by Tricia Reeks
Stephanie hears drawers jiggling and the clang of silverware bouncing around. Death reappears, holding two of the largest knives she owns like nunchuks or sai, one in each hand. He slashes graceful semicircles through the air, then drops into a fighting stance. “Or,” he says, popping back into verticality, letting the knives fall carelessly to the floor, “if you don’t like the bloody approach, maybe you can go the drug route.” And then he’s darting down the hall, opening and closing cabinets, mumbling, “Jeez, these are a lot of pills, you’ve thought about this before, haven’t you?” and stepping back into view, a bottle curled in the crook of each arm and one shaking in his left hand like a maraca.
Stephanie stalks up to him, snatches the bottles away, glares into his foggy eyes—amused, but impersonal, uncaring—and grits, “I’m not going to off myself, asshole.”
“Are you sure?” he asks, voice bland. “Because my presence here begs to differ.”
Stephanie takes a deep breath and holds the air tight in her lungs to keep from responding childishly, turns her back, and walks down the hallway, footsteps measured and light. “Don’t follow me.”
“Oh? And why should I listen to you?” Death asks, arms folded across his puffed-out chest.
“Please. Just don’t,” Stephanie murmurs as the door on the right side of the corridor clicks shut behind her.
Death plops onto the couch, fingering the faded, matted plush. “Fine, but you’re no fun. If you take your time with this thing, I’m going to get bored.”
In the room, surrounded by potted poisons—Atropa belladonna, Digitalis purpurea, Datura stramonium, Conium maculatum and the like—Stephanie kneels in front of the windowsill and tips a watering can, attempting to spout liquid out of the porcelain jug at the pressure and volume her mother would, wetting the soil so it’s just barely damp to the touch.
***
The next morning, Stephanie wakes cold. During the night, her tossing and turning has bunched the blanket around her arms and hips and pulled it away from her feet, leaving them exposed and icy. Her nose feels frozen, numb. The arrival of consciousness is a slow, difficult ascent, like swimming upward through a deep, viscous bog. There are moments when she doesn’t think she’ll ever reach the surface. That’s okay. She doesn’t care. She stops wanting to. She embraces the sensation of complete immersion, of floating, of sinking, of burning oxygen-deficient lungs. But eventually, she rises. The thoughts rushing through her head, like a school of wild fish, slow into sense. She can catch and examine them. She can dissect their beauty until there is nothing left but corpses in her hands. She sniffs, disappointed, and swings her legs over the side of the bed, slipping her toes into the fuzzy, carnation-pink slippers her mother bought her when she was a girl. They are too small and worn; Stephanie’s heels hang three inches off the backs, and she can feel the cheap, industrial carpet through their jagged-holed soles. Hayden used to say, Momma’s girl. But Stephanie doesn’t allow herself to think about that, doesn’t permit Hayden to shake his head, bemused, or grin around teeth digging into his lower lip, attempting to hold back a smile. Instead she spots the image floating up through her memory from a distance, coalescing as it rises, and shoves it back under, dissolving it into harmless, sodden pieces.
Stephanie stretches and shuffles down the hallway, past the faded, flowery wallpaper she hates but doesn’t have the motivation to change, because, one way or another, she’ll be gone soon. The living room is drenched in a shade of cool white. Through the open curtains, she can see it is snowing. Heavy flakes cascade down in front of the glass. The ground is a river of white. The sky an ocean of silver. She frowns. Another winter.
Death has been snooping through her things. Books are askew on shelves, cabinets are open, picture frames full of sunshine and Stephanie’s old life—she and Hayden on a beach in Hawaii, his head in her lap, her hands tangled in his dark, curly hair; she and Hayden, lounging under a white umbrella on a beach in Brazil; her mother, kneeling in her rose garden, light bouncing off her shears and seeping into her wavy tresses—stand erect on surfaces they usually lie flat upon. Stephanie itches to turn them down again, but refrains.
She can’t see Death over the back of the couch, but his robe is draped over one of its arms, and his scythe, so dull and subtly curved Stephanie wonders if it would even cut her if she ran a finger across its edge, is propped against the side, so she figures he must be there. She wonders what he wears under the robe, if he’s naked, what his body looks like. She peers over the top of the couch. He’s wearing black cotton boxers and a white undershirt. His legs are hairy. His arms are thin, but defined. She thinks perhaps his complexion is a little more brown and a little less gray than it was yesterday. He looks ordinary, familiar.
“Throw yourself in front of a bus. Hang a noose from the ceiling fan in the kitchen,” Death mumbles around the cushion his face is smooshed into. Stephanie sighs and he rolls over, rubbing his eyes.
“I’m telling you,” he says, “I’ve thought about it. Broken bones jutting through your skin, blood pooling around your limbs, a snapped neck or a blue face, you could pull them off. They’d look good on you. You wouldn’t be one of those hideous corpses. You’d be beautiful.”
He yawns wide, stretches long and slow like a cat. Stephanie thinks, how cute quickly followed by yep, I’m losing my mind and pads into the kitchen to make tea. She pulls a china kettle down from a cabinet. It was a birthday gift one year from her mother to Hayden. Her mother never really liked him, always said she thought Stephanie spent too much time with him, neglecting her old friends and interests. But Stephanie knows the truth. Her dad was a deadbeat, uninterested and so long gone she doesn’t have even a partial memory of his face, and there were no other children; she is all her mother has. When Stephanie told her she and Hayden were engaged, her mother relented, though. Alright, alright, she said. Stephanie was with her, walking through a flea market under a hot, blue July sky, when she bought the kettle, green and oblong, like a leaf, with embossed vines crawling along its surface. Here, she said, porcelain for the maker of dead things.
Mom, Stephanie said. Her mother sighed, Alright, alright. The memory of Hayden’s dark fingers moving close to hers as they worked together to pull the floral wrapping paper away from the irregularly shaped pot bubbles up behind Stephanie’s eyelids. But, as she runs water, watching the sink distort behind it, listening to it softly tap against the tarnished metal basin, sliding her fingers beneath the stream and feeling it slip silkily between them, the image sinks obediently beneath the surface of her thoughts once again.
When she returns to the living room, Death is sitting up, rubbing a hand over his face. Stephanie passes him a mug, decorated in concentric circles that lap like waves at the rim of the cup, and blows into her own matching one. Death perks up.
“Is it poisoned?”
“No!” Stephanie says, a little loudly, a little sharply.
“Aw,” Death pouts. “So you’re not going to kill yourself today either?”
“No.”
“Oh, well. Hey! These are nice mugs. They look handmade. Did you make them?”
“No,” Stephanie says. “My fiancé did.”
“That him in all the photos?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to him?”
“He’s dead. Shouldn’t you know that?”
“Lots of people die, you know. I can’t be expected to remember them all. So? What happened?”
An image springs into Stephanie’s mind before she can clamp down on it. The brown, flailing arms she sometimes imagines she saw sinking into the ocean in slow motion from the shore. The churning water. The swollen blueness of his skin when they finally pulled him out.
“He drowned,” she says.
“And?” Death asks, eyes hungry, voice hushed and rapt. “What was it like?”
“I don’t know,” Stephanie says. “It happened fast. I don’t remember.”
***
Stephanie gets used to havin
g Death around. He whirls through her apartment, causing chaos in every crevice, snooping, flipping through leather-bound photo albums and leaving them open on the carpet, running fingers over Hayden’s bright, ceramic cups, mugs, and baking dishes and discarding them on the Formica kitchen countertops, pulling her boxes and boxes of jigsaw puzzles off the rough, unfinished, wood shelves that line the living room, turning them over, studying the pictures on the fronts, shaking them up, and replacing them in tall, precarious, asymmetrical piles. But Stephanie finds she doesn’t mind. She has been alone for a long time and she is enjoying the little things about having a man around: the noise, the cooking for two, the picking up after someone else’s messes.
One afternoon Stephanie is working on the jigsaw puzzle from the day Death showed up. She is agitated because as much as she wants to assemble it using deductive skills alone—as much as she longs to see only the size, shape, color, and pattern of individual pieces—she can’t help but recall in perfect, vivid detail the scene on the front of the box. The dark water, the inky sky, the shadows of the trees on the distant shore, the motionless skiff and its obscure passenger all hover in her imagination with irritating clarity so that each jigsaw piece becomes a streak of water, a grain of wood, or a chunk of pine needles instead of a black, gray, or green sharp-edged, rounded, or protrusion-nubbed irregular polygon. Stephanie sulks, pushing the cardboard pieces around with the tips of her fingers, and tries to forget the whole to which they belong.
It is at this point that Death walks up to her, holding her cell phone delicately between the thumb and forefinger of one hand like he might a snake, by the head, cautiously, and afraid, as if he can’t be sure he won’t imminently suffer a life-threatening injury.
“What is it?” Stephanie snaps. “You want me to eat the phone? Beat myself over the head with it?”
“No,” Death responds quietly. Stephanie squints at him.
“What then?”
“Did you know you have twenty-seven messages from your mother?”
“You’ve been listening to my messages?”
“Did. You. Know.” Death snarls, slamming a palm against the flimsy, metal, foldout card table Stephanie uses for assembling puzzles. It squeaks and wobbles, but doesn’t buckle. Stephanie takes a breath, counts to thirty in her head, then pushes it back out.
“Yes, I know.”
“Have you answered any of them?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Obviously, I don’t want to.”
“But why not?”
“Why do you care?”
“I don’t know. It’s just . . . you used to be so close to her,” Death says in a voice as smooth and deep as a bow sliding across the strings of a cello, a voice so familiar it hurts.
“What?” Stephanie asks, fear, shocking and novel, jolting through her diaphragm.
“Hm?” Death asks, eyes distant, distracted.
“How would you know that?”
“I don’t know. It just feels true.”
***
Incidents like this become the norm. Instead of greeting Stephanie in the mornings with gung-ho suicide suggestions like “a bullet between the eyes” and “roll around in a pile of glass shards,” Death often begins the day with observations like “your hair is longer than it used to be” or “when did you stop running? You never used to be able to sit still.” He wanders, glassy-eyed, through the apartment, dragging his feet and running palms across the ceramics in the kitchen, the fuzz of Stephanie’s slippers, the gloss of photographs, and Stephanie knows he’s recalling memories that aren’t his. Sometimes he even reaches out and touches the top of her head, the side of her face, or the length of her sleeves, but Stephanie can’t find it in herself to stop him or the wispy shivers that ripple through her limbs in the wake of his fingertips.
As for Stephanie, she spends increasingly more time in the room on the right side of the hallway and takes lots of baths, sometimes as many as three or four a day. Her bathtub isn’t much, plastic and rectangular, no porcelain contours or lions’ feet—an adjunct professor of horticulture, especially one who only works two out of three semesters a year like she does, can’t afford to be picky about much when renting apartments—but she enjoys filling it to the brim, then tilting backwards beneath the surface and watching the world unglue. Vision blurs and sound distorts and she feels as though she’s managed to remove herself from reality. She drifts away from it, unconnected, unaffected, but interested. A non-participating observer, an objective third party. She stays in until her body, pruned and waterlogged, becomes nearly too heavy to lift and her lungs burn from the effort of holding her breath.
***
Once, perhaps months after Death arrives—Stephanie can no longer be sure how long it’s been; time flows past her, in front of her, and behind her, and she’s not sure where exactly in it she is—Stephanie wakes abruptly and doesn’t know why. She can’t tell what time it is. The light filtering through the blinds is a hazy, gray-white, like cobwebs strung wall-to-wall, and could mean anything from early morning to evening or snowy midday.
Soon enough she hears rustling nearby, and when she turns her head, she discovers Death kneeling next to the bed, gazing at her. She considers becoming angry. She thinks perhaps she should remind Death of what she told him the first day they met—that he should never enter her bedroom—but she doesn’t feel like fighting. She’s sleepy and comfortable and Death’s stare is a warm, gentle weight on her skin.
Time passes and Stephanie feels her body sink back into sleep. Her limbs become heavy, hard to command and hard to move. She dozes, then dreams. The scene from her jigsaw puzzle appears. Stephanie is standing on the bank of the river in a cotton nightgown, mud squelching between her toes, fronds tickling her ankles, the skiff out in the distance. She has always been curious about that figure on the skiff. She watches and watches, peering through the fog, waiting for the silhouette to shift, for something to happen. No breeze blows through the trees. No mosquitoes buzz in the air. No waves beat the shore, and the person on the boat sits as still as stone. Eventually, a hand reaches out. The fingers push together and bend, then dip silently into the water. When they emerge, cupping a handful of river water, they rise level with the figure’s mouth, then tilt.
Stephanie wakes in a sweat. Did the figure drink or not? She doesn’t know. Death’s face hovers inches above hers, his hands trail across her forehead and down her cheeks.
“Are you alright?” he asks, breath ghosting across Stephanie’s lips.
“Yes,” she says, pushing his hands away, “I’m fine.” He looks disbelieving, but drops back onto the floor next to the bed. Stephanie focuses on the gentle burn his concerned gaze ignites in her abdomen and tries to slow the rise and fall of her chest.
“Do you remember,” he says after a few minutes, “that time we visited the Pacific after we got engaged?”
“What?” Stephanie whispers, dread washing through her ribs.
“We went to California, to that beach. There were high, rocky cliffs. You were so happy. You kept smiling at me.”
Stephanie curls her fingers into the cheap, stiff sheets pooling around her. “No, no. That wasn’t you!” Death recoils, his eyes, a warm, light brown, Hayden’s down to the most minute, golden flecks, going shuttered and unfocused. “That was my fiancé,” Stephanie says more sedately. “You have to stop this. You aren’t him.”
“Yes. Of course. That’s right,” Death says, his voice rolling, wavering. “But do you remember anyway? When he took you there?”
Stephanie remembers. The water had been so blue, shot through with green and turquoise and bright, diffused sunlight. Hayden had been happy. Too happy. Too confident. He swam too far.
“No,” she says. “I don’t remember.”
“Alright,” Death says. “I made you breakfast. Have something.” He lifts a tray from the floor beside him. On it are two pieces of toast covered in marmalade, eggs, a sausage patty, and a mug of tea. S
uddenly Stephanie remembers the sorts of things Death used to say when he first appeared, things like “down a bottle of Oxycontin” or “chew up a death cap.” There’s no way she can force down any food he’s made her.
“No thank you,” she blurts.
“But—”
“Maybe later, okay? But can you leave me alone for a while right now? You’re not supposed to be in here anyway. Please?” Death frowns, but turns Hayden’s sad, soulful eyes away and acquiesces, drifting out of the room.
***
The next evening, Stephanie finishes the puzzle. Death is leaning against a wall, watching her as she locks in the last piece, a dark sliver of river. It looks exactly as she always knew it would. Starless sky. Unruffled trees. Water devoid of motion. The boatman in the center, dark and distant. Obscure, unknowable, impossible to capture. Stephanie takes a sip of tea from one of Hayden’s mugs. She spent a long time preparing it, adding just the right amount of sugar (one and a half teaspoons), and heating it to the perfect temperature (140 degrees). She has let it sit too long, though. Now it’s cold, gritty, and bitter. Of course it is. Stephanie sets the cup down gently, still conscious of the fact that it is something Hayden made, and begins disassembling the puzzle, unsnapping the cardboard pieces and throwing them in the puzzle box with quick, frantic flicks of her wrist and jabs of her fingers.
“Why would you do that?” Death asks. “Why did you spend so much time putting that thing together only to take it apart?”
Stephanie throws the box at his face. Puzzle pieces bounce off his shoulders and rain down onto the carpet. Before Death can respond, Stephanie pushes back her chair, runs down the hall, and locks herself in the room on the right side of the hallway. But this time, when she spirals away from the door, Death is standing behind her. Pale moonlight streams through the curtains as she watches him take in the contents of the room. The tall, twisting, deadly plants crawling up and around the walls. The delicate flowers blooming from their leaves. Purple bells of nightshade. Pink tubes of foxglove. Creamy trumpets of devil’s snare. Fragile, white umbels of hemlock.