Vallen

I didn't meet Death until after my mother died.

But he'd been watching me before that.

He wasn't watching me so much as noticing. Being Death, you tend to spend a lot of time in hospitals. For some sick reason, it was one of his favorite places. A "hunting grounds" if you would.

Through his eyes, you see a sort of aura on people. The darker their aura, the sooner they die.

And somehow he found himself sitting in emergency rooms or watching surgeries, waiting to see if an aura would change. Not that he could do anything about it, and that almost made it better for him. He could watch people edge closer to their end, while the humans around them may be clueless.

When days in the hospital were lagging, he liked to watch coma patients.

And on Wednesday afternoons, when he sat with his legs kicked up onto the bed of a woman ten years into comatose, he saw a thirteen year-old girl in overalls dump a bag of art supplies onto her father's bed and draw a picture of his solemn face.

Every Wednesday, no matter who in that hospital was dying, he'd watch that girl draw crappy pictures of her father who'd never wake up. Over time, he began to watch her when she wandered the halls. He observed the interactions between her and the doctors, the nurses, other patients, how she knew everyone.

He also observed how lonely she was. There was never anyone else with her when she visited, her mother nowhere to be seen, no siblings. Each time, she was alone.

But that loneliness didn't really show until she was in that exact hospital again, except two floors up, where she waited for her mother to die.

And he waited right alongside her.

He watched that aura dim, right next to that girl's bright one, and he watched that aura turn black, and he watched as that girl, now seventeen, kept a blank face as the doctors forced her out of the room in an attempt to revive the one person she had left. And when they failed, she sat in that hallway for hours, unmoving.

He sat next to her, unmoving as well, still invisible to her eye. Sometimes that aura flickered the way it does when death is unsure of itself. But in the end, it remained bright, and when he was sure she was staying here in this world for a long while, he let her see him. When she went to tell her father that it was just the two of them in that world now, Death was waiting for her, as he always was.

Only she looked him in the eye, and instead of asking who he was, she sat down at the edge of the bed.

After a long period of nothingness, she asked if she could draw him.

He said yes.