literature

The Problem with Being Death

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The problem with being Death, Death thought to himself, was that it had a lot to do with boundaries. After all, death itself was really nothing more than a particular sort of boundary, that being, specifically, the one between life and whatever the other thing was. Death wasn’t supposed to talk about that part, but he didn’t mind, because he really only had a very vague idea of what it was to begin with.

The problem Death had with boundaries was the part about finding out where they were. Being Death, he knew a little about both sides of the equation, just enough to hover right between the two, but he never really understood where the line was. It couldn’t have been too fine, of course, if he could be on both sides at once, but when he tried to make his own theories about just where life became afterlife, he ended up dividing things further and further until he eventually realized that the only logical explanation was that the line just didn’t exist.

But he was fairly sure that he existed, so that was where that theory went out the window. It was usually the point where he just threw logic out the window altogether and decided to go do something more productive until he forgot about the question completely.

As he was thinking this for the most recent time, he was sitting on the curb in a suburb somewhere in southern Oregon. He was watching a little girl, maybe six years old, who was kneeling in the road in front of him, shaking her head over a rather mangled pink bicycle. “My poor, poor bike,” said the girl, shaking her head again and ignoring the fact that she herself was lying somewhere off to the side in considerably worse shape. “I’m really going to miss it, you know,” she said.

“You do know, don’t you,” said Death, “that you’ve got something a little more important to think about, right?”

The little girl glanced warily over at herself lying up against the curb, then back down again, a quick look that would probably have gone unnoticed under any normal circumstances. The only thing that let Death know that it had happened was a subtle twitch of her long hair, which was pulled up in one of those bright elastic ties with two cheap plastic beads on it. “Yes, I know,” she sighed. “I’m dead, right?”

“Not quite,” said Death. “But you’re on your way.”

“All right,” she said. She stood up with him and stepped up onto the sidewalk, giving the bike one last look. “I’m going to miss that bike,” she said wistfully.

“Maybe your family and your friends too,” Death suggested.

“But I’ll see them again, right?” she said. “And whoever heard of bringing a bike to heaven? You can’t kill a bike.”

Death looked over at the bike, which he had to admit looked pretty dead. “You don’t have to come now,” he said. “You can go back.”

“No,” she said. “No, I’m ready.” She held out one hand and he took it, even though his was big enough to envelop hers completely. In a way he didn’t even think it should have counted as a handshake, but that was the agreement, so he took it as the truth.

The second boundary, he mused, was time. The problem with time was that he was out of it completely. That was okay with him; he didn’t mind not being a part of the illusion; but the mere thought of it bothered him. He had tried it once or twice—by necessity of course, on certain special assignments—and had found that trying to divide moments into past and present even as they were happening made him nervous and irritable. That was another one of those boundary problems—where, exactly, does one moment end and another begin? Death had admitted to himself already that he was no good at this kind of division, so he simply tried to avoid it as best he could.

Besides, the whole idea made him feel distressingly mortal. Even he, knowing in some vague way what happened after death, began to worry when he even thought of all those clocks counting down to God-knows-what. It almost made him feel a little useless, which in itself was horrifying. He thought of going home and swallowing the better part of a bottle of wine until the backs of his eyes hurt and he ended up vomiting countless upended glasses of bright violet-red into the bathroom sink.

“Did that hurt?” he said.

This last part was said to the man who was both standing in front of him and lying on the ground to his right, the latter soaking in a shallow puddle of winelike red on the asphalt.

“Yeah,” said the man standing in front of him. “Hurt like hell.” He was holding his white shirt up in front of himself and staring at his own chest, as if the absence of the wound that should have been there was the most fascinating thing he had seen in a while. “You know what scared me the most, though?” he said. “I was so scared that I wasn’t going to die. How weird is that? The bastard knifed me and ran off before he even made sure I was dead. Cold, man.”

Death nodded.

“Took my wallet, man. How’re they going to ID me without my wallet? Hey kid, you want to hear something weird? You want to know what it was like? When the kid knifed me, I mean, it was crazy-“

Death cringed and shook his head violently from side to side. “No, no, it’s fine. Let’s just get going.”

The man laughed at him. “Okay, I’m good with that. So, what, you have to get out that big scythe or whatever?”

Death smiled. “That part’s a metaphor,” he said. “What really happens is we shake hands to seal the agreement, and then you’re done.”

The man held out his hand then, and Death shook it with the sort of firmness that’s really only a habit. “Well then,” said the man. “Stick a fork in me, I guess.”

“That part’s a metaphor too,” said Death, but the man was gone already.

That was what he didn’t like about time.
A sort of introductary story for Death, who is immensely fun to write even though he can be a little bit depressing at times.

The problem with WRITING Death, of course, is weirdly similar to the problem of being him - it's hard to know what's actually happening. As much as he'd like to think of himself as a purely essential being, he's very attached to the physical side of things. It's important to understand, I think, that when he mentions physically doing things, it's not really the same as what a mortal person would consider the same thing. Like, he'll talk about going home and going to bed, but it's really more of a metaphorical thning than an actual description of what's going on.

See, I told you it was complicated.

More story about Death is coming, although I'm not sure what to do about it exactly, because I've come to realize that, in his physical state, most of his normal responses to any kind of stress translate most closely to yelling profanity. It can get a little awkward, but I'll see what I can do.

I also have a problem with the category system here, in that I keep having to submit things to fantasy just because of the characters involved. There's very little fantasy involved in the next part of teh story coming, but it'll end up there anyway.

Edit: [link] Death has his own gallery section now. ;) Flock to it! The story's totally unfinished, but you can read what I've got of it.
© 2007 - 2024 tweedledoom
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PYROmethod's avatar

Yo, i have come back 13 years later to say this fucked me up still. Thanks for the existential crisis when in 8th grade 🤣