Author’s note: I created a writing challenge with words chosen from a vocabulary-building calendar I was given for Christmas. I chose a word from each week and challenged myself to use all the words in a short story. The list of obscure words and their definitions can be found here. The story was taken from this writing prompt posted on r/writingprompts. This was originally posted on wacie.com on January 17, 2013.
There she was. She was still, peaceful, unconscious. Her flaxen hair, spattered with blood, was fanned out over the crisp and sterile pillow. Even after the accident had etiolated her to this frail state, she was beautiful. In life, she had been a dancer, and had the lean terpsichorean body to prove it, though now it was mangled and beaten. In life, she had been a kind and caring person, loved by everyone and held in high regard by her peers. Now, Death was coming to collect, but he could not. Death didn’t want to take her. Death had fallen in love with her.
He’d come to collect her long ago, and saw her lying so helplessly in her bed. Her family stood vigil in her hospital room. Colporteurs came to offer their books and support. Friends and acquaintances and members of the dance company came to visit and check on her status. Upon seeing her, Death too took up at her bedside, watched TV with her parents, caressed her smooth skin with his bony fingers. He listened to the doctors and nurses discuss her condition. “We don’t understand it”, they’d say. “She should never have lived like this for so long.”
The hospital tried its hardest to be warm and inviting, but still felt carceral, cold and impersonal. Death wandered the corridors, studied the flat faces of the doctors and nurses, went about collecting other debts as they sprang up. Work had always been easy for Death; veridical and inflexible, he always came to collect, and never left without the one he came for. He disregarded any begging, any offers to negotiate, any offers for that game of chess or rock-paper-scissors that would afford them another few years on Earth. No one could wangle their way out of collection. Until now, that is. No one affected Death like she did.
He didn’t like eavesdropping on her relatives and friends, but he wanted to, just to hear them talk about her. Most of them were nudniks and fools, but they were genuine, and Death loved to hear each kind thought and hypocorism they spoke. Had Death a face, he might have smiled. They left get well cards and billets-doux, flowers and stuffed animals, small oriflammes that had less to do with her recovery and more to do with the sender’s hope that, somehow, recovery might be possible. There wasn’t a person on Earth who didn’t hate seeing her life and her talent wasted. Even Death, who didn’t care one way or the other, couldn’t bring himself to end her life.
Death was his own boss; there was no one to whom he was sequacious or compliant. There was no one to whom he would have to malinger. There was no greater authority than Death. There was no one who could scold his sudden cathexis or hound him for ignoring his duties for so long. It’s not that he wanted to ignore them. Whenever there was a new debt to collect, he would leave her side, attend to it, and return. He’d found it so easy to take all the others. People’s reactions were unpredictable, but always fell into one category or another; most were fearful of him. Some would grovel and beg for more time. Some would offer him whatever he wanted, as if Death was a venal politician. Some, upon seeing him, would speak to him, knowing the process could not be stopped, recognizing certain truths and regrets about their ending lives. Others greeted him with unabashed billingsgate or an effrontery that turned out to be a pathetic fanfaronade. Death cared not for last minute antics. He did wonder, though, which one this beautiful fey girl would be.
Death wasn’t sure what it was about her that made him love her. Before now, love had been a foreign concept to him. Death’s understanding of love had been gleaned from the lives he collected and the reactions of those who mourned them. As he saw it, love was a thing that made people selfish and irrational. Now, Death had fallen into the same trap. As he was there to collect her life, after taking the lives of so many others, he just wanted to be by her side. He wanted to preserve her this way, to have her to himself, unconscious and inchoate, for as long as possible before sending her to the fiery vorago that would receive her.
Death had stumbled upon another new concept: daydreaming. Sometimes, while he was watching her, combing his thin bones through her aureate hair, he’d wonder what she was like in life. Through observing her visitors and listening to the things they said, he was able to retrodict the events of her life. She’d been a terrific dancer, an arriviste that angered and upset the older, more experienced dancers. She found humor in irony and malapropism. She lived her life on her own terms, never swaying to the masscult. Oh, how he hoped she lived her life to the fullest. Her life was far too short; every life was. He just never noticed, or cared, until now.
A nurse came in and applied a styptic to an open lesion on her arm, then left. He was alone with her now. The TV was on; there was a film about two men hopelessly chasing a MacGuffin while they learned to tolerate each other. He’d recognized it; just last week he’d collected a man famous for his sarcastic ekphrasis of it. He felt like they were bonding. It was unlikely she knew the TV was even on, but it felt, to him, like they were growing closer, that they were normal. Weeks went by this way. Death took care of his errands and spent his downtimes in her hospital room, watching TV, studying her visitors, or just sitting and admiring her. Even in this half-death, even after the maceration of her skin and the toll her accident had taken on her body, she was still the most beautiful creature on Earth. The alterity of that beauty, the gentleness and kindness she exuded, that’s what he cherished most.
A time came when Death realized that keeping her on Earth was wrong. In so many ways, it was horribly wrong. He watched her friends and family visit; in the beginning, when he first came for her, they would smile sad smiles and hold her twisted hands, telling her that it would be all right, that she would recover, that things would be back to normal soon. Those visits and those messages were frequent in the first few weeks. As time went on, her visitors were less encouraged. They were now speaking to her about the need for closure and the hope that it will come soon for all of them. This tore at Death; had Death a heart, these words would have broken it. He was realizing how unfair it was to her, and to everyone who cared about her, to keep her like this. She lived in this repugnant state because he’d wanted her to; she lived for his own selfish reasons. He could no longer snaffle her away from her family or from her fate. She had to die. He repeated those words to himself. She had to die. Her life was over, and it was his job to take it from her.
Normally, he had a procedure for this, led by an automatic ratiocination. He took some notes, amended his records, wrote a corrigendum or two in case he made a mistake. As prepared as he should have been for this, his execution so far had been extemporaneous and sloppy, as if he was new to the job. Just as he was completing the final steps, she opened her eyes. This had been the first time he’d seen her eyes. They were a blue shimmering oasis, a piercing glimmer of hope that stilled him in this pit of despair. When she saw him, she did not move or cry out. Her lips curled weakly into a smile. He didn’t have to say anything; she knew who he was and what he was there to do. Death held his hand out to her. She struggled to lift her fingers to meet his, but she did. As they touched this final time, her eyes closed. In the wee hours of that January day, she had finally died. Death sat in the visitor’s chair beside her bed, where he’d sat with her so many times before. He listened to the machines shriek, and watched the medical staff shut them down and wheel them out of the room. It was over. She, that beautiful fey girl, fated to die, was finally free.
He’d never loved anyone before; there had never been anyone like her to advert him from his duty. After taking so many lives before hers, he’d never mourned anyone before now, and it didn’t make sense to start. Still, he missed her. He felt an emptiness for her. He spent the longueurs and slow work days with her, and she made him look forward to those times when he used to dread them. Like everyone else, he would need time to get over the loss. Imagine that: Death in mourning.
He delved into his work. He had a renewed interest in his job, a banausic focus, a chthonic neutrality he strove to restore. There was no more time for inane woolgathering or sub rosa eavesdropping on hospital visitors. It was time to collect the dead. After all, Death was the deuteragonist of life. No one was safe from him. There was no conurbation developed enough to hide in, nor was there an ecotone so remote that one would not be found. There was no actor so convincing or a mythomaniac so believable that Death would be fooled and forgiving. From now on, Death came after everyone, and waited for no one. Ailurophiles were taken with their cats still in their laps. Stamp collectors died while conducting their philately. He went after government apparatchiks and drug cartel camarillas, the dirty canaille masses, the clerisy bent over their pretentious books. Death was the ultimate factotum: exterminator, janitor, savior, liberator.
Occasionally, he thought of her. He’d encounter a similar cold hospital room or a pretty blonde girl, and he’d remember the time he spent with her. He’d remember the internal tu quoque arguments he’d had with himself, criticizing humanity for being selfish in love while keeping a young woman from her fate. He wouldn’t let himself think of that lean terpsichorean body, which was certainly now a vermicular tangle in the ground, or a forgotten pile of ashes in a tarnished urn. For Death, his work was the world; a world to which she no longer belonged.