by Eden Summerlee
Don’t call it death, she says, before reaching across the table to lift a purple succulent. She likes my apartment, with its balance between minimalism and chaos. I should add that to my portfolio. Surely a compliment from Death herself will make it stand out. “Nicer than I expected,” she adds, before going back to the subject at hand.
I’ll be dead in four hours, she tells me, and to be completely honest, I’m not exactly surprised. It was bound to happen sooner or later. See, I’ve sunken in on myself, eating nothing but yoghurt and smoothies for the past six months. Despite knowing it would happen eventually, I struggle to hide my disappointment. My first exhibition is coming up. A sculpture, a self-portrait of used straws, isn’t finished yet. I’m missing at least another two hundred straws.
Four hours isn’t enough to finish that piece, but it is plenty for me to call my parents and thank them for everything. “You can’t do that,” Death interjects. “No one can know you met me.” She asks, too, as I play with the string of my teabag, if I would like to know how I’ll go. I look back up at her, seeing her through my haze. She’s kind of cute. Not everyone can pull off a middle parting, but Death looks like she still has her life together. I already know how I’ll die, I tell her, but she shakes her head.
“Murder,” she whispers. My boyfriend will come home after the game tonight and drown me in the bath. But people will leave flowers downstairs, and he’ll rot in jail until the end of time. So it’s not too bad.
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” I say.
Death nods, momentarily stuck in her head, before staring down at her folder. She opens it, pulling out my death certificate, running her fingertips across the paper. She asks for my name, and the one I speak is not written on the file she is currently holding.
Death’s head hits the table with frustration, before she skims through the contents of her folder, spying through all other certificates issued for today. A sigh of relief announces I’m amongst those other unfortunate names. Different death, she says, and the paragraph describing how I’ll go begins with the words brain damage, so I offer Death a knowing look, because I was right after all.
Sometimes, I don’t know when it’s going to happen, but most times I do. And I don’t want to enter a completely different plane of consciousness knowing there’s no way out. So I ask if she can do the job instead.
“Problem is,” she starts, making it obvious that I’m not the first to ask, “The problem is that afterlife austerity has taken away our scythes. Instead all I have is a toothpick.” She shows it, spinning it between her thumb and index. She shouldn’t have told me, I argue, because now I’m going to spend the rest of the day beyond petrified. Not that I haven’t thought of death before, but I’ve never been compelled to consider its immediacy. Death offers me a shrug. She’s not here to take me, in the old sense, only to receive my rating of Life™. I have to fill in whatever number of stars I should like at the bottom of my death certificate. Three stars, I decide.
Tonight, still alive, I rush down to the underground, box of teacakes in my bag. I’d like to be stuffing my face when I go, even if I risk the threat of throwing up in the meantime. There’s no one else on at this time, so I stretch my legs out, resting my trainers on the bench opposite mine. A tiny superhero is telling me to learn Gaelic, and I’m trying to convince myself that I’m not afraid of death.
The train stops at Kelvinbridge, and as an oily breeze slides through the open doors, Death steps in. I don’t recognize her at first; she’s all dolled up, big platform heels and faux fur coat, and with a curtain of perfume she almost smells like a living person. My feet are promptly pushed off the bench, before she looks at me, almost expecting me to know what she’s about to say.
Maybe Death likes to watch us die. But somehow, I don’t quite feel like that. For the first time in a decade I don’t feel sick, my head is clear, like that one time I smoked a joint. And I definitely don’t have an aura. For someone whose seizure is about to fall within the mortal ten percent, I feel fine.
She steals a teacake and our ankles meet. She’s in trouble, she says. It was against her contractor’s policy for me to have seen the death certificate of someone else. The woman who was going to drown has been assigned a new death date because of Death’s mishandling of information. And I, too, will have my mortality extended for an unspecified amount of time. “Lucky you,” she says, tossing the teacake wrapper my way. The red and silver paper clings to her mortal toothpick, and it’s only then that I feel the weight of it leave my shoulders. I didn’t react properly; I should have cried at least once in the past four hours, but somewhere along the line of uncontrolled seizures and failed brain surgery, I must have begun to resent life.
Not only did Death save me, she also handed me a mirror and forced me to see the mess I had become. Now all that cumbersome scar tissue has vanished. The brain surgery that didn’t quite do the job and made my seizures ten times worse has been completed to perfection. I’m able-bodied, even if I haven’t realized as much yet.
I place her toothpick in my pocket, and finally feel myself choking up. She doesn’t say anything; neither do I. I want to ask if she’s going out or on her way home. I’m not wearing make-up, I’ve had a bare face for six months, so I’m not exactly ready to hit the town. But I’m lonely. Two months ago, a psychiatrist asked if I had friends, I said yes, because technically I do, but I don’t see them, they don’t see me, they never call me to go out anymore.
She gets up before I can ask if she’d like to go for a drink. Instead of watching her leave, I rush out behind her, dropping my remaining teacakes. She stops on the platform, towering over me in her red heels. Condensation clings to the arched walls around us; the tunnel is warm despite the temperature outside. Finally she asks what I want. See, Death doesn’t like me. Her mishap cost her this month’s wages, as well as her Christmas bonus. She was due a promotion to Neighborhood Supervisor next century, but all that’s been pushed back because of me. The outer circle train passes by, and her hair blows up across her face, leaving us both standing in silence. “I’ve got a date,” Death says, reading into my intentions. Despite her words, her hands come to stop on my shoulders, pressing down through my grey jumper. “And you only like me because I extended your life span.”
Before I can argue, she runs away, red heels vanishing up a dampened staircase.
My neurologist hits my knee one last time before rushing back to his desk, scribbling down my miraculous recovery. I tell him I’d like to come off my meds, but what I want is irrelevant. Another three years, at least, he says, and then he will gradually remove them from my bloodstream.
On my way home I stop by a Wetherspoons, and without saying a word, I pick out used straws from empty glasses, placing them in a Ziploc bag before ordering a curry and a pint of tap water. I have ten weeks to work on my sculpture, and now that my side effects are the only source of pain, it takes me a little over five days to glue together the other half of my second hand face. I revive my Etsy shop too, and take up knitting again.
Every night, I find myself back down there, carrying a box of teacakes, waiting for her to step into an empty train at Kelvinbridge, but I spot the deserted platform before the doors open, and despite dolling myself up, hoping she’ll find me more appropriate this time, I do a round trip by myself, all the way back home without seeing her. Maybe Death doesn’t swing that way, I think, but at least I know that I will see her again, eventually.
Mum and dad can’t believe it at first. Dad says he’s been praying for a miracle ten years straight. They organize a dinner party, thirty people squeezed into a restaurant celebrating the evasion of death. Cousins I don’t remember being related to hand over gifts, and a choir of toddlers try to sing happy birthday, before being shushed. I consider, halfway through tonight’s designated smoothie, coming out. Timing is perfect, with everybody here. But I don’t want to spoil everyone’s night out.
This is one of the many downsides of being disabled. Most of my friends know I’m queer, and I wouldn’t mind my labor-voting-but-very-catholic family knowing too, if I didn’t have to depend on them constantly. I’ve envisioned the conversation a hundred times, mostly during our takeaway Saturday dinner, but occasionally over the phone or in the company of others. Mum would be upset but understanding; dad would probably not speak to me for a few years, but he’d come to terms with it sooner or later. And even if it coming out doesn’t cement a year of silence, their reaction would be stressful, and stress and seizure disorders aren’t a good pairing. Even after my miraculous recovery, when it can no longer affect me, I’m still terrified of it.
But more than stress, I’m afraid of resenting them. I don’t want to be their enemy when they’ve made so much possible. Even after moving out, they occasionally helped with the rent, mum would come over to cook if I had a cluster, and dad would drive me to the hospital and then take me to Wagamama’s for lunch. I’m a forever child, and they’re always doing everything, perhaps too much, for their only (she/they) daughter.
Then again, I do in fact challenge them when they come away with something homophobic, and I want to tell them it’s not just random strangers they’re hurting with their bigotry, it’s me, too. But if I can’t pay back with money or good health, I should at least permit a lie. We’re all in debt I guess. I’d like to ask Death about this, hear her opinion on such a trivial case of ignorance is bliss, but she doesn’t drop by my family’s night out.
—–
A week before the exhibition opens, I rent a van and one of those friends I haven’t seen in years drives it for me all the way to the warehouse behind the gallery. “It’s fragile,” I tell him, as I open the back door. My piece has been split in three boxes, all to be connected later using wire and glue, if needed. The curator comes by to see it before we go, taking pictures of each box and shaking our hands, telling us to make sure we attend the opening night.
Old Friend and I go for coffee in the west end, and I tell him about my miraculous recovery. He says he’d already told me, at some point in time, that I was going to get better. Funny how most people don’t know how a chronic illness works. I ask him, too, if he’s seen a girl with a middle parting around. There are lots of girls with middle partings now, he says.
I try to trace her online, searching ‘death woman Glasgow red heels’ but all I find is a fancy shoe shop called Red or Dead, and an article on Alexandre Pacteau in The Scottish Sun. She could have at least told me her name. I try to picture her out and about on a day to day basis, when she isn’t breaking into apartments to steal ratings on life, and it’s only then that it hits me.
She lives in a mausoleum, near the highest peak of the Necropolis, a mile from where she was buried three centuries ago, before her pragmatism and hardworking skills earned her a coveted spot as a grim reaper.
“I was a sex worker,” she says, offering me refill, seemingly unfazed by the cobwebs above our heads, frozen in time. “Wee, orphan girl. But I was good. Killed a rapist once.”
Her home is pretty bare. Single bed. Tea table. Kettle. She’s been considering buying a TV for roughly fifty years now, but can’t settle on a model. I tell her to get a laptop instead, but Death argues. Laptops are lonely; TV’s are for watching in company. I wonder if Death has friends. I ask how her date went, and she coyly informs me that he died. Was I also a date, then? “I can’t be in a relationship with mortals,” she says, so I tell her that as someone who avoided demise, perhaps I shouldn’t be classified as such. But Death doesn’t like women. At least not when she was alive.
“I died at nineteen, so I didn’t exactly have time to explore my sexuality outside of work.” She doesn’t feel much attraction these days towards any gender, period. But I might be the exception, she whispers. After all, I’m responsible for her sudden depleted income and crushed dreams of an affluent twenty-second century. I tell her that’s a rather toxic manner of looking at attraction, and Death shrugs.
She sits down on her bed, and pats the space beside her. But before I get up from my chair, she warns me. There are bugs in the mattress; a spider the size of her fist. Occasionally rats get under her sheets. I’m scared of spiders, so I ask if she would consider coming to my place instead, and definitely not, says Death, laughing as if she’d known what my reply would be from the very start.
The next day I climb back up and her mausoleum is gone. The TV-DVD player I was carrying falls and I don’t pick it up again. Three cans of pesticide and fresh sheets are also discarded, rolling down the muddy path leading to a place that exists no more.
She said I only liked her because she extended my life span, and as I head back down empty handed, I decide it’s true. Death is just the gay version of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, she has no value other than helping me understand myself. And now that I’ve understood plenty, I can stop riding the underground at midnight, stop thinking about her every odd second and forget this ever happened.
A week after she asked me to lie down on her spider-ridden bed, I’m standing outside the gallery, staring at my second-hand, second-chance self-portrait hanging by a wire. The party is already underway; there’s a sizeable crowd. My friend who knew I would get better is right beside me, and after he finishes his cigarette, we head inside.
In order to prove how little she means, I’m wearing a pair of red heels. I can hardly walk in them, because my coordination didn’t heal as fast as the rest of my brain. I feel terribly out of place, and as I stand beside other artists for a Facebook picture, I spot her walking in, dressed casually, trainers and a jumper. Our eyes meet, and I want her to feel how I did on the platform, to wish she could win me back again. But Death isn’t here to impress me. The curator standing to my right turns purple, dropping a flute of champagne, and knocks down my sculpture before his heart stops beating.
She must have lied then, about not taking people in the old sense.
Eden Summerlee lives in Catalonia, where she works as a waitress and teaches English from time to time. She is also trying to learn French and is annoying the living hell out of her neighbours with her atrocious pronunciation. She writes in English, Catalan and Spanish, and her writing has been published in Litro, The Ones That Got Away, and was a finalist of the Premis Literaris de Tarragona.