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Come Away

“Come away, come away,” I say, and he chuckles, the scraping sound.

He steps into the room and the fire darkens.  I grope my way back to the chair and sit.  He hovers in the doorway replacing the chill of the wind with his own special bleakness.  I offer him the couch, a steeping pot of tea beside.  His trailing cloak flaps just above the floor as he passes, never touches, perhaps it’s static electricity.  Even as he sinks onto the couch it pools yet still seems not to touch.  An alabaster hand grasps the teacup, as the bone touches the bone china it sounds like two teacups meeting one another.  Now the teapot, now the pour, now the cup is raised.  The hand transports the cup deep into the shadows of the cowl.  It disappears entirely.  There is silence.  When the cup reappears it is empty. 

“Llllooovelyyyy,” he coos, his voice like wuthering.

“Thank you kindly.”

            He sets the teacup down with a gentle clink, lets go with a gentle click, and interlaces his fingers with a series of gentle if somewhat unsettling cracks.

            “Rest your weary bones a while,” I proffer.

            And we lapse into peaceful, seemingly eternal, silence.  How did I come to play host in such a manner, you may wonder. 

I spent many years listening to time passing.  It was a continuing conversation, I would speak and it would wipe the evidence of my words away; I would act and it would cover over my actions with dust and forgetting.  As time spoke with its silence I walked through the desert world and it covered my tracks; I saw how this impartial eradication of my presence was my death.  Death pursued me and I did not flee.  He was my death after all, and any functionary whose duties are unending…whose ending is some unknown (to me, anyway) hour removed…deserves pity.  I resolved to offer my phantasm some respite and succor.  Contact was easily achieved: when one is being followed one merely has to leave breadcrumbs along the way, or a post-it note.  I did nothing for an hour before the appointed time, allowing him to catch up on the work I’d left him.  Because death could not stop for me I kindly stopped for him.

            He did not enter on that first day, but I could sense him near.  I don’t suppose he gets much time off.  I never remember my dreams, so there goes the night shift.

            It was some time before he approached, still longer before he entered.  Perhaps he had been warned against the likes of me, warned that I would ask for clemency.  He knew I wasn’t the type however, he’d seen the evidence.  In fact, he was so familiar with my breadth of experience there was no need for mundane chitchat.  I did not wish to presume upon his life outside of work, if there was one and if it could be characterized as life (not to be disparaging, merely semantically accurate).

            He stood, presumably, leaning upon his scythe.  He was still reticent, our silence then more a product of accepted unease than relaxation. Treading gently, I sought to coax him out from pure blackness into mere opacity.  I gestured once toward the couch.  He declined.  The atmosphere was unbearable.

            “Be not proud,” I ventured.

            Then came a sound like rusted iron hinges in an empty lot, or a house resettling on its foundations at midnight, or a stepped upon pile of dead roaches crunching like autumn leaves.  Death’s chuckle.