Face of Death
The only claim to uniformity they have is the last thing they see. They always see white, swallowing the lives they led. Hard, soft, comforting, chilling, it doesn’t matter. The only thing they ever remember is this stifling white.
Death rarely can learn about the souls it’s meant to escort. When one is collected, they march through the Door, sometimes not even acknowledging Death as anything more than a reluctant doorman. They are a species composed of equal parts uniqueness and pride, acting as emperors and empresses to the very thing that holds their souls in its hands. Not that Death has much of a chance to satisfy his curiosity. Time simply does not allow it and by the time one soul is gathered, another is in need of collecting. Humans are foolish to think Time bends to Death. It would be no more accurate to say they are even reluctant partners. Like all forces of heaven and earth, Death is a mere servant to Time. Such facts never stopped Death from trying to understand, to learn, these bizarre creatures. However, over the course of the years Death learned only one thing. People are highly predictable.
There have been a few exceptions; however, where the rare individual would break the mold and become something entirely new. Something other. They were few and far between, but they made this task of Sisyphus worth bearing. A soldier who abandoned his post to save his murderer, a malnourished boy with a homemade bomb strapped to his bony frame, and the strange young girl who dared stare into the face of Death itself.
I woke up in a narrow alley, one I recognized as a safe haven to those lost souls such as myself, and my brother. Sitting up, I looked around, not knowing why I was here or how I got here. All I remembered was the echo of a gunshot.
There were blue and red lights flashing in the distance, coming closer. The police. I turned to run, to warn my brother and whoever he was dealing to now. Jumping up to brush off the alley grime, I realized there was someone underneath me. The figure was small and thin, covered in the stench of sweat and street dirt, and wearing stolen clothes. She had blood pooling from her midsection. Grimacing, I rolled her over to get a better look at her face. Sharp cheekbones, small nose, a ton of freckles, and a thin scar running along her left cheek. In fact, she looked familiar.
No, no, no way. No way. No fucking way.” I stumbled back from my doppelganger. This was just another sick joke my brother was playing on me. That was all. Isaac would jump out any moment, laughing at my terror upon waking up by my dead look-alike.
“Time to go.” The voice came from behind me. I jumped as a shrouded figure walked out of my shadow on the alley wall. They walked closer, backing me against the dumpster.
"Wh-who are you? Where am I? What’s happening?” The figure said nothing but gestured at me to sit down. Mutely, I did as was suggested. Only after I had sat down did the figure pull back what seemed to be a veil of pure shadow covering their face.
I couldn’t even begin to comprehend the mesh of features before me. They seemed to shift with every passing second. Sometimes young, sometimes old, sometimes human, sometimes not. Their ever-changing features could only be described as one thing, impassive. The glint in their eyes like a frozen fire, caught and crystallized. Hardened to the rest of the world.
“Who, who are you?” My voice dropped to a whisper as I tried to figure out what was going on. Dread pooled in my stomach, hardening into pure, icy terror. This was it, then. There would be no walking out of this one. I heard the gunshot ringing in my ears again.
“Guess.” Their voice was cold, but not harsh. Looking back at my doppelganger, I gulped. I didn’t want to guess. I didn’t want this to be real. Yet, I met their eyes and a calm that I had never felt before fell over me.
“Death.” My voice got caught in my throat and I gulped. The figure in front of me said nothing, but shadows moved behind their eyes. I was right. This was Death. And here I was talking to it. I must have been quiet for some time, because Death sat against the wall across from me. It was used to lost souls.
“I imagine you have quite a few questions.” Something shifted behind their eyes, but, in a fleeting moment, it vanished. We remained there, sitting in that dark, narrow alley. Silence filled the space and gunshots rang in my head. Finally, I looked up from my trembling hands.
“What happened to me?” My voice was surprisingly steady.
“You know that already.” As Death spoke, the memories of my last moments came rushing back.
Yelling. I curled up, trying to focus on my artwork. I didn’t want to come, I hated this motel and how its attendant looked at me. But, Isaac insisted it was safer for us, for me, than being alone on the streets. As though a drug deal with these people was any safer than the open streets.
A gunshot rang out and the room next to me got quiet. Two more followed. My brother was in that room. I closed my sketchbook and got ready to bolt. No one knew I was next to them, giving me the advantage. Anonymity was key to surviving the streets. I reached the stairway, when they found me.
Before I knew it, a gun was pressed into my back. I was marched into the room and I looked around for my brother.
“This is why you don’t pull shit on me Merales.” A gun’s barrel felt like ice against my back, and my heart began throbbing painfully in my chest.
“Then little girls getta pay your debt.” The safety clicked off the gun, and I met my brother’s eyes. I said nothing as tears raced down my cheeks.
“Please.” It sounded pathetic, even to my own ears. The gun dug deeper into my spine and I touched the tiny cross under my shirt and muttered the only prayer my mother ever taught me under my breath.
He turns around. Two shots rang, rocking through my core. The world blurs and all I see is my brother as the others marched down the flight of dingy stairs. He walks toward me and bends down.
“You stupid kid! You stupid, stupid kid! Look what you’ve done! L-look w-w-what you’ve... you’ve...” He looks at me only a moment before turning away again. I wish he wouldn’t look away, wouldn’t leave me alone. The world stills and I feel a soft white come over me as a lone figure moved toward my broken body. The white swallows everything but the gunshots. They pierce my very core.
The world spins as the memory of my death plays in loop, and I grip my sides as if to keep myself together. He looked away. He left me. He left me. My own brother. My vision blurs as tears of rage threaten to fall.
There’s so much I wanted to know, but the question I asked next must have not been what Death was expecting. Honestly, I didn’t expect it either.
“I died in that motel, so how’d I end up in an alley?” My voice is rough as I struggle to school my emotions. Death sits there a minute, a little more than taken back by my question, then looked into my eyes. The hardness seemed to melt and something darker, more forceful replaced it.
Trapped. That’s how I’d describe myself as Death showed me what happened in the moments following my death.
“Yo, we got another one John!” A man stands over the body of a small girl. My body. Sneering, he flicks his cigarette butt at her prone form.
“John, you gettin’ your hulking ass up here, or what? This mess ain’t gonna take care of itself.” A second man, the motel attendant, joins the first.
“I heard you the first time, you know.” He doesn’t even look at the body whose blood pools at the toe of his boots.
“Isaac’s sister. Two shots through her gut.” The first man turns to the other, “The punk probably shot her himself.”
“Such a shame,” the motel attendant bends down, “she was such a pretty creature. Too skittish, though”
“Your ugly mug gives anyone a reason to be afraid.” Both men laugh and pick up the body. The whiteness billows in like thick morning fog.
As the memory fades Death looks at me a moment and shifts. For just an instant I see past the shifting faces and see something, someone, else. Something that could be mistaken for human with its weary eyes, and thin, battered figure. A lost soul, like myself and my brother. Like all of us caught in the fringes of society. For the first time, it occurs to me that Death is tired.
“If you aren’t going to ask anything else, we really must be going. Waiting is for the living.” I jump a little, shaken from my thoughts. Death stands up again and I shake my head. I blurted out, “Why do you wear the shifting faces?”
Death turned around to face me, its eyes melting a bit in what seemed like shock. Clearly, I wasn’t meant to ask anything about that.
“What do you mean ‘wear the shifting faces’?” I looked down at my hands, fiddling with the sleeves for a moment before I answered.
“You have these faces that look kind of like masks, that seem to shift every couple of seconds. Why? Why wear them over your real face?” I risked looking at the thing in front of me again. Death’s face remained impassive, if shifting, but its eyes showed a new emotion I couldn’t name.
“Once, I was a single being, from a place long forgotten to your kind. Ours was the first world created and the first destroyed. Thirteen days and Thirteen nights is all it took to destroy everything, everyone, until only I remained. Being the only witness other than Time, I was given the task of carrying the lost souls to the Beyond. It is a task that I haven’t stopped since. Over the years I’ve watched empires rise and fall, cities burn, and plague wipe entire villages off the face of this earth. A small piece of their souls has become a part of me; a kind of signature if you will.” We began walking out of that alley, Death occasionally looking at me as I absorbed what’d been said by my near silent companion.
“Where are we going?”
“That depends on you. Normally by now I’d have escorted your soul to the Beyond. However, seeing as you are still here, we must keep going as I have other souls to which I must tend.” Death held out a cold, almost skeletal hand. I reached out tentatively, just barely able to stand more than the brushing of fingertips. Suddenly the city faded, and we were walking in a quiet wood. Craning my neck, I could see a small town in the distance.
“Why are we so far from that town? There couldn’t possibly be someone out here, right?” Who would leave someone out here all alone. Alone. Just like my brother did to me.
“There are cruel people in this world you humans created. You of all people should know this. Your brother did leave you in that motel after all.” It wasn’t cruel how Death said it, only a matter of fact. That didn’t mean that it didn’t hurt.
“People aren’t all bad you know,” I began as faces swam behind my eyes, “some have been kind to me, despite knowing who I am and who my brother is.” Some, like the shopkeeper who didn’t call the police when he caught me walking out with stolen goods, or the old woman we used to squat with who’d watch me while my brother was ‘working’. “Even my brother wasn’t all bad, he was just trying to survive, you know? No one is perfect.”
“Yet, you hold this ‘mistake’, if that’s what you wish to call it, against him.” I bit my lip and looked away, into the woods that surrounded us. Silence settled over us as we approached another being, a human, off to the side of the path. The first thing I noticed was the blood, everywhere, and the figure that looked panicked sitting in the shade of a tree.
“Say nothing. It is not your place and the man cannot see you anyway.” Death walked over to the man and I sat down in the woods, not talking like I was told.
Time passed and I began to grow bored. I laid down and watched the sun passing through the trees. It was peaceful here without people running this way and that, almost as if time had let this one corner of the world stay unchanging. The shadows wove in and out of the treetops and I imagined them as people, weaving between the trees as though they were the busy streets I’d always been at home in.
Will anyone miss me? Will anyone notice I’m gone? Would my brother? I wondered. My mind wandered back to mine and Death’s earlier conversation. Was I really holding this, my death, against Isaac? Yes. Did he deserve it? Probably. Did I deserve it? That thought crossed my mind and I shut it down. I don’t know if I could answer that.
I closed my eyes, only to feel a pair of eyes looking down at my prone figure in the grass. Death was done with the man. I sat up.
“That took far less time than I thought,” It was true, I didn’t think it would be that short, “where did he go?”
“Like I said, normally they all pass on far faster than you. He’s now in the Beyond. Come, there are still many to escort.” With that, we again set off.
Time seems far more fluid when you’re dead. The sun still rises and sets, but the things you didn’t notice before—the creak in the trees when dawn approaches, the cracks in the pavement that slowly form when the rain falls—become too big to not notice. I studied these little things that seemed to move on a schedule of their own, trying to find my question in their quiet knowledge. After a while, and three souls later, I finally formulated my next question as we returned to the wood we were walking through hours (days?) earlier. The afternoon light had faded into a deep nighttime black that blanketed the whole area.
“Are you tired?” Death again looked at me, surprise once again filling its eyes. I pressed on.
“You said you’ve been doing this, well, forever. Aren’t you tired?” It was a while before I got my answer.
“Yes, I am,” I opened my mouth to ask another question, but Death looked at me and the question died on my tongue. Death continued to speak, “but I know that I cannot simply stop. To leave those souls on earth would be far crueler a fate than to be caught between here and there as I am, as you currently are. I now have a question for you if you don’t mind. Why is it you care? How is it you see my face when no other soul in the last ten thousand plus years has seen it?” It dawned on me. That emotion I couldn’t identify earlier was curiosity. Death, it seemed, was as human as anyone else in that respect.
“I guess like calls to like,” I replied, words seeming to pour out of me, “you seem so lonely that I figured you could use someone else asking questions about you instead of them.”
“You stayed behind in this limbo because you thought I was alone?” Beneath those masks, Death’s face shifted. Looking a little more closely I saw what could pass as a smile ghosting its lips.
If Death was going to say something, I’ll never know. A door appeared a moment later, glowing faintly in the darkness.
“Is that my door?” I whispered, my voice all but leaving me for the second time in our brief meeting.
“Yes, I believe so. It appears as though you’ve finally gotten all of your answers.” Death stares at the door, almost longingly, and my heart breaks a little bit. It wasn’t fair, but then, nothing ever was.
“One moment, I have one last question. Did I deserve this? My death?” My hand was on the doorknob.
“Only you can answer that.” Those words again. I knew that would be Death’s answer, why’d I hope for something different?
I opened the door but paused on its stoop, not ready just yet. I turned around.
“Can you do me a favor?” Death gave a nearly imperceptible nod and I continued, “When you see my brother, can you tell him I’m sorry?”
I didn’t hang around to see Death’s reaction. I turned around and walked through the door, into the Beyond. .
Death watched as the door closed and faded into the quiet night. Death knew that they’d stood there for far longer than Time would’ve liked, but for once it didn’t care. Someone had seen its face through its mask of souls. She was a strange one, that was certain.
Can you tell him I’m sorry? The girl’s words rang in Death’s ears. Death moved on to the next soul, but never could quite shake off the encounter with the girl who saw its core. A strange girl indeed. .
It would be encounters such as these, where a human would be more perceptive than most, that kept Death intent on working this endless task. Death would never understand where such beings came from in such a different-yet-not species, nor would Death ever know what is behind those doors that it would never walk through. This is what haunted Death; the knowledge that it would never be able to figure out such mysteries. Perhaps not so much that it would never know so much as the knowledge that it would never rejoin its own kind.
But these little run-ins were a great comfort to Death; knowing that amongst everything that has been meticulously pre-arranged by a power not even Death itself knew fully there were the precious few who broke the facade, if even for a moment.
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JASMYN BEDNAR is a freshman pursuing a Baccalaureate degree (currently Undeclared). Jasmyn intends to go into foreign relations and/or journalism as her major, with a French minor.