Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
Inheritance
Monday, June 15th, 2009
‘Miss Millikan?’
I can barely hear the woman for the noise in the background at her end. ‘Yes?’
‘It’s Nurse Seraph at Sacred Heart. It’s your grandmother.’
I feel the cold hollow in my stomach, where a vacuum forms. ‘Has she?’
‘Not yet, but you need to come down. The others are here and there’s a bit of a problem.’
‘What sort of a problem?’
‘You’ll see.’
The hospital isn’t far. I go on foot. The automatic doors are opening and closing erratically. Ghosts move back and forth just inside. I take a deep breath and walk through them. They’re cold and my clothes feel damp.
At the desk, a large nurse is trying to calm down a crowd of old ladies. She sees me, looks relieved. ‘Miss Millikan?’
I nod.
‘Thank God. She’s responsible for this.’ She gestures at the spectres. I recognise a couple from sepia-tinted family photos. Uncle Seth looks better dead than alive.
‘She’s just a little old lady,’ I lie.
‘She’s panicking my patients!’
‘Okay, okay.’
A great line of spirits keeps exiting Vina’s room, while she lies on the bed, comatose. My cousins stand around. Tansy sidles up to me, yellow eyes sly. ‘It’s coming out.’
Petyr says, ‘The Inheritance. It’s dissipating.’
Vala, Arthur, Jezebel and Elizabeth agree.
‘Well?’ I ask. ‘I don’t want it.’
‘We all have to be here for one to take it,’ sneers Arthur.
I stare down at the woman who raised us as harshly as she could. We grew up worse than hyenas; no love, no kindness. I don’t like them any more than I like her. I tell myself I don’t want her inheritance.
‘Take it, then, one of you,’ I say.
They look at each other, then Petyr reaches and my arm, seemingly of its own accord, shoots out and beats him. I clamp thumb and forefinger around her nostrils, and cup the other hand across her mouth and hold down tight.
She doesn’t struggle much. The silver wisps rise from her body slowly, then coalesce into a great silver arrow that shoots into my stomach and knocks me across the room. I cough silver smoke as I sit up.
All the ghosts troop back into the room and politely wait for me to stand. When I do, each steps into me and settles inside the repository of my body. I am the new well of souls.
The Angle of Death
Friday, June 12th, 2009
As the ice cream truck slammed to a halt just past my crumpled, flattened body, I was pulled up out of myself by something thin and sharp. I found myself floating just above the ground, looking down at the busted collection of formerly fairly-well-cared-for-organs that was me, and floating next to me were a couple of segments converging into a single being. This being wore a black robe and held a scythe.
“What the hell?” I said.
“I am the Angle of Death,” it said. “Please come with me.”
“Isn’t there supposed to be an angel?”
“Even God makes the occasional typo,” the angle said–a little snappishly, if you ask me. “And since ‘angle’ is a perfectly valid word, the spellchecker missed it completely.”
“I’m just surprised, is all.”
“Why is it always this conversation?” said the angle. “Why can’t it ever be about substantive things? The nature of being, the brevity yet incredible richness of life, the strangeness of a coherent consciousness surviving death when it’s entire physical mechanism has ceased to operate … these would be worthy subjects. Yet instead, everyone chooses to spend the first moments of their own personal postexistential eternity criticizing God’s typing!”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “So, how does this work?”
“It’s very simple,” the angle said. “Just follow me.” And he began drifting along the ground. I felt tugged after him and surrendered myself to the feeling so that I drifted with him, still trying to get over being greeted in death by a geometrical figure.
The buildings grew blurry and irrelevant, and soon we were crossing a trackless landscape of misty light and shadow. From this rose up a wide open gate. The angle gestured, and I drifted through. Then the angle whipped out a key, slammed the gate shut, and locked me in. A disturbing, sulfury smell began to permeate my nose.
“I bet you thought no one knew about your weapons smuggling, didn’t you?” the angle said smugly. “Well, we certainly did! It’s Hell for you!” It laughed horribly. My feet began to feel uncomfortably hot. I gripped the bars of the gate, shaking them.
“Curse you, angle of death!” I yelled. And I realized that I had been distracted by the seemingly whimsical error of his nature, probably exactly as intended.
As I was dragged down into flames, I was at least comforted a little that God didn’t make mistakes after all.