Life is Sweet

The room was dark, only the light from the narrow slit in the window curtains illuminated the figure that lay nearly immobile on the bed in the center of the dingy hospital room. The walls were a stark clinical white and the furniture was spartan, a single grainy television was bolted to the ceiling in the farthest corner of the room. On it played some long forgotten western, the volume down as the room’s occupant tried and failed to fall asleep despite the dull fire that burned throughout their whole body. A deep ache that superseded description, a pain that surpassed words.

The man in the bed was old, incredibly so. Donald had been born nearly one-hundred-and-thirty-four years earlier, his body was now far past its prime and his rattling breaths were drawn painfully past parched lips. A cup of amber fluid sat by his bedside, but he didn’t have the strength to reach it.

Donald stared at the ceiling impotently. The dull rage that burned in his heart had long since been extinguished, replaced by the cold acceptance of his fate. He once more wondered why none of his family had been to see him, surely he had been a better father and grandfather than that. Not even a single one of his grandchildren’s children had deigned to stop in to see if he was even still alive.

He would have cried but he was too tired to muster up the emotion. So instead he grimaced and shifted weakly under the thin covers. Donald didn’t consider himself a particularly religious man, but now here at the end of all things a part of him had started to wonder what the point of it all was. Why had he lived, for what purpose did he die?

All these questions and more plagued him, the profound ideas rattling around in his rotting mind like thumbtacks in a tin bucket. He would surely drive himself mad trying to understand.

“God, I’m so thirsty..” he groaned to himself. If only he could reach the container of juice that sat by his bedside. It might as well have been on Earth for all the good his frail arms did him. He could scarcely even lift them anymore, much less manipulate them with the fitness required to slake his burning thirst.

He shook his head and closed his eyes, hope was gone. Replaced by a deep dark sadness that seemed to reach up and grab his soul, dragging it down into depths unfathomable. A dry sob escaped his lips and he thought about how easy it would be to just let go of it all. To just drift off into that crushing darkness that promised an end to his suffering forevermore.

He paused, his eyes shooting open as some intuitive sense told him he was no longer alone in the stark room. He looked around, partially milky orbs looking for a sign of the invader that even now lurked somewhere in his little chamber.

He swallowed dryly, his voice scratchy and hoarse as he asked into the dark, “Who’s there?”

He would have sat upright in terror if he could've as the darkest corner of the room began to move. The darkness shifted and then stepped forwards. What was revealed was impossible and familiar in equal measure.

Donald looked and beheld a shadowy figure, their body inhumanly thin and impossibly tall. So much so that their hooded head nearly touched the ceiling of the small room, their gaunt almost skeletal form hidden beneath a dark black robe that seemed to be made of shadows. It was then that Donald saw the figure’s hands and what they held.

He jerked, his eyes wide and his breathing becoming more labored as his aged heart tried to beat faster, the vestiges of adrenaline oozing into his already tired system and shocking him more awake than he had been in months.

The figure’s hands were indeed skeletal, and in the bleached bone-like fingers the dark figure held a large reaper’s scythe. The apparition looking like the spitting image of the grim reaper. Death itself.

He sat back into his pillows as the figure took an impossibly long step towards him, the hood still hiding the features of that terrible phantom. He croaked as loudly as he could, his atrophied vocal chords creaking like ancient doors. “Stay away from me!”

The figure stopped and seemed to cock its head. From that dark hood issued a voice, the sound weaving its way through space and time like a burbling stream through a field of dry reeds. The sound of it was not cruel or harsh as Donald might have expected. Instead it was a woman’s voice, youthful and full of a kindness that shocked him once more in its sincerity.

Death, for that was what the shadow must have been, spoke softly. “I am not here to hurt you Donald.”

He swallowed again, his eyes flicking to the door and the red button that would summon a nurse to his bedside. He thought about pressing it but instead he tried to wet his dry lips. “How.. how do you know my name?” he asked Death.

Death seemed to smile, he couldn't understand how he knew, but it was as if the figure radiated its emotions directly into his mind. A connection deeper and far more personal than any he had ever experienced before in his life.

The figure looked at him and then to his right. “Please, allow me to help you. You are in such great pain Donald. It was your pain that called to me, that sutured the borders of existence and brought me to you.” Again, the voice was distinctly female. Donald felt his heart rate slow, a feeling of trust washing over him. Somehow he understood in his very soul that they were not here as an enemy, but as something else.

Death walked around the foot of his bed slowly, her long cloak fluttering in some unfelt breeze. The long handle of her scythe clicking faintly as it tapped upon the ground. Soon the figure was next to him. He moved slightly as she sat on the side of his bed, her tall figure still shrouded in that cloak of night. Despite her size, the cushion of the bed barely shifted from Death’s weight. But it did move, they was not merely an apparition then as Donald may have thought.

Death leaned her scythe against the wall, her skeletal fingers reaching for the container of golden juice on the bedside table. Gently, as if they were handling the most precious of fragile artworks, Death brought the cup to him and placed the straw in his lips.

“Drink. Please.” she said kindly and so Donald did.

The lukewarm liquid filled his mouth and almost immediately soothed the aching dryness that had burned in his throat and mouth. An ambrosia sweeter than any he had ever before tasted. He paused and took a deep breath, the figure no longer provoking fear in his mind.

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He nodded to her as she replaced the cup on the table. “Thank you.” He hesitated, what did one say to Death? Donald thought quickly, his mind racing as he tried to think of a specific question, but he failed. Instead he simply uttered, “Please, I need to know.”

She once more cocked her head, amusement coming from them in waves. “You want to know why?” she said, asking the question that surely burned in his mind like a supernova. He nodded weakly. Death paused and then reached those skeletal fingers up towards the shadowed hood that covered her face.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the hood was drawn back until the true visage of Death was revealed to him. He had expected something horrible, a terrible grinning skull that would shock the life from him and send his mind screaming into the infinite black beyond. Instead she revealed her fleshless head wreathed in desiccated flowers of every color and variety, the colorful bouquet offsetting her macabre features and inducing a feeling of calm in him once more.

It seemed somehow fitting to him that she should be ornamented so. For what was death but one last journey. She gazed at him, empty sockets somehow conveying a feeling of tender caring concern though it should not have been so. She spoke again, her skeletal jaw moving, “Why? You are but one amongst untold trillions Donald. All of them crying out to the universe for answers. All of them moving towards the inevitable end that awaits all in this plane. You are unique though. Please tell me, do you have any regrets?”

The question caught him so off guard he chuckled, the pain in his lungs causing this to turn into a pained wheeze that had him nearly double over in a coughing fit. Before he could experience any more pain he felt something on his chest.

As the pain vanished to be replaced with a soothing warmth he looked up in surprise. Death had placed a skeletal hand upon his chest, not aggressively, but gently. As one might comfort a sick child or injured loved one.

“How?” he asked, his curiosity getting the better of him as he lay back in his bed.

Death seemed to smile once more. “Not all is as it seems Donald. This universe is energy, as are you. Limited only by that which stands above all others. Please, I would ask that you answer my question for my time is limited.”

Donald shook his head. “No, not really.” He had always strived to be a good person. Doing the best he was able with the resources he had. He had not been incredibly wealthy, but he had never felt poor. His family and the love they shared had always been enough for him. As he thought about them and all he had done for them he felt that familiar pain, the anguish of being so utterly alone.

It was once more Death’s turn to speak, her voice echoing with untold eons of sympathetic suffering. “There it is, the pain that called to me. You Donald, are a truly good being. And the unjust manner of your passing stirred something fundamental to Life itself. One should not pass on to that eternal plane without loved ones and friends by their side. But sometimes existence can be unfair. You asked why, why I have come? I came because others would not, Donald.”

He smiled, it was true. One’s last thoughts should always be of home. But what was he to do without the love that had carried him in life. He looked back to the dark figure, to Death. “You are here.. to take me away?” he asked not in fear, but in curiosity. He had been stuck in this room for so long now, he was ready to go if it was his time.

Death nodded, that beatific horror of death had held him paralyzed in fear before, but slowly he had come to terms with his mortality. Embraced it even.

He looked once more upon the flowered features of the being that sat by his side. “So, what is the afterlife like?”

Death chuckled, the breathy sound almost shattering the illusion of her kindness with the depths of its tenebrosity. She leaned towards him, that rictus grin cracking open slightly as she spoke slowly. “There is no afterlife Donald.”

He jerked back a bit, shocked to hear it in so little words. He had never been particularly religious in his life, but there were times when the idea of belief had bright great comfort to him. The loss of his oldest son and then his wife, when his parents had finally passed. “There isn't an afterlife? Then what’s the point?”

He didn't know what to expect, and as Death stood and retrieved her scythe he trembled in fear. Not a fear of death, but a fear of the unknown. Of not knowing what fate awaited him on the great path after death.

She pointed a finger at him. “You have been a good and virtuous soul, not prone to invoking the negative tenets. And for that you have my respect, as for what awaits you, Donald. Well, that is going to be entirely up to you. If you are as strong of will as I believe you are then your consciousness may just survive the transfer. But I have been wrong before, I may be powerful, but even I am not all knowing. That is the true aptitude of Exsti, the creator.”

He felt his mouth drop open, his will? He had always considered himself a strong minded person, not used to letting others push him around. But what did she mean, was his will strong enough to survive what transfer? And who was the creator, creator of what?

All these ideas and questions spiralled around in his mind as death gingerly placed the blade of her scythe against his chest, the tip coming to rest gently upon his sternum. Donald took a shallow breath, and then all the lights faded away into swirling oblivion.

Donald felt free, as if he was unchained for the first time and truly limitless. His body had been but a prison he suddenly realised, caging the energy that was his soul or mind and keeping him from his true potential. He felt golden streamers of light try to ensnare him and he fought violently against them.

The lights whispered of home and friends and a million other fair and wondrous things, but he rebelled. With this bare taste of freedom he would never be tied down again, not even by all that he loved. He trashed madly and then finally broke free of the clinging lights that tried to entice him with love into a web of stinging lies. An eternal prison from which there would have been no escape, no hope.

The lights receded in this dark nothing, he looked around but not with eyes, he listened but not with ears. His soul was raw and chafed from the light, a deep fatigue filling their being like some seeping sickness. But he was free, he took only the smallest moment to look back. He felt his identity slipping away as the true weight of infinity stretched before him. His fears, his past and even his own name seemed to evaporate from his mind as he soared for an eternity into that glorious golden nothing that stretched like forever all around him.

**********

Life watched as the essence of the small creature was liberated from their physical body by her divine sceptre. She looked once more upon herself and sighed. Why did these primitive minds always imagine her as some destroying angel or avatar of death. Yes, death was a part of life. But she was so much more than that, she allowed herself to be reabsorbed back into the conceptual fabric of the plane that sat just under what the smaller ones may call reality.

Her physical form was discoperated and Life once more became as the infinite. Spread thin like a gossamer sheet across all of her creator’s domain. She would have smiled if she was truly able, for in the last instants of her visitation she had felt the man called Donald breaking free. His soul as the mortal called it would live forever now. She sighed, none of her others had yet realised that she was sparing them, as many as she could at least before the end.

Sparing them from the torment that awaited all others in that sea of burning light. Free to experience the bliss of life eternal, and the terrors that came with the knowledge of what lay below. She was not the master of this realm, though she was powerful there were dark places that even she feared to tread.

Her consciousness slowly faded as it was once more subsumed into the general miasma of that other plane. Her last coherent thoughts were of the small human mind that she had spared and the thoughts of how cruel the creator truly was for what they had done to all of those that called reality their home.

End of Story