Tears of Death

The coldness of Spring. I see a bit of black from my clothing blowing in the fierce breeze. And I advance, striding elegantly through the countryside. Striding towards the man, lying half-hidden behind a large boulder, lying on his side clutching his knee and moaning. As I approach him, I notice the symbol of the cross hanging from a necklace fastened around his blood-stained neck. “Caught off guard while walking,” I think. “Mugged and left to die, “ I conclude.
He looks up at me, with glassy eyes. “You”, he whispers, clearly in agony before his eyes close in obvious affliction. I never saw those eyes again. I do my work well and quick, before another hiker can pass by.
Soon I am done and I walk slowly away into the horizon, the feckless parts of his existence still remnant in flesh.
“Life is so frugal”, I think to myself. “It doesn’t even allow the most basic of activities to some and others never even live to know true love. Life truly is reserved for the rich.”
It feels like moments ago that I was underway but here I am now, in a rundown side alley, completely alone. Until I notice the man, completely drunk and obviously absent-minded. He seems to have a wound on the front-right side of his skull. It’s actually bleeding. But the man is blissfully unaware of his pain. And the doom that I would sow for him.
He spins around at me and stares at me with expressionless eyes. He cannot see me. He can only detect me, feel me in his gut. But he has perished.“Yes death”, I concede sadly, like someone realizing they ate the last biscuit in a packet. The man closes his eyes and passes into the next life with but a choke of air.
“Yes, life is very frugal indeed.”
I return home. It was a long day. But then again so is every day. So many people that I need to fill my collection. How could I ever rest?
I have time to think. To make my thoughts clear. To plan my work before I set out again. I pull out a pack of cards. “And to enjoy myself”, I conclude with silent bliss. Three hours later, my home seems but a distant memory as I stand in the middle of a freezing cold downpour.
Lightning strikes high above my head and the thunder growls like a ferocious beast. The sky splits in two as I put my hand upon the old man’s head.
Lying on the ground, in the middle of the storm, just as it broke out everybody left,  but the man was slow and when he fell, he was left there by the fleeing others. He was so old and had no family any more anyway. The man lay in the cold for exactly five hours before I discovered him.
He couldn’t move, it was as if he were frozen. “Don’t worry”, I comfort him. “You’ll be going to a better place very soon. Much warmer”.
I feel pity for this man. Though his age was only 77, he had lost everyone close to him. Now he was alone. Nobody cared about him. So they pretty much killed him.
“I know what it feels like”, I whisper into his silent ear. “I know what it feels like to be alone.
But now you’ll be with everyone you love. So thank me in thought.
I swear the man’s face smiles at me, a smile which lingers for but a mere second, yet which confirms to me the importance of my work.
I pull out a sharp object from my pocket and stab it into his cranium. He instantly goes silent. I listen to the sound of his heart. The sound of his spirit departing. I stick my hand into the man’s pocket and pull out a talisman. Then I turn around and leave the scene, leaving his empty vessel to rot in the rain.
I look at the talisman. A wood carving of an owl with two blue gems embedded into its eyes. “So these are the man’s true colours”, I think, “A wise man”.
When I return to my abode I carefully deposit the talisman into a shelf where it joins a large number of other similar ones.
I then open up my diary to consult my calendar. “Darn it”, I mutter, “I’m late for Sophie”.
I rush out of my so called house and set out in direction of the Mediville Hospital.
It’s 11 o’clock at night and the hospital is locked to outsiders. But I am able to get in with a special card I happen to possess. I know exactly where I need to go. This job will be too easy. Nobody will even see how she dies.
I enter into room 7 on the fourth floor. Nobody is on guard and she has no relatives visiting, Sophie lies motionless on her uncomfortable hospital bed.
I stare down at her and am shocked to see the state she is in. I had seen the girl on photos before, she was quite attractive. At the age of 18, she had had many boyfriends and many quick time lovers. She had always been revered but now, with all the bruises and open wounds on her face, one would not have even recognized her. Beaten. “By her boyfriend”, I mutter, knowing with certainty the truth of my hypothesis.
She must be in pain. “And now she will be relieved of it forever”, I think feeling guilty. I approach her bed, ready to work my magic. But something gets in the way. I hear a voice.
The girl is speaking to me. “You cannot kill me. I will resist you.”
I admire the girl’s courage but also know the futility of it. I lean it closely but just then the girl starts singing. A minor tone. It soothes my ears. I cannot touch the girl. I just can bring myself towards doing it.
I concede defeat and angrily muttering approach the door to leave the room, absolute in my determination to return at a later time.
“Wait mister”, the girl croaks. “Please stay. I know who you are. But I would prefer to die while in company then to perish all forgotten and abandoned.”
I stare at her. Company. The word tastes strange in my mouth. I have always been solitary. I have never bothered to bond with anyone. It was pointless anyway. They all feared me and would leave at some point, some earlier, and others later. But I would lose them all in the boundless reaches of time.
The strangeness of the girl’s request paralyzes me. “Ok” I mutter in voice that seems foreign even to me.
We play cards and it feels so strange. Thinking about it, I realize this experience corresponds to the emotion of fun.
Time passes me by as I witness something I had never really witnessed properly before.
I can’t stay long however. This was a setback after all and now I need to quickly find another person to replace the young Sophie. She is sad when I tell her my task that I still need to accomplish. She even cries. It is then that I do probably the stupidest thing I could have done. Overcome with a sick pity, I promise the girl to visit her tomorrow.  She makes me swear. Even this I do for some bizarre reason. She is happy, I am grumpy.
A hunter in the forest with his dog. So dark, the body would never been found, the poor thing.
Next I pick up someone who had been washed up by a wave and was just holding on to life. But not tight enough as he soon slips underneath the waves of the abyss.
I visit Sophie the next day as I had promised her. She gives me a small book and tells me to read a story from it. It is a boring book, more useful for its capability to fuel a fire rather for than its esthetic value, but the girl seems to like it. “I am studying literature at school and I love it. Next year they want to greatly reduce it though which I find to be a travesty.”
Sophie talks most of the time. In fact I don’t really talk at all. I just listen to her stories with admiration. This girl, so barely clinging on to life, had done all these things. The sad part was imagining all the things she could have done, were she not in this hopeless situation.
She had won a gold medal in a swimming competition in Sweden two years ago. She had always been on the look for the love of her life. Then she had found Pierre. She stops for a second when she pronounces the name. I suspect that this must be the boyfriend that had beaten her. She then continues, tears pouring down her cheeks.
“He wanted me. He wanted me to sleep with him. I refused to give my chastity at such an early stage without any real love.” He didn’t let loose. He then started to threaten me. I was scared and decided to give him what he wanted. In the last moment however I was overcome by some sense of pride and made a run for the back door. He grabbed my head and slammed it to the ground. He then leaned me up against the wall and started punching me. After I fainted he realized he had gone too far. But look what he did to me. She is really crying now. I don’t know what to do but I have the strange desire to put my arm around the girl’s shoulder and comfort her.
I wiggle up next to her and do just that. The girl does not reject my arm. In this moment the girl seems very weak and so close to death. But she continues to fight it with all her might. Even though I have my arm around her, that willpower to fight the inevitable quietus that she demonstrated yesterday seems evermore dwindling.
But I do not give into my tingling sensation. I let her live, homage to her spirit, and promise to visit her again the next day. Strange as it may sound, I conclude that I have grown very fond of the girl. She intrigues me, because for someone so young, she  truly would have had so much to live for.
This same day I catch only one person, unconscious at a rest station. I collect him quickly before anybody else shows up.
The next day with Sophie goes pretty much the same as the previous day. She tells me a lot about herself, her school, her dreams and her inspirations.
“I was sad that the Australian team was eliminated in the soccer world cup”, she admits modestly.
I actually have never seen Star Wars and all my guy friends told me I had to see it!”
She sniffs. “And now I probably will never be able to celebrate the things I love.”
She doesn’t even cry. Even now she defies the inevitable. But she is getting weaker. Her wounds are not healing. And she has suffered many internal bleedings again. Her essence is running thin.
I visit her the next day and am shocked, but not surprised to see her only barely hanging on to life. “You better not take me yet”, she warns me with a weak smile, “We still need to spend one last day together.”
For the second time in my life I am paralyzed. I could never touch this girl. Even though she’s nearly at her end and if I didn’t get her now, she would soon pass from my reach forever.
But I am completely powerless. I need to spend that day with her. I need to know that feeling again.
What a fateful day. I know it will be my last day with her. This girl I had looked upon so often for the last few days would soon be gone from my sight forever. She tells me all her embarrassing stories. I even end up laughing. Imagine that, who would have thought I’d have humor.
She then asks me a question, a personal question but a question where she demands that I answer it truthfully. “How old are you friend?”
I whisper my age into her ear. “I am sorry”, she mutters solemnly. She then continues with her abundance of stories. I stay late into the night. That’s how it comes to pass that I am with her until the very end. In the night her condition worsens. “Her heart isn’t working properly”, I had heard them saying. She was done. I open up my briefcase which I had carefully slipped under the bed. “Yes, it’s time. Kill me now”, she whispers, her voice a little shaky but ultimately at peace.
I draw a pendant, shaped like a dolphin and made of gold with ruby eyes from Sophie’s pocket. She looks at it. “My soul”, she acknowledges, already in a state between worlds. I nod in affirmation, putting my hand on her forehead to ease her path into death. The girl stares at the pendant for a long time. Then she is overcome by a sudden jolt of pain. Before she can suffer much I put my palms upon her head and imbed the spike into her brain. Her movements stop instantly.
A sudden beeping sound from the machine she is hooked up to makes me jump. I run over to the window, desperate to make my escape. A nurse barges into the room followed by another. I hide in the shadow of the corner where I am sure nobody will care to look. The nurses wait for the doctor who arrives and proclaims the girl to be dead. An old lady can’t stop crying; the owner of the foster home where Sophie had grown up. She can’t stop crying and suddenly turns her gaze and fixes it right on me. She can see right through me. She stares in shock. She pulls a blanket over her to cover herself up from the cold and pushes me from her thought. “Death really can make you see things”, I whisper. “She doesn’t even know if I’m real or just a fragment of her imagination brought on by the grief.”
I slide open the window and slip out into the dead of the night. I walk into the distance, full of rage and a brand new emotion; remorse.
Pierre Geist, ex-boyfriend of Sophie Veider. Her murderer, un-trialed and unpunished.
I know exactly where he lives. I look upon him as he sleeps. I wish to harm him. I wish to rip out his soul on the spot, but I have my etiquette.
So I wait. I wait for what seems like an eternity but which also seems like quite a short time. “What a strange paradox”, I think and laugh.
An old man in a wheelchair wheels his way down the ramp of his house and onto the front porch. I step in front of him. He looks at me and is instantly terrified. He knows who I am. He knows what he is going to get. Even now, 70 years since the incident with the young Sophie, he still holds the sin of murder at his core. That he could never forget even if he is now actually married and a grandfather.
I had watched him for all these years and waited for him. Of course I had done the other things I had to do as well, but every night and free moment of my existence I followed him and waited for him to die. It took him 70 years at the age of 89 to lose the battle of life.
Now I had him. Pierre closes his wrinkly eyes for the last time. Before he can pass on, I grab my scythe and stab it into his chest. “Sinner”, I scream and I watch as his soul drains out of his body, forms into the token of a snake and then dissipates into dust, the matter of what it was made of.
I spin my cloak around and stare at the stars. “I got him Sophie”, I think to myself, “I got him at last”.
I look at the talisman of the dolphin and smile. “Her essence” I think as I curl my fingers around the small artifact. I knew that this is only the essence of her soul, the leftovers, but it is worth so much to me. This is not only just another piece for my collection, no, this is a memory. This golden trophy will always be a memory of an unforgettable time.
I sit down and think of Sophie and what I had accomplished with her. Something I had never had before. For an infinite amount of years I had never felt any kind of compassion or trust or even acceptance.
This simple girl proved to me something I thought long impossible. This thought provokes something indescribable in me and I do something so utterly foolish, I am paralyzed for the third and last time in my existence. I am so overcome by sadness that I actually weep.
Yes, on that night, on the 6th of September 2084, 70 years after the death of Sophie Veider, the Angel of Death actually wept.