To Live Again

Room seven in the ICU unit was dark and quiet except for the beeping of the heart monitor and the soft hiss of the ventilator.  In the bed, under a thin white blanket was the figure of a woman who seemed to be already dead.  Her skin was so pale it was practically translucent, her veins tracing blue lines up and down her arms.  It was only the machines that kept her lungs inflating, still flaming the tiniest spark of life when her spirit would have otherwise fled this dying body. Death was there, waiting patiently in the shadows.  He’d been waiting a long time for this woman, and he had grown rather fond of her.  He hadn’t seen a human specimen like her in decades, maybe even centuries.  Death was supposed to be completely impartial, but sometimes he stumbled upon someone so extraordinary, that he was compelled to bend the rules.  He had already made exceptions for Daniella Starr, and he made another one as he stepped out of the shadows and became form and substance so that he could sit beside her and hold her hand.  It disturbed him that she was dying alone, and at least he could give her that small comfort. The man who slipped into the room could not see Death sitting there.  If he could have seen the supernatural, he would have been frightened of the angry scowl on the reaper’s face.  The man stood at the foot of the bed and stared at the woman for a long time.  He might have been a passably handsome man, if his features weren’t twisted with a vile expression of hatred.  He walked toward the monitors and studied the machines, the tubes and wires that connected her body to life support and bags of fluids.  He looked at her face dispassionately. “They say you aren’t going to make it, Danni.  Your internal organs are failing one by one.  But toruth be told, you shouldn’t have survived this long.  Don’t worry darling, I’m sure you are going to a better place.”  The man kissed his fingers and then wiped them down her pale cheek, more like he was wiping off something dirty than giving his wife a final goodbye.  He looked again at the monitors.  He silenced the alarms before he simply pulled the vent hose out of the machine.  He quickly slipped back out of the room and into the halls of the hospital.  The busy nurses and LNA’s didn’t pay him any attention.  He would be out in the parking lot and driving home before anyone discovered that weak heart had faltered and her thin chest had stopped rising. Death reached out and stroked her cheek.  “Sweet Daniella, open your eyes now.” Her heart had stopped, but she was in that sacred space between life and death.  Her eyes fluttered open, and her hands stiffened, but she couldn’t move any other part of her body.  “Don’t be afraid,”  Death crooned.  He pushed a lock of her dark hair behind her ear and smiled down at her.  He spoke to her softly, but really he was talking to himself, trying to reason out his own behavior.  “People die before their time every minute of every day.  Good people whose lives are cut short by tragedy, and evil intent and disease. I come and harvest their souls, and I never mind how they lived or how they died.  Living is not my business.” Daniella’s eyes were wide and frightened.  Her sight was growing dim.  The distant lights outside the hospital room door were fading.  There was only Death and darkness.  Death was a vague figure of a man, darkness with form, blacker than black.  He seemed to be pulling all of the light into his body and swallowing it… and she felt that she was about to fall into that void as well.  He chuckled, a dry sound like bones cracking together.  “I’m not satisfied with this ending.  I am going to bend the rules.”  He crossed his arms over his chest.  “I’m sending you back, beautiful one.  I’m giving you this one chance to change the story.  Who are you, that you push me so far?  What woman is this that Death would break the rules of the cosmos just to watch you live again?” He leaned down and kissed her forehead.  His lips were as cold as ice as they smiled against her smooth, soft skin.   “Don’t disappoint me, my sweet.”