Your Orisons May Be Recorded by Laurie Penny Page A

letting the slow grind of their daily trauma worry him too much. It’s a demon thing.
    Grem waves to me from behind his copy of Kerrang! They tell us it’s important to stay authentic, but Grem doesn’t need to try very hard at that. He’s sitting with his feet up on a swivel chair, reading his magazine and eating a ham sandwich.
    â€œYou shouldn’t let it get to you,” he says, seeing my face. “I never let it get to me.” This is true. Every demon I know is a profoundly chilled-out individual. Our two spheres incorporated over a thousand years ago, and the merger has been a big morale boost all-round.
    â€œI hate not being able to do anything for them,” I say, grabbing a coffee from the machine. “The heartbroken ones, most of all. You shouldn’t laugh at them. It’s not their fault.”
    â€œHuman hearts,” says Gremory, “are brittle, but also durable. I should know; I’ve eaten thousands. You should never attempt to engage one while it’s still beating. I advise against it.”
    â€œYou’re jealous because nobody wants to fuck you because you’re a demon.”
    â€œThat,” says Gremory, pushing half a sandwich into his second mouth, “is a vile stereotype. I get mine. I just don’t like drama.”
    â€œI can’t bear the lovesick ones, though. They’re so pathetic. And they’re always killing themselves, or each other. My ones do, anyway.”
    â€œYour problem is that you keep trying to talk them through it,” says Grem. “I just tell mine to take a walk in the sunshine. It’s not like they remember the calls.”
    That’s not quite true. They remember the calls in snatches, like the dregs of dreams you can’t touch with your tongue, draining away. A sense of something profound, whether it’s redemption or frustration, vanishing on the edge of vision.
    Our repeat business is booming.
    â€œI submit to you,” says Grem, “that you are projecting, my friend. I submit to you that you’re getting stressed because you’ve been due another of your dramatastic love affairs for years, and you’re bored, and you need to learn to relax.” Grem wipes his hands on his untucked shirt.
    â€œIf you will insist on romancing the doomed,” he says, “Go and fuck a panda.”
    I throw my empty coffee cup at him.
    *   *   *
    They tell you not to fall for human beings because they always die. For me that’s part of it. That’s their beauty and their tragedy—everything is always rotting, puckering and falling apart under your hands, and you claw at them with your kisses to slow the tug of time but you can’t. The panic in their eyes when they reach the age when they realize that, yes, it’s happening to them too.
    The way they swallow their breath at the point of orgasm.
    I can’t get enough.
    Some of us are perfectly happy counting dust motes in sunlight, or recording the little lives of the luminous creatures at the bottom of the ocean trenches who live and die and drift to the sea floor and know nothing but darkness.
    Not me.
    Loving humans is what got me demoted.
    A long time ago, before the current system, when there were far fewer of them, it was our job to walk among men and women and all the other human creatures and teach them things they needed to know. Writing and calculus and basic food hygiene. We were allowed to give real advice, back then, and we taught them a lot. But they taught us things, too.
    They taught us what it is to fear death and to nourish hope. They taught us about pleasure. And passion. And love. Love more than anything. I have always been drawn to the ones who burn with it, the ones who take their tiny lives in trembling hands and try to wring out all the juices before it’s too late.
    I love fucking human men.
    I love loving them, too, though if I’m honest, the fucking is quite a