This time, I didn’t say anything but stared up at the couple arguing on the TV show, having it out with one another in the middle of a coffee shop, shouting each other down before, out of nowhere, the two rushed each other, crashing into a kiss.
Again, my mind went to Helena—the way we’d kissed in her apartment.
Moments before, out in the hall, she’d asked if we were arguing. I hadn’t thought we were.
Maybe, though, we had been.
Next to me, the old man started to stand.
“You don’t want to do that,” I told him. “Trust me.”
He didn’t say anything but settled back into his chair.
“Thought you were distracted,” he admitted.
I was.
“You’re afraid,” I guessed. “For a moment, I thought you might not be.”
“You’re carrying a scythe,” he said. “I thought that was just… something from movies and books.”
I sighed long and loud, taking on my human voice and skin again before tossing back my hood.
“Normally,” I said, shooting him a side glance as he absorbed my appearance with new shock, “pickups don’t see me.”
“Ah,” said the soul, “you’re a young man. That surprises me.”
“Older than I look,” I grunted.
“Really?” he questioned. “And how old is old?”
Here I’d been callinghimthe old man when, really, that descriptor applied more aptly to me…
This role. I’d been in it for eons. Longer than either Flora or Johann had occupied the Hallowed Halls.
And, in the beginning, it had just been… me.
The beginning… I didn’t want to think about that.
“Don’t know, don’t care,” I said truthfully, gesturing to the TV screen, which now displayed rolling credits.
The man fell silent again.
Then, after several long beats, he spoke. “If I could go back and do it all again,” he said, “I’d do it so much differently, you know?”
“I think everyone feels that way to a certain degree,” I observed.
“But that’s the trick, isn’t it?” he said. “No one does get to go back and do it all differently. Even if we do come back or move on to something new. There is only one Cielo Bluford—was, I guess I should say—and as much as he wanted to, he never did pictures.”
I peered his way again. “I’m sorry,” I said, shocking myself because I actually meant it.
Helena’s plight. The snipped fuse on her short life. It brought more awareness to what I did than I’d previously bothered with.
Until now, I’d just been the collector of souls. Neither good nor bad. Just, like death itself, an inescapable reality.
Death, like life, wasn’t fair, though. And maybe, for as long as I’d been…this, I’d never really appreciated that.
He shrugged. “It’s all okay, I think. Because even if it’s over, and clearly itisover, it isn’t really, is it? Or else…youwouldn’t be here, would you? Who knows? Maybe wherever I’m going, people make pictures there, too. And whoever is in charge there, they’re bound to understand that circumstances arise. Things happen. Life gets in the way.” His voice dropped, taking on an oddly knowing tone. “Deathgets in the way, too… doesn’t it?”
