Weekly Writing – December 9 2023

“We can’t keep doing this,” it sighed, or the wind only fluttered through its robe.
“Why not?” they asked. If the wind touched them at all, it was too faint and fleeting a caress to move them in their current state.
“You know why,” it said. “I have to reap you sooner or later. Otherwise, someone is going to start asking questions.”
They shrugged, or the wind caught them after all. They rippled with or without it, a stubborn mist hanging over their own body, which lay in a tangle of broken limbs against the curb. The wind had no trouble touching that ruined carcass, tugging strands of scarlet-dyed hair from the massive wound that matted the side of its head.
“Doesn’t mean you have any obligation to answer them,” they said. “You’re death – everything answers to you, not the other way around.”
“That’s only an absolute principle as long as I am,” the robed figure pointed out. “If I stop working the way I’m supposed to, questions will start creeping in the cracks. The whole thing will crumble.”
“Only if someone actually notices that you aren’t being absolute. If you pick me up off the pavement now, before anyone comes along, then the only person who could point me out and say you should be dead is the one who hit me at seventy miles an hour. And do you really think he’s going to do that, when he’d have to admit to being the one who killed me?”
The robed figure, whom the wind greeted not as a solid, living being, but as a fellow side effect of the world’s shifting forces, remained silent.
“I’ll rent that movie you’ve been wanting to see,” the person lingering over their own solid, unliving form said. “Which one was it? The-”
“It’s a Wonderful Life,” death grudgingly supplied.
“Done. I’ll leave it looping on the TV all night if you like. You know you’ll have a hell of a time finding someone else who understands that death deserves a little break with a film and a beer now and then.”
Death did not, of course, actually drink beer. But someone else pouring a tall, chilled glass and leaving it where death could hypothetically reach was the sort of gesture where the thought really did count. Most people spent their short lives looking frantically for wards to keep it away, not offering it a piece of their own comforts.
And it had been wanting to see that film for quite some time.
“Be more careful next time,” it sighed again, or the wind skirled away.
Unsettled by a fellow side effect that was not having quite the effect it should. The wind had no one to tell, at least. And the street was comfortably deserted. No one could have seen the stubborn spectre sink back down towards their flesh with a last, “You’re a real pal.”
No one would see the corpse against the curb twitch and tuck its mending limbs up under itself, or mutter an old film title to itself before limping carefully down the sidewalk.