Young face.
Old eyes.
Overhead, the rain slows, stops, turns to mist as he gets to his feet. He does not know how long he’s been asleep—hours? days? weeks?—but now he is awake, and he is cold, and he is hungry.
Not a stew-and-potatoes kind of hunger—that is a thing he knows but doesn’t know—but a purposeful hunger, a marrow-missing-from-your-bones, no-blood-in-your-veins, heart-dragging-itself-along kind of need.
Death is awake, and so he is hungry.
He is hungry, and so he is awake.
He climbs slowly, steadily, out of the deep hole, fingers finding the holds. He swings a thin leg over the side of the well, sits for a drowsy moment on the stone lip.
It is nice to be awake.
Beyond the well, the world has changed again.
It is always changing. One day he climbs out of the well to find the leaves green, and the next they are beginning to turn. He wakes more often in winter, sees bare trees, bare trees, bare trees for days on end. The summers are long and sleepy.
Today the air is cool and damp, with the fair palette peculiar to spring.
He swings his legs absently, knocking bare heels against the mossy rocks. He knows he cannot be the only death, but he is the death of this place, with its rolling hills and its rocky cliffs, its wind like music, and its old stone well. The hills spill away around him, one side leading to the sea and the other to a forest, and there, through the mist, beyond the woods, the subtle shadow of a town. On and on, the world spills, waiting.
Something clenches in his chest. A hungry heart.
His feet hit the grass, and it begins to wither. The ground has gone to green again, the barren places where he’d stepped before now filled. Weeks, then. Maybe months.
He tries to step on stones as he begins to walk.
His strides are long, his steps are slow, but the distance falls away beneath him. He steps one foot down the hill, and the next in the field, one foot in the field, and the next in the forest, one foot in the forest, and the next at the edge of the town. He takes another step, but his bare feet move forward a single stride, solid, ordinary.
That is how Death knows he is close.
The town—Fallow, that is the name on the wooden sign—is waking around him, men and women spilling from their homes, moving in a stream of bodies toward the church.
He stops in the middle of the square and looks around, humming softly, the tune familiar, though he doesn’t remember how, the words, if he’d ever known them, now lost.
He is a stone in the river. It courses around him.
Death slips into the crowd, tucking his hands—one flesh, one bone—into the worn pockets of his worn trousers. As he strolls down the lane, he plays a game with himself, trying to guess who it will be. The old man with his basket of bread. The young mother clutching her little boy’s hand. The girl bobbing on her father’s shoulders.
Last time, it was winter, and the life belonged to a man sound asleep.
Before that, a pair of children too close to the cliffs.
Before that, he cannot remember. He has lost track of the order, the faces, the names. They are spots of light in his mind, flashes of warmth.
Up ahead, the church bells begin to ring.
The girl squeals as her father tosses her.
The boy begins to cry.
The old man coughs.
Death follows them all.
His bone hand aches.
II.
The girl is sitting on a flat stone grave.
The whole world’s still wet from the storm, and the damp leaches into her skirts and chills her legs, but she’s never known a person to melt from rain. Catch a chill, maybe, but her blood’s always been hot as the rocks in summer.
“Isn’t that right?” she asks, tracing her fingers over the grave. She does that more often than not, carrying on half in her head and half out loud, dancing between them the way one does from stone to stone in the low tide, and it drives her father mad, but the way she sees it, the dead don’t know the difference. They hear it all the same, whether it’s on her tongue or in her head.
The girl’s got her hands busy, braiding a crown out of weedy flowers—it’s the day of the spring festival, when all the girls become May Queens and all the boys go as Green Men, and summer’s waiting at the edge of the woods, peering through the trees. The tall grass starts whistling around her, and she imagines it’s her mum, asking her to sing. She listens a moment, picking the tune, then kicks off, humming until she finds her mark.
“I met a lad with wide brown eyes,” she sings, her fingers weaving stem to leaf. “He came to me in a dream. He was the fairest boy I’d never met, the loveliest I’d ever seen. I knew him by his smile, I knew him by his steps, I should have known to run—”
“Grace,” calls her father from the house, and she trails off, letting go of the song. She can picture him standing there, scanning the garden, squinting into the field, casting a look at the cliffs, as if she’s fool enough to go near them when the rocks are wet.
And for a breath, she thinks of ducking lower. Of pressing her whole self to her mother’s grave, and letting him look till he gives up and goes to the church without her. She thinks of it, but doesn’t do it. Instead, she sets the flower crown on the grave (it was for her mum anyway) and rises, sprouting like a weed.
The church bells start ringing in the distance. Up close, they clatter and clang, but from this far out, the song is sweet and even.
“We’re going to be late!” bellows her father.
She jogs back to the house, barefoot, and he lets out a short, exasperated sound at the sight of her, white dress smudged with dirt.
Grace doesn’t think God will care about a little mud.
III.
They do not notice his bare feet.
They do not notice his damp clothes.
They do not notice the cold breeze that curls around him—or if they do, it does not last. Gazes flit past. Minds slip by. People are peculiar. They have a way of seeing only what they want, of not seeing anything they don’t.
Death walks behind them through the town, searching their faces for the light.
A burning aura, like the last air escaping a log on the fire, sending up a plume of sparks and heat and orange flame. That’s how he knows whose hand to take. His bone fingers flex.
He longs for the heat, for the lovely moment after they die when he holds their life—all they were, all they are, all they will ever be—in his hand, cupped like a wounded bird, before he sets it free.
The white church is a quaint little building.
Death doesn’t go in.
He stands by the door, across from the priest, watching the congregation file past. Face after face. Life after life. None of them ready to end. He sighs when the stream of people trickles to a stop.
A funny thing happens then.
The priest turns, noticing him there. “You coming, son?”
Death smiles warmly. “Not today.”
IV.
The service has already started.
Her father mutters as he slides into the pew.