When the angel drops by looking for your husband, you're chopping garlic and onions, roasting chicken the way you like it, with enough garlic to give a vampire something to cry about, enough salt to give your husband an embolism. This angel knocks so hard at the door she nearly blows the house apart, though that's no surprise to you with her being a superbeing and also with the way this city is, every building and street sign and taxi and dog crumbling endlessly around you, like the tall rocks in the desert beyond the highway, nibbled and tugged by the wind.

Since he got in with his new church, your husband always complains that this place is Sin City, that the decay is all down to the fast, loose, out-of-control way everyone's living, sex, drugs, music, eroding the fabric of existence so normal life doesn't stand a chance. When he's being sweet, your husband says, Edie, I'm glad you're a good woman, not like those other whores. When he's being less sweet, your husband says, You can add salt to roast chicken, honey, but you can't take it away. Salt graining your hand like the oily coconut scrub you use on your legs in the bath. Salt crisping fat on the chicken until it looks like the elderly Goodfellas who turn on their tanning spits down at Laguna Beach. Salt, a wet bead of it nosing its way across the shaven pocket of angel armpit that glows in your doorway, her palm on the rusted hinge, her hair held in a messy bun pinned with chopsticks. You always your whole life wondered what come-to-bed eyes are. Well, this angel has come-to-bed eyes.

Things reach the point of no return with you and the angel and you find yourself loving your life, you who only ever took a pinch of what you needed to survive. One day, you and the angel lie in bed together while your husband is at work, lazily filling out one of those stupid magazine love quizzes, a crane fly buzzing on the wall, one wing mired in the flypaper's jammy glue, Nina Simone skipping on the record player I want a little, wanta little, wanna little, sugar sugar suuuugaaaar in my bowl. 'Reasons you should probably break up,' the quiz is titled. Your new squeeze is a celestial being, you circle. Judgmental asshole husband, the angel adds in red pen. Same sex relationships outlawed by your home state, you tick. Worshipping/being employed by vengeful, potentially deadly gods, the angel writes solemnly, a footnote.

We won't split hairs about who did what to who, whether your husband or her employer found out first, or if the angel got bored or scared and snitched, or whose church called in the law. Back in the day, the deities ruling over the land were ancient and vengeful, prone to sparking sudden fires, sending down lightning bolts, engaging in bouts of religious or gender-crime-inspired cleansing. That was before new PR teams came and made them camera-ready, tactful, the softer side. In the big book, the good book, you will one day be indexed under "Salt, pillars of"; you who looked back on your beloved city one microsecond too long; you who became that Lot's Wife, sparkling in the desert beyond the broken city gates. Some say they hauled you off to the mine, broke you into chunks at the factory, sieved you into grains in their mills for little pots of bougie cooking salt. TLDR, you got crystallised. Your lover the angel, meanwhile, only got demoted to—irony—a human market-stall-holder selling cute little tchotchkes carved from salt rock.

Behold this angel now: a crowd of bored tourists watching her chisel a crucifix, a heart, a dog with his leg cocked, a tiny woman who looks like you, each feature perfectly modelled in salt. This red-hot angel isn't magic any more. She wakes up with sleep boogers crusting her eyes and feels like an asshole when she forgets her bus fare. Here, says the former angel to anyone who'll listen, this one's on me, a woman made of salt. And here, sobs the loser wannabe angel, a hundred percent authentic hand-carved salt heart, the human tears and snot coursing down her face and now she can't do anything but lick at them, just take them, you all deserve her more than I do, handing away another fraction of you, this tiny part of what you once were, still loving that traitor angel more than the whole of you loved anything else in your life.

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