It was 1999 and taking photographs really was her forte. Angel was masterful at taking photographs. This allowed her room for scorn at realist artists, who tried and failed to imitate with paints the spectacular effects she achieved with lighting and shadows and strategically positioned draperies. She liked, pretentiously, to call her ability her "gift," and this drew the irritation of most all her tentative admirers. She wondered why she had won so many awards and yet never recieved the fan mail she thought her due. She felt like a god damned celebrity, she really did. Angel had begun to wear sunglasses indoors when her first submission to a photography journal was accepted.

Mary, a devoutly buddhist anemic with a tendency toward largely undeserved inferiority complexes, wished someone would knock a little humility and sense into her talented daughter. That was why Mary acclaimed boisterously the engagement of Angel to a large, flaccid, laconic man in his fifties, who beat her occasionally with pots and pans. He wasn't perfect, Mary would concede, but he was, after all, the only man Angel had even taken any interest in.

His name was Durwent. Angel felt sorry for him, as she figured his anger was a product of his rage at the injustice of such an unfortunate name.

At Mary's behest, Angel soon found herself married, though no less humble about her gift. She was photographing Durwent's slouching, drooling, exquisitely sleeping form, in the semidarkness of their trash-strewn apartment, when he banged awake. Reaching amongst the objects on the bedside table, his hand closed around an intermediately sized lamp, which he ripped from the wall socket and smashed across Angel's face. Surprised blood slipped from between her teeth. Durwent rubbed the sleep from his eyes, then grabbed her expensive camera and stuffed the lens end into her slack mouth. He pushed her head down and stepped on it, and the camera scraped the back of her throat.

It was 1999, and Angel was only ever good at one thing.