This happened sometimes. Ordinarily, Suzie would have flown away home, but something about the young man intrigued her. There was a light about him, some madness or goodness set free by the illness.
Indeed, as he recovered, it seemed Francesco had gone crazy. He kept skipping work, spending his days out in the meadows and woods, chasing birds and skinny-dipping in streams and trying to pet the deer. His friends and neighbors laughed and laughed, but Francesco only laughed back, took off all his clothes, and walked stark naked out of town. He went to live in the ruins of a stone chapel out in the wilderness, eating berries and nuts and doing as he pleased.
“Questo è folle!” gasped the townspeople. “You can’t just go around being happy and doing whatever you like!” Some of them even went out to the wilderness to tell him so.
Francesco didn’t answer them with words. He just kept right on being happy, right in front of their faces. This made some of his visitors angry, and they went home and kicked things around the house. A few of them, however, decided to stay. By and by, a little community formed: a group of the nicest people you ever met, wearing rags and living on berries, fixing up the old chapel stone by stone. Animals even started coming around. Birds and deer and squirrels and frogs and toads and such.
Suzie couldn’t believe it. Humans usually had some weird addiction to suffering and toil. These freaks, insisting on simplicity and happiness, reminded her a bit of Milo (currently off living a life as a Japanese bunny rabbit). If they weren’t careful, one of two things was bound to happen. One: They would spread their happiness to others and make the world a better place. Or two: They would make people uncomfortable and get burned at the stake.
Suzie even put on a human form and warned Francesco about this. “Happiness scares the crap out of people,” she told him.
He only smiled and went on doing what he was doing.
Something happened then, while they were talking.
They saw each other. Really saw each other.
Francesco saw who she was. He looked surprised to discover Death hanging around his little chapel. But he wasn’t upset. Death was part of nature. Death was a door. She was also, apparently, not bad-looking.
And Suzie saw waaaaay into Francesco. She saw that he would become a famous example of peace and goodness and make the world a better place. It was terribly important that he continue what he was doing, so that these things could come to pass.
Suzie saw something else, too. Something bad.
Francesco was still sick and didn’t know it. The sickness was sleeping inside him, and very soon it would wake up and kill him. She saw it the way you sometimes see a shadow down in the water.
She decided to not let it happen.
She found some rags to wear and pitched in helping to fix the chapel.
Her feet and hands grew rough. She tried to pet the animals, but they recognized her and kept their distance.
Francesco walked to Rome (with no shoes on) and had a talk with the pope, and the pope liked him and blessed him, and after that more people started coming to the chapel. Not to laugh or be uncomfortable but to see and learn.
Not long after that, the sickness inside Francesco bloomed and grew, and Suzie felt the urge to kiss him on the forehead and make him be dead. But she didn’t.
She didn’t make the same mistake she’d made with the whale, though. Didn’t let his soul escape and then try to stuff it back inside. She focused on the shadow instead. Stuffed it back under whatever interior anatomical rock it had been hiding and told it to stay put.
Francesco was down with the sniffles for a day, but that was the worst of it. By evening he was well enough to take some of his disciples out to look for lepers to feed.
There would, Suzie sensed, be hell to pay.
Sure enough, about a week later, she was out in the meadow looking for a good keystone to anchor the chapel door when she saw a tall, pale figure riding down out of the woods.
One of the other Deaths. He called himself Zaazeemozogmelaffello-Ba-Tremuloso-Ba-Jalophonso-Umbertoaawiigsheetossalavagredorro-Ba.
“Well?” said this universal slice, approaching Suzie. “Where is he?”
Suzie had just found an especially likely looking pile of rocks. She picked up a good one and held it in a way that, she hoped, looked mildly threatening.
“Where is who?” (She tried to look innocent, as well.)
The other Death just looked disgusted and turned to ride on toward the chapel.
“You can’t have him,” Suzie called out. She gripped the stone harder. She’d throw it if she had to.
He stopped.
“Suzie,” he said. “What’s going on? You know this isn’t how it works.”
She nodded.
“Still,” she said.
He looked uncertain and climbed down off his horse.
“What do you propose?” he asked. “And would you put the stone down, please? We both know you’re not going to throw it at me.”
She dropped the stone.
“He’s important,” she said.
“I’m sure he is. I’m sorry. This is how it balances out.”
“Sometimes the balance is wrong.”
“That’s not for you to say.”
Suzie’s eyes flared.
“I’ve decided that it is for me to say,” she told him. “How do you like them apples?”
“Apples?”
She had an idea. “You can have him,” she said, “if you beat me at a game.”
“Like what?” (Death was a sucker for a challenge. They all were.)
She reached into her pockets and drew out two little green apples.
“We throw these apples,” she said. “Whoever’s apple goes farther gets to have their way.”
He looked puzzled and wary.
“That’s not really a game,” he said. “As such.”
She tossed him one of the apples and said, “One.”
“As you wish,” he said.
“Two,” said Suzie, and “Three!” and they both threw as hard as they could, and a crow came swooping down out of the air and grabbed Suzie’s apple and carried it off over the trees, out of sight.
The other apple landed in an old posthole, at a respectable distance.
“That doesn’t count,” Zaazeem-etc.-Ba complained.
But he got back on his horse and rode away, embarrassed by the way he’d been tricked.
Suzie didn’t tell Francesco what had happened, just as she hadn’t told him the whole truth about his bout with the sniffles.
She also stayed up all night watching the door, in case Zaazeem-Ba tried to sneak in and take Francesco in the dark. But he didn’t.
The years passed. Summer and winter gave way to each other, in turn. People came to the chapel to watch and help. Some of them started their own communities in other places. Suzie finally got the animals to let her pet them. Some of them died, but they seemed, overall, to sense that this was okay.
Every now and then, one of Suzie’s colleagues would come riding across the meadow (or whirling on the wind or falling with the rain or creeping with the twilight), and she would challenge them. And she managed to send them away, by hook or by crook.