Summary: An angel of Death makes an utter mess of things. (Enjoy)
***********
I closed the door with a sigh.
A hard habit to break, breathing.
Angels don’t need to do it, see – though we have everything we need to do it with.
I still haven’t learned how not to, though. Lucius always jokes that I’m still a “fresh” one, and that I’ll eventually forget.
I smiled wryly to myself, and turned to face the corridor.
I tugged my shawl, settled it more comfortably around my shoulders, took another habitual breath, and sighed it out again.
Old habits die hard.
Like living.
I glanced once more at the unremarkable wooden surface of the door, then ambled away.
Stanley Lee Pearson had gone out quietly, in the end. Old, alone – his only surviving child estranged since his wife died seven years before. In… I ran the numbers… two days time, it would have been, actually.
Sad, but not as sad as it might have been. He’d had a life to do with as he pleased. He’d never really faced any grave crisis, if you’ll pardon the pun. And on the whole he’d tried to be a good man. He’d loved his wife, though he had cheated on her once with that younger woman from the bar down in Galveston. An hour or two of hot, furtive sex in a seedy Motel and a light dusting of UTI for his sins. A small taint on an otherwise unremarkable soul – the sort usually recorded with two dates and some pithy little annotation in Azrael’s neat Copperplate.
Not even within sniffing distance of Hell from downwind, that was for sure.
Oh no.
You had to work hard to earn a hole down there.
Most of the dead simply get to make the Choice – when they are ready.
What is the Choice, you ask?
Technically, I suppose, there are three.
You could choose to go back to the World – forget everything and be born again, in the most accurate and exact sense of the phrase.
Or you could, like me, opt to wait for a while and get a pair of wings – to do what you could to help in whatever way suited you. Or not, if you fancied the idle non-life. As far as I could tell, nobody seemed to care very much what we did – Ineffability or some such nonsense, I supposed.
The third choice, you ask?
Oblivion; the ultimate Omega. The final fullstop on your brief little tale.
The good old Trinity again – the Boss did so love doing things in threes.
I had known some who’d chosen the third way, driven there by the endless unchanging Above and too damaged to wish to go back Below.
We didn’t talk of them once they had gone. A standing stone would be set up on the vast plain beyond the Gates of Dusk, and that would be that.
Every once in a while someone might visit it.
But mostly not.
Leave the truly departed in peace, was the unspoken agreement.
I sighed again.
Two souls done today. Two more to go. Then back to the Reliquary for debriefing, as Azrael insisted on calling it.
He never lets me see to more than four travellers in a “shift”.
He’s fond of me for some strange reason, see.
Helping the dead move on takes its toll on us all, even on Lucius, who’d once been a bigwig of the 5th century Coptic church in Ethiopia – he plays at being dapper and jaded but I know he flirts with that big old Nothing all the time.
Just two more to usher on. And then I would be done – for this cycle, at least. I’d take a break, take some time to walk the fields of Arcadia under the gentle warmth of the Sun, time to talk with those few others like me that I’d befriended in my hundred and fifty-seven years of… being.
Azrael had insisted I take a break, take some extended time, blow off some steam. According to him I was looking tattered.
I made a face at the memory.
Azrael. Almost as old as Heaven, older than the World; the record-keeper for the lives of the departed, he was not an entity I would ever dream of saying “No” to.
You might forget who he was, might be swept in by his neat, meticulous, ordered way and his minor vanity of the tailored off-white Armani suit…
But he was the Angel of Death, and he could be terrifying when crossed.
Oh well.
Time to go.
I paused, concentrated, shifted… my wings beating downwards, the powerful thrust driving me slantwise through the dream of existence from the clear morning of Memphis to the overcast just-about-lunch of my beloved Wales.
I furled my wings, managed for once to de-manifest them, and stepped out from behind the bin shed I’d used to occlude my arrival.
Then I closed my eyes, found my bearings, breathed in the clean air of home.
And wrinkled my nose at the diesel fumes from a passing bus.
I could almost imagine Jezebel’s mocking grin.
I stared up at the beige brick exterior of the “managed End-of-life-care facility”.
Not my favourite type of place by any means, but still much better than other ways to die…
I parked that thought. Self-pity was for later, when I was on my own time.
I squinted at the entrance foyer through the sliding glass doors.
The planters full of bright yellow Daffodils on either side of the door were a nice if slightly twee touch. Annuals. Here for a season, then gone.
Like the girl in the room upstairs.
Time to go.
I tugged my shawl straight so it stopped scratching my neck, and stepped through the doors that hissed so slowly apart for me.
Nobody paid any attention to me – not the middle-aged receptionist, not a sombre Physician, not the neat and efficient nurses… I’m not invisible, in the strictest sense of the word. It’s just that you’ve all hardwired yourselves to not to notice me; I’m a background character, someone unimportant to your narrative… until the final paragraph of your story, that is. I can interact with you but if I’m careful about it you probably won’t remember me except as a quiet young girl in some unremarkable clothes that you spoke to briefly but can’t really remember why…
You’re all very good at ignoring reality when you need to.
I pressed the elevator button and slipped into the cabin.
Up one floor, out the door, then a right turn. Seventeen slow steps down the corridor between its comforting nature scenes, my adorable pink unicorn sneakers kissing the clean linoleum.
It was another private room in another private ward. A small mercy – death with some measure of privacy and dignity.
I walked slowly but with purpose. My charge awaited.
Rhiannon Eira Jones.
She was twenty three, and loved horses, and was just about done with stage four Myeloma.
I’d volunteered to help her move on.
It was always voluntary, especially when the soul belonged to someone so close in “age” to me.
Azrael’s gentle meddling was all-pervasive in my work.
But I always chose to be there for the Rhiannons of the world. Barely beyond being a girl and already done with this time round the wheel.
A cousin to me in so many sad, little ways.
Sometimes I wondered if the Boss knew what the fuck he was doing, or if he was just making it up as he went along.
I sighed, kicked at an imaginary pebble, pretended it skittered down the long, clean corridor.
Benevolent didn’t have to mean kind, I reminded myself. The bearings do not love the axle and they probably don’t even know about the wheel.
I paused at the door and bowed my head briefly – another habit I had, a mark of respect for the girl who was about to die.
Then I touched the door and gently pushed it open.
This was always the worst bit for me – I knew who would be here, mostly, it was intrinsic knowledge that came with the job.
But there’s a wide ocean’s distance between reading about fire and being consumed by it.
Rhiannon lay at peace, with the machines all at last disconnected and covered with discreet white cotton drapes in the corner. She had her family around her; Mum and Gran crying the broken hopeless tears of those who’ve given up hope, Dad trying to be brave for sixteen-year-old Branwen who stood there, blank-faced, too far gone to feel anything any more.
We can’t read the future, but sometimes there are signs. I knew someone like me would meet with Branwen sooner rather than later.
A little stab of pain to my heart; that. She deserved better than this. They both did.
I am not heartless. Oh no. I am not at all. It would all be far, far easier if I were.
I still feel pity, and sadness, and helpless rage and…
Someone grabbed my arm and barged me out of the room.
I found myself pinned to the wall by a furious girl in a black cotton dress and indigo denim jacket, a girl whose jet-black hair hang in disordered curls like a veil over her nearly-emerald eyes.
Eyes that were red and raw, cheeks that were wet with tears, face pale with Hell’s own fury…
“Who the fuck are you?” she demanded, her voice gravel-rough with grief and rage.