Fiction: Deal With Death

More fiction! Yay? Yay! People have been on my ass about reading this one. It's my most recent, though I came up with the story almost two years ago. And now I'm mildly depressed it's been that long since I was in a writing mood. Damn you grown up life! So anyway, this is part of the first issue of my Stories of Death (and all his friends) comics. The first part, which is Untitled or Dinner Over Death, you may have read already and I'll be posting it probably later tonight. Just to warn you, I'll be posting most of my stories tonight. Anyway, my idea for Stories is kinda based on these Time Life books I would read when I was a kid. I don't know how familiar you, anonymous reader, are with the Time Life series but each book was beautifully illustrated and had a theme, and the way each story was written was timeless like you'd have heard it a thousand times but just then learned the meaning. With my Stories series, I'm trying to evoke that style. Each of the 12 issues will contain two tales, a shorter one and a longer one. While Untitled or Dinner is the shorter story, this is the longer one. God this preface is long. Uhh the comic itself is going to be slightly different, since I only have the first draft in short story format while the other drafts are in graphic novel format. So yeah, this is the first draft and that does explain a lot.


One day I was dying. I miss that feeling.

A man came to visit me, maybe in a dream. He asked me if I was afraid. I told him I was.

"Of dying?"

"Of dying alone. This can't be how it ends. My best friend is the woman in the bed next to mine, whose face I've never seen but whose screams keep me awake in the night. My family is the doctors who check on me, who all look the same but distinguish themselves by the bad news they deliver. My lover is the old nurse who changes my sheet every day but won't look me in the eye. This is what I'm afraid of. That this is how it ends. I don't want to die alone."

"Done," he said, the dim light in my mind illuminating his face like a skeleton. I woke up to my best friend's final scream. The next day my family told me I was free to go.

"Here's to you and here's to me, if we should ever disagree, fuck you, here's to me." Cassidy lifted his sixth round, clashing it against my second. I closed my eyes and tightened my throat, wincing at the burning as it went down. Cassidy slammed his down. "Have you ever been in love?"

"I guess."

"No, really in love. Not just with someone you like or whatever, not infatuation, love. Where you would jujmp off a cliff if they just asked, where every moment you spend with them stretches on forever and goes by too quickly. That kind of love."

"I guess not."

"I'm telling you, this girl is like no one I've ever met. I can't see how someone wouldn't love her. And she picked me, you believe that? Of all the fucking people..." he motions for another round.

"Let me get this one."

"No, I insist. I have a tab." The bartender looked at him expectantly. "Which I fully intend to pay tonight." Cassidy dowsed his next shot, as I sipped mine. "I should stop talking," he slurred, grabbing my shoulder. "Tell me about you. You're my new best friend and I don't so much as know your name."

"There's nothing really to tell." I looked back at my new best friend in time to watch him fall off the stool. I left the bartender a generous tip in exchange for Cassidy's address.

She was beautiful, I'd give Cassidy that. She was polite and made conversation with me, talking about mundane subjects like all strangers do, but every now and then when she thought you weren't paying attention, she'd look at Cassidy and smile. When she smiled, you could see all her teeth and you just wanted to smile back. Lizzy- that was her name, and Cassidy took me in. While less touchy-feely sober, he still called me his friend, and after time I realized I was.

I got a job where no one knew my name. I went on dates with pretty girls and went home where Cassidy would get drunk and Lizzy would call him an alcoholic and Cassidy would call her a bitch. Then they'd go to his room and in the morning she was cooking and she smiled. Everything felt better when she smiled.

"A little formal for work today," she said. Cassidy was at the table and wearing sunglasses, holding a paper to look busy which meant he was probably still sleeping.

"My coworker died. We have the day off to attend his funeral," I responded.

"That's terrible. Did you know him well?"

"No, but I was there when it happened."

"Do you want company?"

"Would Cass be up for it?" I asked as he let out a snore.

"I'll go with you."

"Oh. Okay," I was taken aback. She kissed Cassidy on the forehead, then disappeared to their room.

"She loves funerals," Cassidy said, putting down the paper. "She even circles obituaries that have a public memorial service.

"I almost died once."

"Shame they don't throw services for that. I'll take any excuse to see her in... that dress..." I followed his eyes to Lizzy and she smiled and for a moment I thought I was dying again.

It was raining, the women wore long black dressed and black hats and grabbed the arms of the men wearing suits and holding umbrellas. Lizzy stood next to me, her wet hair clinging to her forehead and her smeared makeup dripping down her face and she looked almost like all the women crying, except with this perfect stillness. As a preacher spoke the same words of comfort he said a thousand times, an older woman fell on her knees and begged to God to bring the dead back.

"It's not God she should be asking," Lizzy muttered, watching the woman with a strange indifference.

"Then who?"

"Death. Ultimately, it's up to him. God stopped caring about individuals."

"You're a lot darker than you seem." She smiled.

"Let's go."

As we started to walk away, a man with a face like in a dream muttered, "It should have been you."

"Why do you love funerals?" I asked her. The cafe was warm and dry and the waitress was my type.

"Do you remember his mother?" she said, sipping her tea.

"Yes."

"The way she reacted. It doesn't matter who you are, how you were raised, what you believe. In the end, you need to grasp on to some hope that this isn't the end. You hope, at the very least you'll be remembered by those you love. But as time passes and they pass... All that's left of a life is a name on a grave."

"Are you religious?"

"I believe in Death and all his friends. But God, heaven, hell, reincarnation, bullshit. If there's a God, eternity has made him bored and apathetic, and heaven and hell and after lives are fairy tales to tell the dead. Are you going to get her name?"

"Who?"

"The waitress you've been eying."

"No. She thinks you're mine."

"Like you'd ever have interest in me. I'm too dark for you," she said with a quick smile.

On the contrary, I see everything in you that Cassidy does.

Work had gotten worse. My coworkers all seemed to echo that statement; "it should have been you." He had a wife and a family, he was likable. I kept to myself. My wife was the Lizzy in my mind, separate from Cassidy and loving me the way I was growing to love her. My family was Cassidy, a brother I resented who'd never done me any harm.

Lizzy would come to my work sometimes and we'd walk home together. When she smiled it took all I had not to grab her hand. Then we'd get home and she'd melt into his arms. Cassidy and I would go to the bar. I'd find a girl who looked my type and fuck her, drowning out the noise from the other room. If I was too tired to make her leave afterward, in the morning, Lizzy wouldn't make breakfast.

Cassidy got fired from whatever he did and took this as a great opportunity to avoid sobriety altogether. After only a week of this, Lizzy broke. She showed up at my work crying and for the first time, I got to hold her. We sat on a bench behind my job, her head was burrowed into my chest and I couldn't concentrate on what she was saying because I was trying to remember how to breath. Her cries grew heavier, and I held her tighter and I kissed the top of her head and she looked up.

"I hate you, I really do," she said, her eyes wet and doll-like. "I hate how disposabley you treat women, and I hate how you pay for Cass's tab, and I have how much it bothers me when you take out others girls and I wish..." she started stroking my arm and my heart forgot to beat.

"You wish what?" I was surprised I could voice the words.

"I wish that was all I felt about you." I kissed her or she kissed me and my hand was shaking as I held her waist and my heart was trying to make up for all the lost beats then she pulled away. "I'm sorry."

"No, I'm sorry. I've just wanted you so long..."

"Please don't,: she wouldn't look at me. She got up and started walking towards the street.

"It was bound to happen eventually. It doesn't mean things have to change," I was following. She was already halfway across the street. "Lizzy, I love you." She stopped. The car didn't.

Cassidy was the one who fell to his knees and begged a God to take him instead.

I didn't know anyone else there. My wife, the Lizzy in my head, was holding my hand and wearing that dress.

We stopped by the liquor store on the way home and by the time we got back home I realized the fifth wasn't enough.

"Tell me something," he said, his eyes red. "What was she doing at your work?"

"Sometimes we'd walk home together," I said, taking a swing to numb my own pain.

"Were you fucking her?"

"No."

"Bullshit. She was the only good thing in my life, I would have done anything for her. It should have been you."

"I know."

"I shoulda known you were fucking. She never talked about you. We live together, how could she have nothing to say about someone she lived with? She just didn't want to slip up."

"We never slept together."

"Don't FUCKING LIE TO ME," he got up and went to his room. I could hear him cussing as he slammed the door. A moment later, it swung open and his curses got louder as he came back. "It should have been you." My brother was pointing a gun at me.

"Cass, you're my only fucking friend, I'm not going to lie to you. I wanted to sleep with her, but I never did and you're right, it should have been me. I wish I could switch with her right now, but this isn't going to bring her back."

"You're right," he said, cocked the gun, and fired.

His body fell to the ground. Some of his blood got on my clothes. I felt a cold hand on my shoulder. I turned to see a man who looked familiar, maybe from a dream. He smiled and everything felt worse.

"Do you remember me?" he asked. There was a perfect stillness to his voice.

"Yes," I responded.

"Are you still afraid?"

"Is this Death?"

"If you want it to be."

"You say that like I have a choice."

"Well, that's one way to put it. You can go back, make more friends, fall in love again..."

"And watch them die."

"So you understand. You can live for a hundred years or die tomorrow but in the end..."

It will always be just you and me.