To the original author of this story: you know who you are. You wrote a story so compelling I couldn't leave it alone. There is a thin line between love and hate because they are both passion, and this story has it. It is so strong I have to meddle and write my own version. That should be a compliment to your creative juices, to have come up with something worth meddling in. I just couldn't leave it alone. So if you hate me for digging my fingers into your work of art, that's okay. It's only a thin line away from loving me for it. :)
Oh, and I prefer the American spelling of words like gray and recognize. In case you didn't notice.
My Version of Death's ElizabethI didn’t realize a good thing when I had it.
And I didn’t realize the nightmare I endured on a daily basis.
And by nightmare and good thing, I mean the same thing. My life.
Death came for me, just like he comes for all of us. But I saw him coming. I didn’t realize it till he came, but it turned out I knew Death better than I thought. And when you know someone well enough, you can sense when they are nearby.
When I was eight, I knew a boy named Tim. I suppose when I say I knew him, that would be an understatement. We lived inside each other, every spare minute in a complete kind of way. We shared all the dark corners of our minds because it didn’t occur to us that there were things worth hiding from each other.
We walked home from school together, stepping in ant piles to see them all scramble. Poking dead squirrels in the road with sticks. Throwing stones at birds nests. As our walking took us to my house, he asked if I ever wondered what happened to people when they die. I told him Yes. I thought about it all the time. Then, because there was nothing to be done about it, the conversation hung empty in the air for several seconds. We had stopped walking and just stood looking at each other, considering death. Then he said, "I wish I could see it." His eyes sparkled.
My mother called to me from the open front door. I cocked my head to one side, and gave Tim a crooked smile. Then I turned and ran inside. If I had known it was the last time I would see him, I would have hugged him. Or cried. Or tried to run away with him. Or something.
Tim’s mother pulled him from his life with me. I think she had been watching our ant stomping, dead squirrel poking, and didn’t like it. My mother told me to stop bothering dead things, that it wasn’t good to kill, even if it was just ants. All I knew was that I didn’t see Tim anymore, that things had changed because the moms had talked. I also knew Mom stepped on bugs all the time, that things died whether you wanted them to or not.
It was a first for me. To wonder if Mom was wrong about something. And another first, to have to hide my love for death. To hide anything. It was only the beginning of hiding for me.
Hiding led to lying. And then it was easy to hide other things and tell other lies. I lied about cheating when I was ten. And smoking when I was twelve. And boyfriends and sex when I was fourteen. And drugs when I was sixteen.
The lying was easy, but the pain was hard. Because the life I had built was pretty miserable. At nineteen, I was with Brian and we were both stealing to support our habits. Of course, when I say I was with Brian, it was more like I was merely around him. I was really a fortress, an island by then. No getting in or out. Too many lies to keep up with to let anybody inside. I was really really well hidden by then.
And then Brian left me. No goodbyes. One day I came back off a high, and all his stuff was gone from our crummy little apartment. And even though I told myself he was nothing to me, that turned out to be yet another lie. I had gotten so good at lying I had even been lying to myself.
Something inside me broke. Snapped in half. Jagged edges and oozing and shrill screams, like the moans of the undead.
Getting high didn’t hide it as well anymore. As soon as I came off one high, the pain of being broken was back, bigger and worse than before. So I got high all the time, and upped the dose, to keep even a hint of pain at bay.
Three days I did this. I think I forgot to eat. I rarely remembered to drink. I never left our crummy little apartment...or rather
my crummy little apartment. I got so weak I couldn’t stand anymore. But I kept up the drugs. I’d rather die than face the pain.
I hallucinated all the time. The apartment wasn’t the apartment half the time. I was underwater, floating among the seaweed. Or inside Big Ben, spinning on gigantic cogs, the ticks and the tocks thrumming so loud they shook my body with their beat. Sometimes I was back in the apartment and mythical beasts like unicorns and centaurs galloped around the room. A Pegasus slept on the ceiling most of the time.
And then, after three days, I saw Tim.
It wasn’t nine-year-old Tim, like I remembered from that last day I saw him. It was grown up Tim. Maybe twenty-year-old Tim, which would make sense, because he was a year older than me. But it was still strange how I would recognize him, even all grown up. Once, I had stolen a wallet of a perfect stranger and saw the name Carla McClosky on the drivers license afterward. She had been my science lab partner two years in a row in junior high. And yet I would never have been able to pick her out in a line up.
But the guy standing so serious and solemn in the corner of the apartment was Tim. I knew it in my bones. He had lost his twinkle. He had lot his childhood. And he had even lost his normal clothes. He was wearing a graphite-colored robe with a wide band of subtle and intricate black embroidery that ran along the hem, the wide-open edges of the sleeves, and the deep hood, which partially darkened his now pale face.
But it was definitely Tim.
He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking down and to the right of me. I followed the line of his sight and saw, lying on the floor in a heap, my own body. My dark stringy hair, my pale and sweaty skin. My bones jutting out, like my muscle was gone and I was just a skeleton with a cheese cloth draped over it.
Looking at myself, I felt the craving for my next fix coming on. I felt the pain creeping back in, stabbing at the back of my head. Usually this kind of pain put me back into reality because the high was wearing off. But this time, as the pain grew, I still saw my own body. I still hallucinated a grown-up and serious Tim watching my body from the corner of the room.
Something was wrong. Seriously wrong.
I looked between Tim and my body, perplexed. The pain was a throbbing in my head. The ache for the drugs an almost overwhelming pain itself. This felt more real than anything had in days.
“Tim?” It was barely a whisper, but had a slight shriek of panic to it.
His head snapped instantaneously towards me, and his eyes widened in shock. Or maybe recognition. Or maybe both. His seriousness was gone. His jaw dropped for a second before he breathed my name in a kind of horror.
“Elizabeth.”
“Tim...what’s...happening...” I could barely speak now, could only barely keep my eyes on his as the craving for the drugs and the pain of emptiness had me wanting to double over in pain. Only I wasn’t in my body, so I couldn’t double over like I wanted to do more than anything else in the world at that moment.
“You’re dying,” he said in a quiet voice.
Our last conversation together broke through the pain and craving, and for a second I was transported back to my childhood, walking along the road home from school with him again, stepping on ant piles and poking dead squirrels. It was just long enough for me to realize I was no longer curious, like I had been when I was eight. More than anything I wanted it to be over. Death was something I never wanted to think about again. So, despite the agony of the moment, I pushed through and asked Tim the one thing that might hold me together.
“What’s...next?” I don’t think the words were audible, because I didn’t have enough of anything outside of fighting the pain and the craving to speak. But he must have heard me, because Tim answered.
“Elizabeth. I have to...” He paused so long I almost lost the memory of him trying to say something. Then he forced out the last words in a strained voice, “...make a choice.”
Without realizing it, I had looked away from him because the sensation of death was so overwhelming. But when he said this, I turned back to look into his eyes. Steel gray eyes that were filled with agony. The muscles around his face contorted in torment. His focus was glazed over, as if he were looking through me, to something far off in the distance behind me.
Then his focus settled back on me, and our eyes met. The torment of his face slipped into grim determination. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly through his nose. Then he came toward me.
It was so hard to keep looking at him, when I wanted to look at nothing, to be nothing, to feel nothing.
The pain mounted, and I opened my mouth to scream in agony. But no sound came out. My whole body itched for the drug that could scratch it, the one I could no longer reach. I wanted to rip my skin off. To tear myself into a thousand pieces.
I felt his cool fingers wrap around the curve of my shoulders. The insanity ebbed a little. He spoke softly and his breath fell on my face like a winter draft creeping in from beneath the door.
“The next step won’t change it, Elizabeth. With death, however you are now, that’s how it will always be.”
I felt myself shrinking, crumpling up like a wad of newspaper engulfed in flames, losing myself and being smaller for the loss. I melted into the ashy version of my former self, just knowing that I could not endure this, but yet I would. I had to because there was no escape.
"But..." His grip tightened and he pulled me closer to him. “I can buy you time. Not a lot. But maybe enough for you to change. To end it differently.”
The cool touch of his fingers on my shoulders spread like a balm, like a shower of healing, down my arms and across my collar bone. And into my neck enough for me to speak.
“Oh, Tim.” I breathed a battered and strangled sigh of relief. “Yes.
Please.”
I held onto his gaze as if it could save me from drowning. I couldn’t bear the thought of being without whatever it was he had to give me. His gray eyes looked back into mine, darting slightly, searching for something, furtive and still strained under his furrowed brow.
“Elizabeth. It’s not so simple.” He lifted one of his hands to my face. Oh, how cool and peaceful it felt against the anguish of the stabbing pain in my head. “I can buy you time...but it comes at a price.”
I didn’t even pause to think about it. The cool of his hands, the buoying power of his eyes, I grasped onto them like a life preserver. It was not the time for questions. It was the time for doing whatever it took.
“I’ll pay it, Tim. Whatever it is, I’ll pay the price.” Then the cool healing power flowed into my hands and I could move them, so I reached up and pulled back his graphite hood. It shimmered iridescently as it dropped away from his face, like it had been woven with strands of black spider web washed in dew. I rested my palms against the sides of his neck, absorbing the blissful emptiness that emanated from him.
“It’s not much, Elizabeth. But it’s better than
this.” He took my face in both hands. His lower lids lined themselves with unshed tears. “And it’s all I have to give you.” Then he lowered his head and pressed his lips against mine.
The stabbing pain in my head, the unbearable itch of desire, the misery of my life, it all lined up and solidified into a long string of ugliness in my soul. I felt it form in all my parts, throughout my whole body, as if I was made out of string, as if there was no room left because I was so full of coils and tangled piles of string.
Tim’s kiss, the pressure of his lips against mine, soft and yet urgent, pulled on that string. The string started to slip out of me and into him, where our mouths touched. It felt like eating spaghetti backwards, instead of slurping the noodle up into my mouth like I did as a kid, it slurped out. If I hadn’t been so engulfed by the situation, I would have thought of Lady and the Tramp and laughed. But you don’t laugh when you’re looking Death in the face and realize you’re on the brink of eternal Hell.
The string slipped out completely and left me feeling empty. It was a blissful empty, especially with cool hands on my shoulders and cool lips pressed sweetly against mine.
And the next moment I was violently ill.
My stomach turned itself inside out, and I rolled over to vomit up bile. The vomiting stopped and then I saw I couldn’t even gather the strength to stay on my side. I rolled to my back, and every muscle cried out in pain where it touched the floor beneath me.
I was back in my body. I was alone in the room. I was no longer high, my body shaking uncontrollably from the withdrawal.
But I was alive. And this time, it would be different.
.......
From that very first moment of living again, I forgot about the price to be paid. That the universe had been left unbalanced for my sake. And it wasn’t until six years later that I remembered that debt.
The time of reckoning was not what I expected. But then, the unpleasant business of paying old debts rarely is.
