a drunk who’d evacuated his stomach, bladder and bowels on her shift, her blind eyes didn’t want to see, weren’t prepared to see, the truth.
“Can I... Can I... get cleaned up... somewhere?”
Disguised as tears, blood began to run from his eyes.