The girl named Death traveled through the bustling streets with a mysterious elegance, weaving between the people who shoved and pushed. Despite her long day, she still had more work to do - there was always more work to do. An orange-hued glow silhouetted the skyline of glass buildings, their sharp edges jutting into the sunset she so loved to admire. How she hated her city jobs, when the sky was stolen from her, the air smelled foul and the souls were cruel. But she had to do her duty nonetheless.
Standing outside her destination – a large, bustling hospital – Death stopped for a moment to take a breath, before putting her foot forward and being drowned by the lights and noises. The white walls felt as if they were closing in on her and the sounds of beeps and the smells of chemicals threatened to drown out her cries. Once over the initial discomfort, she set off towards her next soul.
As she silently drifted through, a couple in the lounge cried crystal tears, their sobs tearing their bodies into pieces. A few seats over a man held balloons of pink and white with a wide smile spreading through his face.
What a strange place hospitals were.
As she navigated through the corridors and up the stairs she passed several other Deaths, all with the same translucent skin and hooded cloaks, who each had their own souls to collect. The fourth floor, her destination, was busier than most, bustling with nurses and deaths alike. Death had infinite compassion for the nurses; though they performed different jobs for different purposes, it was all the same when you really thought about it.
“Hey,” a young, male voice croaked from behind her, “are you here for me?”
She spun to look the boy in the eye. Like all souls, he was transparent as a ghost, the only colour being the tint of blue; and like all souls he looked exactly like he did when he died, tousled hair and old jeans. He was slightly taller than her, so she had to look up to meet his eyes and was startled by the calmness she found there.
No one was ever that calm about their own death.
“Yes, I am,” Death straightened up, eager to waste no time and move on to the next soul, preferably one outside the hospital. “I assume, since you have been wandering from your body, you said your goodbyes. Very well, I shall move you to the next world. It is quick and painless. You do not need to worry; you are at peace now.”
She always gave the same speech, especially to humans, as they were prone to begging for time they could not have. Death wasn’t capable of feeling anger – how could she when her heart, the very thing that stirred such emotions, had been forfeited long ago? In fact, the capability to feel anything but detached compassion had long since been foreign to her, but if she could feel anything more, she supposed that she would get quite aggravated by the humans inability to move on.
What lay beyond was full of peace and happiness; she could not understand why they were so attached to this world of suffering.
The boy’s eyes hardened ‘round the edges, staring into her as if examining her soul. Nobody ever bothered to do that, not when they were so wrapped up in the tragedy of their own death. She could feel his eyes taking in every forgotten part of her, a soul so long buried under the formalities of her job.
She brushed her hair behind her ears, standing a little straighter under his gaze, and offered a hand towards the boy, a hand that would take him to the next world once he took it.
But he didn’t take it right away like Death hoped he would. Instead, he asked a simple question.
“What’s your name?”
It startled her. Her name was Death, anyone could take one look at her and tell who she was and why she was here. But… there had been a girl before Death. The name was forgotten, discarded to the back of her mind with everything else that was complex and messy, and she refused to bring it back up again.
“My name is Death, and I am here to take you to the next world.Please take my hand and we can proceed.” She said, as automated as ever, but with a strange feeling welling up inside of her.
He leaned back against the sparkly clean hospital walls, his dirty clothes looking so out of place, and grinned at her. “You hesitated. That’s not your real name but regardless. Death,” he said the word with mocking humour. “My name is Dorian.”
Death’s eyes darted around this boy, scouring him for any clues as to why he was acting like this. He couldn’t be more than seventeen, tall and slender, with ruffled hair and a wide smile. The more she looked the more, she couldn’t figure out.
“Dorian, I am afraid there is nothing left for you in this world. It is time for you to depart.” Death extended her arm further, practically shoving it in his face. “Please take my hand and we can proceed.”
“Do the souls of animals get Death to come help them move on? Or is this service just for humans?” He looked up into her eyes and she backed away.
Why didn’t she put a stop to it? Why didn’t she grab his hand?
“Yes, they do,” she said softly, not being able to meet his eye. “I mainly work with animals, specialising in roadkill, but I take other cases as well. It is very rare that I move humans on, but they did not have anyone else to help you. So, I am here.”
She wouldn’t lie to herself; she knew why she hadn’t just grabbed his hand and sent him on his way. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had shown her any interest or asked for her name. And she would be lying if she said it didn’t feel good to be cared about, even if it was just temporarily.
“Huh?” hhe grinned ear to ear, a strange look for someone who’d just died, “So, Death, after you move me on, will you go and move an animal on?”
“It depends. After I have moved you on, I will get my next call and I will attend to that, whatever itmight be.”
“Can I come with you?” He moved from his position against the wall, leaning forward and looking instantly more animated. “I want to help, do one piece of good in this life. I’ll help a soul and then I won’t have to have to be in this hospital when I move on. Please. I swear you’ll barely even notice that I’m there, and after just one I’ll leave. I promise.”
So that’s why he was being nice to her, for one last dying wish. She should have known that nobody would be genuinely interested in her, she should have known.
The professional thing to do was to tell Dorian that he mustn't stay in this world any longer, that his time was up. And she was a professional: for her whole career she hadn’t stepped a toe out of line; she followed everything to the dot, saying comforting words that were recited from books.
Surely, she deserved to bask in his interest just a little longer before it was over.
So, she put her hand by her side, retracting the invitation from the other world and smiled fondly. “This shall be your dying wish, and you shall leave without complaint. Swear it.”
“I swear.”
Just the way his face lit up was worth all the guilt that twisted her insides.
And so, she walked out of that sterile hospital with the dead boy trailing behind her. And so began the best and worst hours that Death had ever encountered.
***
The next call she found was for a small duckling, trampled when crossing a road leading out of the city. It wasn’t a long walk from the hospital, and one of the perks of her job was that no matter how many miles she walked, she never felt any pain, but with the boy beside her she felt every step in a way she had never felt before. His questions didn’t help either.
“So, these calls… How do you get them? How do you know where to go?” Dorian tried to kick a loose rock on the side of the road, forgetting that he was merely a soul His foot fell right through it, almost causing him to lose balance.
Death tugged her hood further over her face, cautious of the other Deaths wandering through the streets, giving her strange looks. “Once I move someone on, I feel the next call. It just comes to me and my feet guide the way.”
“But you didn’t move me on,” he notes. “So how did you get another call this time?”
“I had to search for it.” Death replied, using her curtains of hair to sweep in front of her face. Once she was out of this city, she could relax slightly. “I had to search for it within me.”
“So will you tell me your real name?” Dorian asked again. The sun had set, and darkness had fallen all around, like Death’s cloak. The dark was always comforting.
“No.”
Not because she didn’t want to, but she couldn’t - it was a wound she was not ready to unpack. The name and her past were somewhere inside of her, and with every question he asked, she could feel them clawing at her, feel the dripping blood. But she couldn’t allow them to resurface. She just couldn’t.
“How many other ‘Deaths’ are there?”
“Countless,” Death had never spoken to her fellow translucent-skinned, cloak wearers, never spoken to anyone apart from the dead since becoming what she was, but she had passed them on her daily errands. “Just think how many souls die every second. Every ant that’s stepped on, every fly that drops dead. We help and guide them all.”
He let out a breath of awe, “That’s a lot of souls.” “It is.”
They had left the main part of the city now and were walking by the side of a main road, the concrete ground surrounded by a thin section of weak trees, not even enough to call a forest. Though the grass she walked on was not very well taken care of, she preferred it to the rough feeling of the road.
“Have you always done this?” he asked, walking alongside her, awfully carefree, “You know, been Death?”
“If when you die, you have no hatred or anger in your soul, then you become what I am.” She could feel that they were approaching the duckling, with every step he was ever closer.
He scoffs. “That won’t be me then,” He pauses and examines Death’s face. “How old were you when you died? You look really young.”
“You know,” Death slowed and rounded, stepping so close to him that only a centimetre separated them. “I do vaguely remember you saying that if I took you with me, I would barely notice that you were there,”
He was so close to her, close enough that a ghostly chill shivered through her, and her neck began to strain as she looked up into his face. Souls look exactly like they did the day of their death, until they move on and choose their eternal form. His hair was still tousled, and he still had blood in between his fingertips.
A museum of all the things that made him alive.
“Ah,” he grinned, “I may have overestimated my ability to keep my mouth shut.”
“Right,” He was close, so close it made her throb for a heart just so she could feel it pounding in her chest, to chase away the silence of her own thoughts.
“You can ask me any questions you know,” he laughed and started walking again, unaware that he had left her stunned. She shook it off to go join him, “I’ll answer anything.”
Dorian. What did she want to know about Dorian?
She wanted to know everything. She wanted to know how he died and why he was so ready to die. She wanted to know how he convinced her to let him come. She wanted to know what strange hold he had over her. She wanted to understand him, understand the core of what made Dorian, Dorian.
“How did you die?” Was the question she settled on.
It took him a minute to answer. All the humour disappeared from his face and he looked strangely serious.
“I always knew I was going to die. Ever since I was seven I was ill, seriously ill. I wasn’t going to make it past twenty without a transplant and I just couldn’t get one. So, I knew I was going to die. There was a new treatment they were trying out, a trial medication that might have worked. But it was expensive, and my sister would have to sacrifice uni for that medicine. I didn’t want her to give up her dream for me, so I just stopped taking my treatments, I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing but… I died within a month of that.”
Dorian spoke the words, the words that pierced any echo of Death’s heart, with such a matter of fact tone. What are the right words to say after someone says something like that?
“Do you regret it now that you are dead, now that it is truly over?” she asked tentatively.
“No,” his voice was firm. “They’ll be free now. It’s the only thing I can do for them and I’m glad I’ve done it.”
The story, the words, stirred something within Death, something that she had long ago forgotten, a life she couldn’t quite bring herself to remember.
She spotted the duckling, a tiny soul, crying on the side of the road.
“Hey, look over there,” Death pointed at the small cowering soul. “Do not do anything, let me take the lead.”
With the sight of the small duckling, Death’s mind was clear. She was here with a duty, intangible from emotions. She needed to help this duckling into the next world and that’s what she would do.
The soul was small and crying, sitting by his flattened body, too afraid to move on further. When he saw Death, he managed to stand up and waddle a few metres towards her before slumping to the floor again.
“My legs really hurt,” he said as soon as Death was close enough to hear. “And I’m not very good at walking.”
“That is okay. You will not need to walk any further now. You can rest.” Death kneeled next to the soul, reaching out her hand for the duckling to hop into, but he just didn’t have the energy as he rested against her knee.
The duckling's voice was small and squeaky, but Death could have heard it through even the loudest storms, it was another thing about her job. “Why did my mum leave me? I was hurting and she just kept running with my siblings in toe.”
“Maybe she did not realize the weight of your pain?” Death suggested. She could feel Dorian’s eyes on the back of her head, and it reminded her of what she couldn’t do. “But in the next world there will be no more pain. There will just be understanding, I promise you that.”
The duckling just huffed, so young but already a soul so tired of this world. Death lay her hand down beside him.
“Let me scoop you up and I will take you to the next world.” She slowly sifted her hand underneath the soul, letting him rest on her palm. Her arms were calm and steady, not a nervous shake or tremor anywhere in her body. She lifted the duckling to the sky and whispered:
“Goodbye little one,”
And the soul began to dissolve, little blue flecks breaking apart into the air, they floated upwards. Death watched each piece disintegrate and float further away. It was the same every time, the same certainty, the same death.
This was her job, what she was supposed to do. Ever since she died and could not join the other souls in the next world, she had been given her cloak and her job and for hundreds of years she had done everything by the book, emotionless and systematic. Whatever Dorian was doing, his manipulation was wrong. Anytime she felt anything for him, it was wrong.
She turned to the boy; her head held high with defiance in her eyes. “Dorian, it is now your turn. You have seen how it works, and I have granted you all the wishes I am able to. Now you must take my hand.”
He smiled, tilting his head to look in her face in a way that made her crumble, but she would be strong, she’d been doing this job for hundreds of years and wouldn’t stop now, couldn’t stop now.
“Any chance I could know your name before I move on?” There was a glimmer of hope in his voice and when she didn’t reply, his eyes fell to the floor. “Well, it’s been a pleasure meeting you, Death. I hope I see you again.”
“You will not. If there is one thing I know, it is that.”
Dorian reached out to take her hand and she kept her eyes on his long, careful fingers, not his round soft eyes. Time slowed, stretching out the moment, as its own cruel way to antagonize her. But, just as his fingers were about to slip into hers, they both startled at a sound.
Sharp, persistent quacks filled the air, loud and ringing. The mother duck had returned, squeaking in panic with her remaining babies behind her. Death, having seen many a scene before, returned her attention to Dorian and outstretched her hand once more, but the boy's focus was purely on the mother.
He crouched beside her, his hair falling over his face again, muttering soft and low to her. As Death strained to hear the words he was saying, she realized he was begging her to stop, to calm down.
At last, he seemed to remember the girl standing beside him and looked up at Death from the floor. “She can’t hear me, can she? I’m not going to be able to make it better.”
“No, you are not,” Death said firmly. “Dorian, I have given you more than enough time. You must take my hand.”
His eyebrows creased as he got up, brushing his hands on his trousers and backing away from Death. “You don’t care, do you? Why don’t you care about anything? Why can’t you care about anything beyond your stupid jobs? She’s upset now and she’s scared and she doesn’t know what happened and she just wants to be with her kid again and her kid just wanted to be with her again. Why did you make them move on? Why did you separate them? He just wanted to be with his mum again.”
He was rambling, the pain etched in each desperate word.
“Why don’t you care?” His final words were a spit in her face, a claw in her soul.
She wanted to care, every time she heard the sobs and the pain and the cries of anguish, she wished she could find it within herself to care.
“If I cared about every little thing, I would crumble,” she said coldly. “If you had seen everything that I had seen then you would crumble too.”
“People’s lives aren’t little things!” He exclaimed, turning his back to her. His breaths were short and ragged, cutting into the air. She heard his sobs and felt the inexplicable urge to comfort him, touch his arm, but it was such a long ago impulse that she didn’t know how to act upon it anymore. So instead, she did only what she knew how to do.
“Dorian, take my hand.”
“My mum will miss me; do you think she will forgive me for what I did?” He said softly. “Did I make the right decision? I thought I was protecting them, Death, I really did.”
She sighed softly. “She will miss you more than you will ever know. By not fighting for your life, you have caused her a great deal of pain and suffering. But the time to fix that has passed now and what is left for you lies beyond.”
Dorian wasn’t satisfied with the answer, his shoulders hunched over, and his face was contorted in agony, it pained something within her. She needed to help him because as much as she buried herself in her job, she did care and there will always be that part of her deep down that cried for everything she saw.
And so, she offered him the only thing she could: her truth.
“My name is Ophelia,” the name sounded so foreign on her tongue, but she felt a strange, loud heartbeat in her chest at the sound of the name. “I died in the ages of simplicity in my small village. My father, whenever he would raise his hands on me, I would fear for my life. I was so young when I learned that if I felt anything, any anger towards him, felt true sorrow for myself, I would combust.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, he killed me eventually, long after I had mastered myself. But by surviving then, by feeling nothing. I doomed myself to this eternity. Dorian, it’s not that I don’t care, it’s that when I care, it consumes every part of me. I had to stop caring.”
And for the first time in centuries, for the first time since she was a young girl, she felt a cold, silver tear fall down her cheeks, a drop against the rocks.
“Do you wish… do you wish you could move on?” His tentative voice brought her back to where she was. Ophelia, the name she had long since forgotten, was a girl who longed to be loved and in that moment that girl had never been more exposed.
It was a curse and a blessing, a song and a shriek. “Desperately.”
It was a whisper; all she could do was whisper.
Dorian approached her and held a shaking hand to wipe the singular tear from her face. He caught her pain in his hands and took it away from her, keeping it safe.
“We both ruined ourselves,” he said. “I am so sorry Ophelia, for reminding you of your pain.”
She wanted to say he shouldn’t be. That she wanted to feel pain, to feel human again but the words weren’t coming and wouldn’t be. She could only hope that he felt everything she was trying to say.
“And I’m so sorry Dorian, that I’m the one who will take you from this world. I’ll be the reason you never get to say goodbye.” Ophelia had never had anyone to say goodbye to, never felt that much but Dorian had, and he had given it all up too soon.
The wind blew through them both, but not a strand of hair slipped from its place. She looked at the floor and there was not a footprint, not a mark. When she looked up and met Dorian’s eyes, he was smiling, though still drowning in tears. With one last fleeting look, he grabbed her hand.
“Goodbye Ophelia.”
The words were soft and quiet, the last whisper of the soul.
Ophelia lifted her hand to the sky, Dorian alongside it. His eyes were closed, and he began to disintegrate. It started at the back of his body, disappearing into the sky and it kept going until all that was left of him was a hand.
Once the pressure on Ophelia’s hand had lifted and he was no more, only then did she let out a breath and mutter the words.
“Goodbye Dorian,”
She tugged the cloak over her head, leaning into its darkness. Her tears were gone, and any heart that she had felt in the moment had fluttered and died. She had chosen her path all those years ago, chosen to curse herself to this eternity and she would never be free from that. But it was nice for a break, to see Ophelia again, even if it was only for a couple of hours.
But now, the night was cold and the wind was harsh.
Now, Death had another job to do.