The setting sun battles valiantly against the moon and her countless twinkling hordes. His retreat is slow and stubborn. The silver queen grows impatient. Her secret weapon, Old Man Time, falls upon the retreating warrior of light and vanquishes him to his grave beneath the horizon in one fell swoop. Crimson lifeblood spilled across the heavenly plains. Celestial gazers below bathe in the dying light. Darkness conquers all.
I met a dentist recently. Hated his job. He didn’t have to actually tell me that; I could see it in his eyes. They say that dentists boast the highest suicide rates in the world. Don’t think his wife would have found much comfort in that. She was busy clutching his legs and trying desperately to lift him up and slacken the noose around his neck. Nobody likes to think of their loved one as merely a victim of statistics. I don’t know why I’m telling you any of this. Maybe it’s because I find kindred spirits amongst dentists – people see us only when they’re in pain.
I hate my job, too. Sometimes I wish I could end it all and find eternity at the end of a short rope. But I don’t have the choice. Even warm summer nights such as this one give me no pleasure anymore. They did once. But that was a lifetime ago. Before this.
Now all I have to do is wait. All I ever seem to do these days is wait. But when you’ve been doing what I have, for as long as I have, you come to appreciate the waiting.
*****
A shadowy figure stands on the grassy knoll by the side of the road. The occasional car zips by, the sound of laughter and music spilling out from its windows. Youngsters looking for love at the end of a winding country road. The headlights fall briefly upon the Watcher on his mound, but nobody seems to notice him. It is just as well that they don’t.
The onward march of the stars across the great expanses of the velveteen night sky signals the lateness of the hour. The Watcher glances at the bend in the road. The roar of a motor can be heard in the distance. The car is being driven with the carefree abandon typical of a young man whose senses are drowning in blossoming love. He takes his eyes off the road for a second to look at his lover. A second is all it takes.
The car comes careening around the bend and smashes into the telephone pole by the side of the road. The sickening crunch of metal against metal resounds throughout the quiet countryside. The slender frame of a young woman emerges head-first from where the windshield used to be and is launched through the air amidst a sparkling shower of glass shards. The inescapable lure of gravity draws her into its clutches and she slams into the ground. Her lover pulls himself out of the mangled remains of the wreck and stumbles forward.
The Watcher makes his move. It is time.
I walk towards them. An eternity on the job and it’s still difficult to look upon suffering and not feel anything. He holds her broken body ever so tenderly in his arms. Yet another snatched away too soon. The young man is but a child now, his body and mind shattered by grief, desperately trying to revive her with loving words. He prays that his tears on her face can wash away the stench of death.
His efforts are in vain. Nobody can bring her back to life now. Nobody but me. Suddenly he looks up and sees me, taking me in for the first time, wide-eyed like the countless others before him.
He understands who I am. They all do.
The breeze whispers in my ear reminding me that one more is owed a place in eternity. The time has come. I offer him his choice.
For one to live, another must die.
For the one you love to come back to you, someone else must meet their end.
Choose.
In the instant it takes him to make his decision, I lean in and look deep into his eyes and through the windows of his soul. I search desperately for the spark of humanity that’s eluded me for eons. The spark that tells me that he will think about the life of another before the life of his. I silently will him to choose to end this senseless cycle of arbitrary death and suffering and rid me of my loathsome duty.
My eyes are wet with tears as I pull away from him. There is nothing there.
Like the multitude of flawed, faceless others before him, he reaches down into the depths of his all too human soul and grasps at the same predictable decision – “Her! I choose her. Of course I choose her!”
He has chosen. “My mother, my father, my son, my daughter, my lover,” the voices ring out from the past, “I choose the one I love.” It is an instinctive choice. Not one of them thinks about the stranger they’ve condemned. This choice – the natural choice – has sealed someone else’s fate.
There is nothing for me to do now but go through the motions. I pass my hand across her bloodied face. Someone else, somewhere else, draws their last breath as she draws her first. Her eyes flutter open and she sees him above her. The onrush of relief and joy drives out the memory of our encounter from his mind.
I wait there until another car comes around the bend and halts by the two lovers. The newcomers don’t see me. It’s just as well that they don’t.
As I dissolve into the nothingness from whence I came, I know that he will never again think about the tragic sequence of events he has chosen to set into motion. He kept his lover alive and condemned another to the icy clutches of Death.
It means nothing to me that balance has been restored. I’m completely drained.
The young woman lives, someone else dies, and my torment goes on forever.
*****
Halfway across the world, the gentle thrum of suburbia fills the ears of residents with pleasing sounds and fans their flames of desire for the American dream. They try everything they can to convince themselves that no harm can come to them within this pristine fishbowl.
People always surround themselves with affectations of safety. In vain. All men owe their lives to Death. It stalks them from the shadows with a fearsome tenacity.
The young mother’s shirt clings to her wet body. The young mother clings to her drowned toddler. The azure water of the shallow swimming pool belies a deathly intent.
A grotesque portal opens up above them and a churning darkness pours out of it and envelopes the corpse of the child. It is Death come to collect the debt that all men must pay.
Neil Balthazar is an aspiring writer and hopeless optimist. When he isn’t daydreaming, he’s trying his best to get into an MFA (Creative Writing) program. You can find more of his work at www.neilbalthazar.wordpress.com