by T. A. Pratt
The newly-made death god known in her mortal life as Marla Mason—and referred to by her nascent cult as the Bride of Death—looked over the totality of life on Earth. To describe what she perceived in terms analogous to human senses would be reductive and arguably futile, but for a crass approximation—a stick figure of metaphor when compared to the Michelangelo’s David of reality—say she saw a vast black field, and shining in the blackness, points of light, trillions and trillions of them, one for each creature on Earth that had been born, and yet lived, and would someday die. (Only trillions and trillions. Viruses didn’t seem to count, nor did single-celled organisms and the fauna that lived in the guts of more complex animals. They didn’t meet the threshold for “dying” as part of the goddess’s remit, though many insects did. She theorized that some element of awareness of being alive, or the capacity for suffering, were necessary in order for a creature to possess what might as well be called a soul.)
Despite the multitude of lights, each spark was distinct in her awareness, and with a bit of focus, she could see the entirety of that light’s life and comprehend its contours in a moment. Most were anonymous unless she chose to focus... but one light kept snagging her attention.
The Bride was attempting to take in the entirety of Earth’s life, to see the pattern, to look for disruptions in the pattern, to see if her personal attention—or, rather, a facet of her multivalent attention—were necessary anywhere in the world to restore balance or keep a cycle cycling along, but one particular light, flickering and flashing, kept drawing her (let’s say) eye. She didn’t focus on the light, though, mostly because even as a god she retained some of the contrariness that characterized her mortal personality. She resented the individual light’s unusual call for attention as it blinked in her (let’s call it) peripheral vision. There was nothing special about that light. It was just another life on the cusp of death.
As the living things in her vision died, their lights vanished, and they transitioned from the Earth into her realm, which she thought of as “the underworld,” though it wasn’t under anything, and it wasn’t just one world. Some of the lights had long and lingering declines, and those lights dimmed first, and then guttered, before blinking out, while others died instantly in the jaws of a predator or the crunched metal of a wrecked car, and those lights snapped off abruptly. The human lights were no different in brightness or intensity than any of the other forms of life, and they were not the most numerous—most of the lights seemed to be beetles, honestly—but they had a different quality, something we might as well call a hue. (The Bride theorized that the difference in hue was because humans thought about death the most, and in so doing granted the gods of that sphere a particular form of ontological mass. Certainly the afterlives of beetles were exceedingly dull, consisting of endless plains of dung and so on, while the afterlives of even the most seemingly boring and down-to-Earth human could become astonishingly baroque.)
This particular light... flickered more intensely, somehow, or at a frequency that triggered something in her (might as well call it) brain, like the flashes that could cause seizures in certain susceptible people.
“Go ahead and take a closer look,” her husband Death murmured in her (for convenience) ear.
Death had never been mortal. He’d married his Bride—in a ceremony that was less an exchange of rings and more an exchange of divinity and mortality—and so raised her up as his equal co-regent of the underworld and governor of all cycles of life, death, and rebirth on Earth. The realm of Death had been ruled by such dualities for... a long time, anyway: one god, and one mortal who became a god. Having a ruler who had once feared death, who had lived with the splinter of mortality lodged in their soul, to help rule the underworld seemed important, somehow. (The deities lived and died on their own strange centuries-long cycles. Sometimes they were male, and took brides; sometimes female, and took husbands; sometimes they chose mates from their same gender—biological sex being a matter of convenience for gods—or mates who could not be accurately described in such binary terms.)
Perhaps having a mortal ruler in the realm kept the business of dying from seeming too abstract, too much a matter of numbers and balance, and provided a reminder of suffering and ecstasy. By mingling his divine essence with one who’d been mortal, the immortal Death became more connected to the living things he was meant to oversee and shepherd from a world of ever-shifting circumstances into a world of unchanging eternity. The two ruling together were stronger and wiser than one ruling alone.
That was the theory, anyhow.
“Why should I look?” The Bride shrugged off his (more or less) hand on her (essentially) shoulder. “One light is much like another.”
“You’re supposed to be the squishy compassionate one in this relationship,” he said. “I’m supposed to be the one saying ‘people, ants, mosquitoes, they’re all the same to me.’ You’ve really embraced the whole belt-of-skulls, black-tongued, many-fanged, mother-of-murder, death-the-unrelenting aspect of our nature, though.”
She almost smiled (let’s say). “I can’t help it if you’re all soft and fuzzy.”
“Take a look at the light. For me. Besides, it’s something your mortal self would appreciate.”
“Her? I hate her. But fine.” The Bride turned her (basically) head and focused on that one particular life.
After a long moment, at least as mortals reckon such things, she said, “Oh. Well. I don’t care. Even if I were mortal I don’t think I’d really care. Even if it were—oh, what are their names, those two men who always hover around my mortal body...”
“You know the name of everyone, and the secret names they use only for themselves, if you bother to look,” Death said, not quite chastising. “But you mean Rondeau, and Pelham. Your dearest friends.”
“Yes. Them. Even if they were the ones dying, I wouldn’t care—they’ll spend a lot more time being dead than alive. It’s silly to worry so much over the distinction, they’ll get there eventually no matter what. As for this one, for her —”
“You don’t want to go there? See her? Say goodbye? Ease her journey?” He paused. “Or even prepare a nice hell of boiling sweat and biting eels for her afterlife? I’d even take vindictiveness in you as a good sign at this point. You’re so cold, my bride.”
“The work we do is too important to let feelings into it.”
“Arguably, arguably,” Death said. “Fortunately we’re gods. Unlike mortals, we can actually multitask. Why don’t you bud off a fragment of your attention and send it down to Earth? Endow it with a simulacrum of your mortal psychological make-up. Consider it a favor to your past and future human self.”
“Oh, fine, if it’ll shut you up,” the Bride said.
Marla was briefly disoriented. Why was she wearing a nurse’s uniform and standing in a closet full of rubber gloves and gauze bandages? Had she wandered into a kinky sex game? She usually didn’t roleplay any of the caring professions.
Then her holographic projection of a brain fully engaged.
Oh. She was a sort of puppet, or no, more like a robot, a tiny autonomous portion of the Bride of Death’s personality, with very little power and full knowledge that she’d only be around a little while before getting absorbed back into the godhead and having her thoughts and identity thoroughly digested. “Bitch,” she muttered, and stepped out of the closet.
Okay. So where was she, and why? Institutional hallway, but without the energy you got in hospitals. Everyone was very sedate and calm. Old folks’ home? Not quite. This didn’t seem like a place where people would play bingo and annoy their grandchildren with old stories. None of the nurses or orderlies noticed her—being a god, even a tiny piece of a god, mean never having to show ID.
She peeked into one of the rooms and saw a man hooked up to tubes in a bed, flowers all around him. No balloons reading “Get Well Soon” though.
Ah. A hospice.
There was a room number in her head, 122, so she eased along down the
hall, wondering what she was supposed to do when she got there. She wasn’t entirely sure what gods of death did—appear to every dying person, scythe in hand, and say, “This way to the Great Egress?” Was she supposed to do that?
She opened the door and stepped inside and said “Oh shit.”
Her brother Jason was sitting in a chair by the bed, reading a newspaper. He lowered the pages, stared at her, and said, “Marla? Is that you?”
She looked at the bed. Her mother was there, a scarecrow version of herself, unconscious and hooked up to tubes. “That—she—”
“I sent word to that hotel in Hawaii where you were staying, but I wasn’t sure you got it,” Jason said. “Not quite a Christmas card, but I figured since we’d called a truce between us, I’d let you know the old lady was going.” He cocked his head. “Why are you wearing a nurse’s uniform?”
“Just.... some scam,” she said. Her brother was a con artist. Probably also a psychopath.
He grunted. “I guess it’s good for getting in after visiting hours, not that they’re all that strict around here. Anybody could go at any moment, so they’re pretty relaxed.”
“Lung cancer?” Marla said.
Jason nodded. “Started that way. She did love her cigarettes. Metastasized all over. She never went to the doctor, so it was really eating her up by the time anybody noticed. Liver, colon. She doesn’t have much time.”
“I talked to her on the phone... it wasn’t all that long ago. She sounded fine.” Poisonously, viciously bitchy, but not like she was dying.
Jason shrugged. “That’s the Masons for you. We’re good at faking stuff.”
Marla sat down beside the bed, considered reaching out to touch her still mother’s bundle-of-sticks hand, and then decided against it.
“Can you heal her?” Jason said. Not exactly sounding hopeful. Just curious.
Marla wasn’t sure. She sent a pulse out into the universe and got back only a sense of vague impatience. The Bride of Death didn’t heal things. She shook her head. “I’m... no. Healing has never really been one of my strengths.”
“You’re more about fucking shit up. I get that.” Jason went back to his paper, trying for nonchalance, but his resolve cracked, and he lowered the pages again. “Well, then, can you... I don’t know. Help her along?”
Marla frowned. “What, is she costing too much, lingering here? You eager to pick up your inheritance?”
Jason sighed. “She doesn’t have anything for me to inherit. She still lives in the trailer where we grew up. And I’m here, you know. I’ve been here all along. You don’t need to shit on me.”
Marla nodded. “Sorry. You’re right. It’s just, seeing her like this...” She trailed off. Gloria Mason hadn’t been a nice woman. Not physically abusive to her children—though some of her many boyfriends certainly had been, and she’d never bothered to stop them—but when it came to head games and psychological nastiness, she was enthusiastic if not particularly subtle. But still. She’d given Marla life. Been a constant in her life, apart from Jason, until she ran away from home at sixteen. Giver of life. Very nearly ruiner of life.
Feelings were complicated. Marla dearly wished to be reabsorbed into the cold unfeeling intellect of the Bride.
Jason said, “She’s in a lot of pain. She’s more morphine than woman, but she’s hanging on. I’ve been hinting to one of the nurses that it might be nice to send mom out on a cloud of narcotics, but the nurse is being willfully dense. I’d make with a pillow over the face, but my luck, I’d get a murder rap out of it. But you’ve got that magic shit, you could probably do it clean.”
Can I ease her pain? Marla pulsed out into eternity, and the response came back, distracted, uninterested: sure, fine, whatever.
“I... could maybe do something, yeah.”
Jason nodded. He stood up, leaned over, and kissed his mother on the forehead. “Thanks for all the alibis over the years, Gloria.” He patted his mother’s sunken cheek, then met his sister’s eyes. “You going to make it to the funeral?”
Marla was mortal for half the year, and a god for half the year—one month on, one month off. She still had a fair bit of time on this stretch of godhood, so if the funeral was soon, she rather doubted she’d be there, even as a fragment of attention projected by the Bride. “I... probably not.”
Jason nodded. “Get Pelham to send flowers or something, it’ll stop the aunts and cousins from asking me too many questions about you.” He paused on his way out the door. “Sis. It’s good you came. I wasn’t expecting it. I, ah. I’m glad we decided not to kill each other.”
“Likewise,” Marla said.
Jason left her alone with her mother.
A door opened in the wall, where a door hadn’t been a moment before, and Death walked out, looking entirely human, wearing a dark suit with a mauve shirt and tie. He sat in the chair her brother had vacated. “So this is my mother-in-law.”
“She’s a viper,” Marla said. “Stupid, and cruel, and petty.”
Death closed his eyes. “Mmm. I see her life. She was beaten, as a little girl, by your grandmother, and as for your grandfather... well. It wasn’t good. She wasn’t proud of much, but she was proud that she never laid a hand on you or Jason.”
Marla gritted her teeth. She had no desire to give Gloria Mason any sympathy. “She didn’t stop her boyfriends from laying hands on me.”
Death cocked his head. “She... hmm. Yes, that’s true. She thought you were trying to seduce them, mostly. From the time you were eleven or so, how terrible. The inside of her mind was a very ugly place, I don’t deny that. She struggled—”
“We all struggle. Welcome to the club. It’s called being a human.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Death said mildly. “She won’t last long, now. She’s being eaten up from the inside. We can give her a gentle passage to our realm, if you’d like.”
Suddenly Marla wasn’t angry at her mother anymore. You could be angry at a bleached-blonde chain-smoker who went to roadhouses on school nights and came home stinking of beer with a different man in tow every time, at a woman who said she wouldn’t have any daughter of hers dressing like a slut even though Marla had never put on a skirt as short as the ones her mother routinely wore, at a woman who watched game shows on TV with the volume turned up ear-splittingly loud while you tried to do your sixth-grade math homework at the kitchen table—but how could you be angry at this shriveled husk, here in a sad hospice room, at the end of a life of misery alleviated only by moments of getting high or drunk or striving for connection with a man in the dark?
“Sure.” Marla reached out, and touched her mother’s cheek—it was so hot, burning up—and Gloria Mason shivered. Her eyes opened, and they were the same eyes Marla had, the same eyes Jason had. For an instant they focused on Marla’s face, and her look of lost bewilderment eased, and she almost smiled.
Then the life passed out of her, and she was just a body on a bed.
Death sat silently for a moment. “Are you all right?”
“I—” Marla said, and then she began to dissolve, as the Bride called her back to herself.
The Bride sat on a chair watching a video screen. (The chair wasn’t a chair, and the video screen wasn’t a video screen, but let’s just take it as read that these are all mere analogies.)
On the screen, Gloria Mason—appearing far younger than she’d been when she died, perhaps twenty years old, and more beautiful than her daughter had ever been, despite her rather trashy cut-offs-and-halter-top ensemble—stumbled weeping through a bar, past endless rows of pool tables and booths and barstools, stepping in puddles of beer, crunching broken glass and peanut shells underfoot. Faceless men in gimme caps and cowboy hats mocked her, aimed kicks at her with feet clad in cowboy boots or motorcycle boots, and threw bottles at her as she tried in vain to escape. Equally faceless women, dressed like her but with bigger breasts and longer legs and shapelier asses, pointed and laughed at her too, pressed up against the men who tormented her.
She tried to find the way out, to reach the parking lot, but it was just an endless haze of cigarette smoke and cruelty, and as her makeup ran down her face she actually aged, through her twenties, her thirties, her forties, her fifties, until she was the scarecrow from the hospital bed again, her once-tight clothes sagging on her.
Death walked into the room and watched for a moment. “She made herself a hell.”
The Bride nodded. The dead constructed their own afterlives, based on conscious or subconscious expectations. Some got blessed nothingness. Some got clouds and harps. Some got gardens full of hot-and-cold running virgins. Some got lakes of fire and red-faced demons with tridents. Some got pits of shit and biting flies. Some got caverns of ice. But most hells were more personal and idiosyncratic.
The ones who thought they deserved torment tended to get it. The ones who thought they were destined for paradise—even if they’d been psychopathic conscience-less mass-murderers in life—got it, too. Death and his Bride sometimes meddled in the latter cases and gave them afterlives somewhat more suited to their actions on Earth, though not often. The people were already dead, after all. It wasn’t as if they were going to be rehabilitated, or hurt anyone else ever again either, and vengeance doesn’t make as much sense when you take a view that encompasses centuries.
“I thought she’d have a different sort of afterlife,” the Bride said, annoyed at herself for even looking in on her mother. “At a roadhouse, sure, but I figured she’d be winning that wet-t-shirt contest she always bragged about forever, every man in the place hanging on her every word, buying her shots, making her feel like a queen.”
“Doesn’t seem so have gone that way,” Death said.
“She messed me up,” the Bride said. “You say I’m meant to be the compassionate one—if I’m not, it’s partly because of the mother I had, because of what she made me.”
