A Game with Death

Moments before departure

When Death came for me, it wasn’t because I begged her to make a bargain with me. There was no melodramatic screaming over a prematurely lost spouse or friend. This wasn’t some cunning scheme that I hatched to cheat her. I wasn’t someone with aspirations to attempt to scam a primordial force that was beyond my comprehension.

It was far more demure.

Rather, I was sat in the mud, looking straight at the ground which seemed to open up before me. I barely felt the squishy muddy ground moving around me when I shifted my weight. All feelings of cool or warm or wet or dry escaped me. Any signals my nerves could possibly send to my brain were slow and attenuated. I realized I hadn’t taken a breath in a long time. Then I realized that I couldn’t remember how to take a breath. Which muscles I needed to flex and in which order remained a mystery to me. I felt that lifting my arm through my bodily numbness and apparent increase in air viscosity would be impossible–yet it happened nonetheless.

I looked at the mud in front of me. Littered across the ground were shattered pieces of bright yellow plastic, crumbles of solid auburn, and a number of reds and greys splattered in an arrangement reminiscent of post-modern art. Something that is not the right thing to see in a trench on a construction site.

A tall woman approached from a distance, though I couldn’t make out any of her features through the air that seemed to become more and more opaque as each second passed. She walked through the mud wearing a perfectly tailored black pantsuit. Where I was seated, however, I first noticed her glossy, expensive-looking white pumps. For whatever reason, I was so concerned about her walking in the mud with them, but speaking felt impossible without having been able to take a breath still. As she got closer, I realized that she was walking over the mud and not sinking at all, either because the ground had frozen solid or she was simply floating and flitting over the ground. She had long straight blonde hair that fell below the structured pads on her shoulders and I finally got a look at her face. It was the color of alabaster and the shape was that of a skull with a thin layer of tight papery skin stretched across the bone. Then I saw her eyes–if that’s what you’d call them. Black pits that looked like swirls of midnight or the endless void of space were trapped in her deep sockets.

“Hello.” She nodded. Her voice was smoky and deep at a frequency that reverberated off the back of my head and shook my organs.

I slowly mouthed words for the first time, not sure how to press my lips together or bring air out of my lungs to generate sound from my larynx, but noise in the sound of my voice erupted from my mouth.

“You shouldn’t be on site.” I said. “You need PPE. Hard hat and boots. I don’t wanna see your shoes get messed up.”

I don’t know what my fixation with her gleaming white pumps were. Perhaps it was the only brightness left that I could see. The only rays of light that pierced through this increasingly dark fog that slowly but undoubtedly continued to encroach on where I sat. Them becoming muddy would be a sin, but most of all, they would trap me here in the dark.

“Didn’t seem to help you.” She nodded curtly at my head.

Finally, I mustered the strength to crane my head up to hers, trying to get a better look at her face. I felt a stream of warm fluid run behind my head and down my back, but the feeling didn’t bother me. She was tall and slender. I watched her examine bony fingers and put her hand on her hip in what I could only imagine is boredom.

“Can I help you ma’am?” I asked earnestly and reflexively.

“Yes, I’d like you to show me where the port-a-john is.” She sighed. “That was sarcasm, by the way. I need to speak with you. I made quite the trip just for you, dear.”

“You got a name?” I asked.

“Not really.” She shrugged. “Just what others call me.”

“That ain’t what a name is?” My voice mirrored my Father’s all those years ago when he’d answer a stupid question. It just felt natural here.

“Not one I picked.”

“I ain’t picked mine neither.”

She frowned. “Fine. To start, I’m here to usher your soul to the other side.”

“Death? Really?” Though I wasn’t all that shocked honestly. Maybe by her appearance. After all, she was a pale white bony woman wearing all black. It all made sense thematically. “You’re meaner than I imagined.”

“Well it’s not like we’re going to be great friends, now are we?”

“I’d reckon not.” I frowned back at her. “You’re here to kill me after all.”

“Who’s mean now?” Death asked sarcastically. “I’m here to help you.”

“The Grim Reaper said she’s going to help me. Maybe I’m just dreamin’ or something.” I said.

“Leave my sister out of this.” She shook her head. “I’m just here to help you do a little bit of thinking before you die. You’re not a good person.” She said with the slightest inkling of a grin.

“Never have been. Blame my upbringing.” I paused. “So I’m going to Hell then?” I asked, not looking directly in the Stygian pits of her eyes.

“I wouldn’t necessarily say that.” She remarked. “But slow down. Are you so concerned with pain of the flesh that you would forgo any introspection on your mortal coil?”

“From where I’m sitting.” I gestured to the crumpled concrete and shattered pieces of polypropylene spread across the ground in front of me, “I’ll have plenty of time to noodle the aforementioned. Maybe I’ll even figure out what happened to me.”

“Some don’t get that luxury. I’ll give you a hint. Someone didn’t secure a cement block at the top of the trench. What’s the rule for spoil piles? Four feet right?” Death asked rhetorically.

“Somethin’ like that.” I said flatly. “So what happened? Brick fell down the trench onto my head? Ain’t that what I’m wearing a hard hat for?”

“Bad luck, hon. Physics is undefeated.” She responded, words oozing with condescension.

“Just more to noodle.” I said.

“Not much there left to noodle, as it were.” She scoffed and nodded her head towards what was left of my cranium.

“So that’s it then? Just blankness? Void?” I asked.

“Maybe.” She shrugged. “I’ve never gotten that far. They let me go right to the edge, but then I’m always yanked back. Believe me, I’ve tried to get a peek more than a few times.”

I cocked my head with bemusement. A small splatter of grey matter spilled out the side of my head. Death chuckled slightly.

“I don’t understand.” I said. “You just shove lost souls to the afterlife, yet you’ve got no idea what happens to them? You’ve got no hypothesis in the slightest?”

She looked up for a second, finally breaking eye contact with me.

“No sir.” She said, “It’s like dropping a kid off at school. You never go into the classroom to learn what they do, you just loop around back home, yeah?”

“Yeah.” I replied. “But I already went to school before. I learned everything my hypothetical kid would’ve already.”

“I did too.” Death said with a hint of, what was that, bashfulness? She’d never been asked questions like this, or if she had, it had been a while.

“You died once too.” I stated. “Hell of a job interview, I guess. You don’t remember how?”

“No.” She shook her head. “It’s not really like that. At least I think so.”

“You never asked?”

“It’s not like I’ve got a boss I can ring up. These things aren’t just like a big construction site.”

“Maybe they oughta be. I know exactly why I do the things I do.”

“Did.” She held up a finger. “Things you did.”

“Oh right.” I chuckled slightly. “I’m dead.”

“You’re finally getting it.”

“Do I get my life flashing before my eyes? When does that happen?” I asked.

“It doesn’t. You still got memories, yeah?” She pointed towards my increasingly empty head.

“Don’t I get to live them more vividly or something? Isn’t that how death works?”

“What’s the difference between a vivid memory and a dampened one?” She asked. I was unsure if it was rhetorical or not, so I answered.

“How much it means to you?” I tried to stretch my legs, but I couldn’t gain purchase in the mud. Not with the small amount of force I could muster with them.

“Maybe.” She said. “I wouldn’t know. Everyone’s answers are always different.”

“So why are we just chomping? Certainly there’s a number of others that died already during our little chat.”

“That’s my secret.” She said. “Listen, I’m just here to make this as easy as possible. To make you accept your death. It’s a compulsion, if you will.”

“I already did.” I tried to shrug. “Brick brained me. You said so yourself, you ain’t even know what happens when I get pushed over to Hell or space or reincarnation or whatever. Hopefully it’s just like a big sleep. I could go for one of those right about now.”

“Your soul says something different.” She pointed at me. “It wants closure.”

“I gave that up a long time ago. Nobody owes me nothin’ anymore. No one who’s around to give it anyway.”

“Well there are the rules too, of course.” She smirked. “We have to play a little game. If you win, you get all the answers you wanted for what happened in your life. If you lose, I will just take you over to the “whatever” right now.”

“I’m dead.” I said. “I can barely move. That ain’t fair.”

“That’s the problem with losing your head.” She shrugged. “I never said anyone wins these games. Those are the rules though.”

“What do we play?” I asked.

“You pick. Most people pick chess, which I find unwise. Others try a game of chance, but they’re so out of it, they don’t know what they’re doing. Sometimes people will try a game they made up, but they forget that I know all the rules. Even the ones that they didn’t think of.”

“Jacks.” I said. “Let’s play jacks. I was always pretty good at that one when I was a kid.”

Death effortlessly conjured up a square hard surface on the ground to my side along with a marble and ten jacks.

“Rules are as follows.” She instructed. “Jacks must be picked up while the marble is in the air and caught off a single bounce. Each turn, the player must scoop up the proper number of jacks, starting at one and ascending to ten. If the wrong number of jacks are picked up or the player is still picking up jacks following the first bounce and the marble hits the ground twice, that player loses.”

“Easy enough.”

“You first.” She said.

Death and I took turns bouncing the marbles and scooping up jacks. Her fingers grew several inches longer and she showed an inhuman dexterity. On the other hand, despite me having an almost useless arm, the muscle memory from my childhood on the cracked uneven dining room table took over. Death and I went up to ten and back to one and then back up to ten again. On the way down the second time, I grabbed seven jacks instead of six.

I lost.

“Bad luck again.” She shrugged.

“I always hated counting to seven. Such a weird number. Prime and all that.”

“Why jacks?” She asked. “A children’s game seems like an impossible task against me.”

“It’s the last game I played with my Dad and older brother. As a family. Before everything went bad. He beat me on sevens to sixes. Just like you.”

“Did you throw? On purpose?” Death asked, showing the smallest amount of shock for the first time.

“I just wanted to be a kid again. That’s the happiest I ever remember myself. On a little table scoopin’ up plastic jacks with the only people I ever wanted to be next to.”

“That’s the closure you wanted.” She nodded. “You knew you’d lose.”

“They owed me one more game. That’s all I needed from anyone. And I got it.”

We sat in silence for a second while Death stood up.

“I wanna leave. Can we?”

“Yes. It’s time to go.” She said and reached her hand out. When I reached out to grab it, it was warm and soft and human.

The last thing I saw was the increasingly bright shining light from her glossy white high heels engulfing my body.