Thanks for dropping by this week! This is one of those chapters I'm unsure of. I give it equal odds it will make it to the final copy without being completely rewritten. Hope you enjoy!
Thump-thump.
It was becoming difficult to draw even half a breath and Stirling could taste copper blood misting his tongue on the exhale. His chest gurgled when he tried to breathe like somebody had left an egg to boil on the stove. Now that he had one of his very own, a sucking chest wound sounded way cooler than it actually was. His heart thudded hard in his chest, so hard he could feel in in the back of his throat. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut.
Thump-thump.
He opened them again, expecting to see the faint glow of the warehouse fluorescents weakly filtering through the side of his plastic barrel, instead, a blurry rectangle resolved into a motivational poster of a kitten clinging to a tree branch with a caption below reading, “Hang in there.”
Wait, what?
He blinked again. Yup, no doubt about it. There was a kitten poster hanging a few feet in front of his nose.
Wait. He knew that poster. It was the same one that had hung unironically at the office of the gas station where he’d worked during high school. The thing that made this poster slightly different from the original was that immediately below the kitten was the open throat of an industrial wood chipper, the blades blurring with motion. That was a bit fucked up.
Just to the left of that poster, there was another, this one just as familiar. It showed a grinning man wearing colourful skydiving gear, spreadeagled in free-fall against a clear blue sky. Where the poster had once read, “Reach for your dreams!” the caption now read, “If at first you don’t succeed, bouncing doesn’t count.”
Stirling took a pace back and felt mildly surprised that there was no longer the plastic curve of a barrel at his back. The wall he was facing was filled with familiar posters with all-new captions. The poster with the closeup image of a snowflake resting on a frying pan. “You can be replaced,” was written in large swirly script above.
Thump-thump.
His heartbeat came again, but it felt far away, unimportant.
A shuffling sound came from behind him and he turned to find Magnon perched on the back of a stained cloth office chair. It wasn’t just the posters that were familiar, this was the manager’s office at his old gas station. It was identical down to the huge, old-style computer monitor and neon-haired troll dolls lined up on the windowsill. Even the air had the same whiff of refrigeration, burned coffee, and stale nacho cheese.
“What is this?” Stirling asked the crow.
“No idea, it looks like a shitty little office to me,” said Magnon, eyeing the stacks of hard copy and cardboard files.
“Okay, why are we here then?”
“The boss wants a word,” replied Magnon.
“The boss?”
“The embodiment of finality in the universe,” explained Magnon. As before when speaking with the crow, with the words in his mind came meaning. The meaning behind these words wasn’t just the familiar everyday death of living things as they grew old or sick. In this case, “Death” carried the notion of a force that caused galaxies to wind down, and old stars cough themselves out into empty space.
“Wow. Really? Capital ‘D’ Death wants to meet me? I should let you know now, I’m shit at chess, so if he wants to game it’ll have to be Risk, or possibly Settlers of Catan.”
Thump-thump
The door at the back of the office opened and Death stepped in. Whatever Stirling was expecting to see, the figure in the doorway was not it. Death didn’t wear a black hood or carry a scythe. What Death did was look a lot like was an attractive girl around his age.
She was petite with bright red hair, and not surprisingly, was extremely pale. Between his pale complexion and hers, Stirling was sure they could have kept multiple sunscreen companies in the black. Death wore dark eye makeup, had cranberry coloured lips, and a wore a black skirt that cut off just high enough to be professional, but low enough to be interesting. She walked in and extended a hand to him. “Merciful Death,” she introduced herself. “Nice to meet you.”
Stirling shook her hand and stood dumbly as she sat in the swivel chair and crossed her legs. She gestured to a plastic folding chair across from her and he sat.
“You’re Death?” Stirling blurted.
“An aspect of it,” she said. “You seem surprised.”
“When Magnon told me Death wanted to meet me I was expecting more of a Witch-King of Agnor look. I salute your unconventionalism.”
Thump-thump
Death paused to look at him, he had a distinct impression that she had heard his heartbeat as well.
When she finally spoke, she said, “You named him Magnon?” she asked using the hard g English pronunciation.
Stirling nodded.
Death’s lips pressed tight together, and at first, Stirling thought she appeared to be angry. Instead, she began to laugh. Her laughter was genuine and at one point even contained a snort. It went on for some time, and Stirling couldn’t help but smile along.
“Oh shit,” she finally got out, “that is going to irritate a lot of people. One of the thirteen gets named Crow Magnon.”
“It was either that or Hecubus,” he said modestly.
Death cocked an eyebrow at him. “There’s a chance you’re taking this as seriously as you might.”
“Probably,” Stirling agreed, “but I just died, so you’ll have to excuse me if I’m feeling a bit whimsical.”
Death shrugged, “You’re not dead yet. Listen.” She held up a finger for silence. After a long moment…
Thump-thump.
“There it is.”
“I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that there’s something I can do to get me out of this little pickle I’ve found myself in.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Oh, come on? Really? Look at this place, look at you. I mean, just look…”
“Humour me.”
It was Stirling’s turn to cock an eyebrow at her. He looked around at his surroundings and back at her. “Fine, this office for one. I remember this place. This is the gas station where I worked on weekends all through high school.”
“So?”
“So, by then I’d had my little accident and nobody could stand to be around me. I’d already been fired from a bunch of other places, but I was convinced that if I could keep this one shitty job then somehow I wouldn’t be such a loser. Nobody wanted to work with me, so I got stuck working by myself on the graveyard shift every single weekend. I worked twice as hard as any person there just keep this job. It didn’t matter though, the manager tried to get rid of me every chance she got. I had to check in every day to see if my schedule was the same because they’d change my shifts without telling me. In the end, the manager made me work with a guy who she knew was selling cigarettes to underage kids and fired both of us.”
“Sounds rough.”
“Then there’s you,” he continued without pause. “You laugh at my name for the crow, and trust me, even the few people who get that joke think it’s lame.”
“Hey!” Magnon protested.
“Well, it is,” Stirling said.
“You come in looking like the love child of Emma Stone and Shirley Manson, both of whom I’ve had a crush on nearly since I was old enough to have crushes. My guess is you’re betting on me being so distracted by not revealing my imminent boner that I’ll agree to whatever you want. So, what’s the deal?”
By the end of his speech, she was smiling sharply at him. Even though he knew he was being played, Stirling couldn’t help but imagine what it would be like to kiss her.
“Really? You think I’m pretty?” Death asked playing with a strand of red hair.
Stirling fixed her with a level look.
“Yes, Stirling. You’re right, I do have something I’d like you to help me with. And this setting,” she said nodding her head and taking in the grungy office, “was designed to put you in the right frame of mind.”
“But all this,” she said gesturing to herself and beaming a smile at him, “is just me. Thanks for the compliment. A girl likes to be told her looks are having an effect.”
Stirling ran his fingers through his hair, which was unkempt and oily from a day with no access to a shower, and began to pace. “Riiight. And I’m supposed to believe that? You, the avatar of death are a twenty-something redhead with perfect skin? Hell, I’ve read more believable lies In The World Weekly News.” He held up his hands to make air quotes, ‘New Batboy Slim Jim diet makes you lose weight fast!’”
“Stirling…”
“Shut it, Reaper Girl, I know you aren’t all…all… this!” he said gesturing toward her. “In real life you’re probably some tentacled horror with strange geometries that would break my mind were I to merely gaze upon you.”
“That’s not how it works, this isn’t a Lovecraft book.”
“Yes, your tentacled hotness,” he said, flopping back against the wall.
She sighed. “I’m not a tentacled anything. Listen, what it boils down to is that I’m just one of the representatives of Death on Earth, and the one closest geographically to you.”
“One of them? There are more?”
“Not all death is merciful.”
“Good point. So, how many of you Deaths are there?”
“It varies, but usually a dozen or so at any given time, and that’s just on Erde. Every world of the Aether has representatives.”
“Death, we’re everywhere you want to be,” said Stirling. So, when you’re not snuffing people in the nicest way possible, what do you do?”
“I’m an attending doctor in the ER.”
“You’re a doctor? Isn’t that sort of a wildly inappropriate career for an incarnation of Death?"
“I’m Merciful Death. People who come into the ER are the ones who need my services most.”
“Wow. Talk about putting the hypocrisy the Hippocratic oath. Whatever happened to ‘do no harm?’”
Her expression turned serious. “When you’ve worked in the ER for any length of time you understand that there are people who can’t be saved. My day job is to preserve life, and I’m damned good at it. I also preserve dignity in death when it’s called for.”
Thump-thump
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