Always Darkest
Dawn rose after noon the day she died. You've known her since kindergarten, when she stole your fire truck during recess and you socked her in the arm. You'd been inseparable since, once she contented herself to take no more than much of your time and the only pain you caused her involved pointed questions.
You watched as she side-stepped the homeless woman begging change on the corner. From across the street, you saw the truck hit her, your arm caught in mid-wave. You rushed to her, but the damage was too severe, too unquestionably fatal. You've heard that quick deaths are supposed to be a comfort because the deceased didn't suffer.
Dawn disagrees. Once you were home again, after answering the questions from the police, once you were back in your apartment with the tension and fear leaking from your eyes, your phone rang. Dawn asked you to swing by the hospital and pick her up. She hung up and didn't answer when you called back. So you went to pick her up because what else were you to do?
She told you that it had been a mistake. The truck just shocked her heart, but she'd revived thanks to adrenaline. Could you not mention this to anyone else, she asked, almost embarrassed. You were so grateful that you acceded, as strange as you found it. You'd been there. You'd been certain she died. You'd seen the broken bones, the blood, the injuries that no longer existed when she hopped into the passenger's seat of your car.
She wouldn't talk about it on the way back to her home, said it felt like sleep. She woke up to doctors calling it a miracle and was discharged. You just joked that she must be a superhero, then amended this to "zombie".
She went to work the next day, selling music at a tiny store on Main Street. She greeted you with a kiss on the cheek--her frustrating custom--when you came in to check on her. Her dark hair smelled of lilacs and ashes and her green eyes were crisp as apples. In retrospect, you have tried to remember if her lips were cold that day, if there was any indication.
Dawn had a way of confusing the subject. You'd try to talk about one thing, tried to pin down definitions, but found yourself in a conversation about the minutia of books without knowing how. She thought it was charming, but you held it as one of the reasons you could never date her. Not for very long, at least.
You asked her to meet you for dinner, tried to confirm a where and when. You caught the quick look downward before she declined, as she felt for something in her pocket, but couldn't register its meaning. "I have another appointment," she said.
"I'll come," you replied. "I'll drive you and then we'll get a bite to eat."
"No, I need to go alone. It's a lady issues problem," she replied, the force of her denial startling you.
"I can deal with lady issues," you begin to say, having known this as her stock excuses, but then came to the real issue. "You scared the hell out of me yesterday. I don't want you to be alone."
"I want to be alone. You are around me too much."
Maybe it was that look in her eyes, the hard pleading, but you listened.
Though you called her daily, it is a week before you see her again, hobbling down the street, when you were on you way to confront her.
"What's wrong with you?" you begin, the question all accusation, but you catch sight of her face under her hoodie. You repeat the question with sincerity.
"Nothing," she croaks. Her eyes are glassy and stare through you. Her face is blanched and her lips, blue. When you were ten, you walked in on your grandfather dying, his heart giving up the fight. He looked better than Dawn.
"You need to get to the hospital," you insist, pulling on her arm. You feel something sharp underneath the fabric of her shirt. It is only much later that you will realize it was one of her bones, shattered.
"No, they can't help. I screwed up." She gets into your car, but you don't turn the key. The story pours out of her. It didn't take a chess game for her to best death. Dawn woke on the floor of the morgue to her phone buzzing in her pocket. She answered and a voice like an apiary asked if she would rather be dead. Of course she wouldn't, she answered. So it was settled and she found her body amongst the drawers of corpses, falling back into it and reviving. But there were conditions.
"Are you saying you kill people?" you say, realizing your proximity in an enclosed space to the undead.
"Ye-no," she corrects. "People die. I happen to be there. I make sure they do. They are supposed to die. I think." She looks at her hands, the blueness of the veins showing through her bloodless skin.
"How do you know they are supposed to? How do you know what to do? How do you know where to be?" you continue, too loudly. You want to poke holes in her story, to make it any less true, but looking at her convinces you that the impossible may be the easiest answer.
In lieu of answering, she fishes her beat up phone from her pocket and flips it open, pushing a few buttons. A text message pops up from an unlisted number, giving a location just outside of town, yesterday's date, and a time. When you reach out for the phone, she jerks it away and hides it in her pocket.
"What happened there?" you ask.
"I don't know. I wasn't there."
"So you don't have to be a part of this, then."
"I wasn't there and now I look like this. I don't know if they died yesterday, but I died again last night. I can feel myself rotting right now. I'm being punished."
"How can we make this better?"
"Only you," she says back, then coughs in a way that rattles in her. "Only you could be concerned about how to make death better."
"You aren't dead," you argue.
"No. I am Death."
The solution comes to you. She missed an "appointment" and began to die again. But, despite her injuries after the accident, she was whole when you picked her up. She had to hit her next appointment.
"But I never know when-" she began and was cut off by the phone. It was so very like television writer's cliché that you both jump and laugh at your fear. She glances down at the phone and says, "It's in ten minutes. And it's eleven miles away."
So, without further conversation, you drive, well exceeding the speed limit. It isn't a question of the insanity of the act--you wouldn't be Dawn's best friend if you were a fan of sanity--but that this was the only way to be helpful.
You arrive with seconds to spare, Dawn jumping out of the car, turning her head side to side. A car that cut you off swerves into a telephone pole, which begins to fall. Dawn searches for her appointment and you see in her ghoulish face that she is unaware of the disaster about to crush her. You honk the horn and fumble with the seatbelt, but the pole lands before you can come to the rescue.
You run from your car anyway, to assess the damage. You are shocked to see Dawn standing there, not merely unharmed but looking herself again.
"What?" is all you can say.
She nods her head toward the pole, where a shaggy haired man lies crushed.
"He pushed me out of the way. Because he heard your horn, he ran out of that shop."
You ignore the danger of the live wires and try to push the pole off him, but Dawn puts a hand to your shoulder.
"Stop. I wouldn't be here if he could be saved, would I?"
"But... he died because we rushed here."
She slowly nods. "Yeah, he did."
By now, the crowd is gathering, looking at you two.
"Hey, we should get out of here. I don't need to attract attention, being involved with two fatal accidents, you know?"
She leads you back to your car but you can do no more than sit and process. "Either drive or give me the keys," she says. You opt for the former.
"So you were right," she says when you get her to the driveway of her apartment.
"And because I was right, we caused the death of some stranger."
"You knew we would. I was unsubtle about what would happen. I cause death. Now I am okay. Just like that." She spreads her pale fingers before your face, the perfume of her skin echoing after. "Poof!"
"Are you okay with what happened?" you ask.
She pushes you, enough to cause impact but not pain. "I'm not a monster. Jeez, why would you ask me that?"
"You aren't acting very upset."
She shrugs and spins a ring--a present from you for her last birthday--around her finger. "I didn't know him. I'm sure he was nice, but I guess it was his time."
"Because we interfered."
She looks up from her hands, scowling. "You didn't have to."
"I did. You were all sorts of jacked up."
"You didn't have to," she reiterated, "but you did. So thank you."
"Yeah, well, what was I supposed to do?"
"What you did." She leans over and gives you a kiss on the cheek, exiting your car.
As far as you know, things return to some version of normal. If she has any more appointments, you don't hear about them. You find articles about the man who died. He was in his twenties and, from what you could tell, he lead a blameless life that should have lasted another sixty years. There was never any mention of Dawn or you, which did not slake your guilt.
You visit her to hang out, but you end up telling her about the man.
"I don't want to know," she says.
"I figured, since I helped-"
"Why are you so adamant about always being the one to help me?" she shouts.
"Maybe because you are always the one who needs help," you reply before you can stop yourself.
The remark doesn't register on her face. You know this means she is now running through stacked reasoning. You just have to play your part until she is satisfied enough to let it drop.
"You have to agree that your life would be a lot easier without the albatross of Dawnie dangling from your neck," she says.
"I don't want easier and you aren't an albatross." You see her open her mouth. "And yes, I get the reference."
"You should want easier."
You shake your head. "How about we work on easier once you finish being Death?"
"I don't think--"
"I know," you say.
The next day, she calls you for an appointment. You drive her to Breakneck Ridge hours early. She brings a picnic lunch, all the foods you love most and a bottle of good champagne. You can almost enjoy this for what it is without remembering how it has to end. You can watch the tide of the Hudson lap at the shore until the sunset dyes the water in pinks and oranges, and she rests her head against your chest, listening to your heart.
You check your watch and, seeing the time is nearly up, scan for Dawn's target. No sooner have done this than you realize. That bond, that connection you've always shared with her, shows itself reciprocal now.
"I'm sorry, so sorry," she says. You feel the breeze against the wet spot on your t-shirt. She looks at her hands, as she did the fetal pig she made you dissect in biology, disgusting work she couldn't do. Is she waiting for you to do this for her too?
"Why me?"
She looks away, to hide the tears, but they saturate her voice. "It's always been you. Everyone I killed, I killed instead of you. I tried to stay away..."
She reaches her hand toward you and you don't move away.
Note: Always Darkest was first published in Paragon 3 in 2010 and takes place in the fantasy universe of Xen's novels.
