How to Bury a God

Rita didn't mean to stab Death in the heart, but when he reached for her husband's soul, she reacted on instinct.

The scalpel was still in her hand from earlier that evening. She'd been cleaning Tom's bedsores with surgical precision, the same methodical care she'd used on shattered soldiers in field hospitals halfway around the world. Her fingers never trembled when they held steel. They trembled now.

Death stood beside Tom's bed like a question mark made of shadow and bone. He wore a coat the color of crow feathers, his face neither young nor old but carved from winter air. When he extended his hand toward Tom's chest, Rita saw the gesture for what it was: an invitation her husband was too weak to refuse.

"No." The word came out flat and final.

Death turned toward her. His eyes were the color of deep water, patient and vast. "Rita Vane. Former Captain, 47th Mobile Surgical Unit. You've seen me before."

She had. In the trauma tent outside Kandahar when Private Henderson bled out despite her best efforts. In the alley behind General Hospital when the old man with the heart attack slipped away between compressions. Death had been there, quiet and respectful, waiting for her to finish her work before claiming what was his.

"Not him," she said.

"He's ready." Death's voice was neither cruel nor kind. It simply was. "The pain has eaten through his spine. Each breath is glass in his lungs."

Rita looked at Tom's face, gray as morning fog. The cancer had hollowed him out from the inside, leaving only the shell of the man who used to build cabinets with his bare hands. His breathing was shallow, labored. Every exhale sounded like a question he was too tired to ask.

"I can fix him," she whispered.

Death shook his head. "No. You cannot."

That's when Rita moved. Thirty years of emergency medicine had taught her that hesitation killed more patients than bullets. The scalpel found its mark before conscious thought could stop her, sliding between Death's ribs like cutting through silk.

Death looked down at the blade protruding from his chest. A thin line of something darker than blood seeped around the steel. His expression didn't change, but the air pressed against Rita's lungs like wet cotton.

"Interesting," he said, and fell backward onto the hardwood floor.

The sound he made was like breaking glass, like snapping bones, like the last breath leaving a dying man's lungs. Rita knelt beside him, her hands automatically moving to check for vitals before she remembered who she was examining.

Death's eyes were still open, but they reflected nothing now. Empty as church windows. The scalpel jutted from his chest like a tiny flag of surrender.

Rita sat back on her heels and looked at what she'd done. Tom's breathing hadn't changed. If anything, it sounded more labored now, like he was fighting against something that wouldn't let him go.

Outside, a siren wailed in the distance. It went on and on, never getting closer, never fading away. Just hanging in the air like a question that would never be answered.

Rita touched Tom's hand. His skin was warm, warmer than it had been in weeks. But when she looked into his eyes, she saw something that made her stomach clench with understanding.

He was trapped. And it was her fault.

***

By the next morning, Rita understood what she had done to the world.

The hospital called at dawn. Dr. Martinez's voice was tight with exhaustion and something close to panic. "Rita, I need you to come in. We have patients who should be dead but aren't. Their vitals are... impossible."

Then the news stations picked up the story. Patients in critical condition, their bodies destroyed beyond any hope of recovery, but still breathing. Still aware. Still suffering.

Rita stood in her kitchen, watching the reports flood in from around the globe. A car accident in Tokyo—five people crushed beyond recognition, but their hearts still beating. A building collapse in São Paulo—dozens trapped under concrete for hours, their bodies broken but their minds intact. Everywhere, the same impossible story: death had stopped working.

Mrs. Campbell knocked at her door just after noon, her face streaked with tears. "My mother was hit by a delivery truck yesterday. Her skull is cracked open. You can see her brain. But she's still looking at me, still trying to speak." She clutched Rita's arm. "You're a doctor. Please, can you help her?"

Rita couldn't meet her eyes. "I'm sorry."

She closed the door and leaned against it, listening to Mrs. Campbell's sobs fade down the walkway.

In the living room, Tom lay exactly where she'd left him, propped up against pillows that brought no comfort. His breathing was a wet rattle, like stones tumbling down a well. But his eyes were alert, tracking her movement, filled with a pain that had nowhere to go.

Rita muted the television and sat beside him. She'd seen every kind of death the body could manufacture. But this wasn't death. This was suspension between worlds, a half-life that stretched on without mercy or meaning.

"I thought I was saving you," she said to the silence.

Tom's lips moved, forming words she couldn't hear but understood anyway. Let me go.

Outside, the sirens multiplied. They layered over the city like a blanket of noise, racing toward crises they couldn't solve, suffering they couldn't end. Through the window, she watched Mr. Patterson tend his garden with mechanical precision, blood spreading across his shirt from the heart attack that should have killed him. The mailman limped past, his leg bent at an impossible angle, still delivering mail with the persistence of the undead.

The world had become a museum of the almost-dead. And Rita was the curator.

***

On the third day, Rita made her decision.

She found Death's remains in the kitchen where he'd fallen. His body had begun to dissolve, flesh melting away like salt in water, leaving behind fragments that hummed with otherworldly energy. A cracked scythe blade no longer than her thumb. Tattered cloth that whispered when touched. Bones that felt warm against her palms, thrumming with the rhythm of every heart that had ever stopped beating.

Rita gathered the pieces in a surgical tray, the same kind she'd used to hold instruments during operations. The irony wasn't lost on her—she'd spent her career putting people back together. Now she was trying to resurrect the one thing that could take them apart.

She carried the tray to her basement, where she'd set up a makeshift surgical suite on her grandfather's workbench. Clean sheets draped over the scarred wood. Her instruments laid out with military precision. Her steady hands, which had never failed her in thirty years of practice, ready for the most impossible surgery of her career.

Rita arranged Death's remains on the table. The bones formed a rough skeleton, incomplete but recognizable. As her gloved fingers traced the edges, her surgeon's mind took over. These weren't just fragments—they were anatomy waiting to be rebuilt. The jagged edges were suture lines. The gaps between bones were joints that needed reconstruction. She could see, with a clarity that bypassed rational thought, how this body was meant to be whole.

She loaded her suturing needle with black thread pulled from Death's robes. The thread felt alive, warm and pulsing like a vein. When she made the first stitch, connecting a rib to the sternum, her own blood welled up around the needle point.

The surgery demanded payment. With each completed suture, Rita felt something precious slip away. The sound of Tom's laugh—that deep, booming sound that used to fill their house—faded to silence in her memory. A stitch connecting vertebrae, and the warmth of sun on her face during their honeymoon in Greece turned to ash, leaving only cold historical fact. She was trading her past to give the world back its future.

As she worked, methodically reconstructing Death's ribcage, she began to understand what he had been. Not a killer, but a keeper of balance. Not a destroyer, but a guide who appeared to each soul differently—sometimes as a stranger, sometimes as a friend, sometimes as the answer to a prayer they were too afraid to speak.

The needle slipped as she recalled Tom's voice from that last night before she'd acted, barely a whisper above his struggling lungs: "Rita, I'm ready."

And she'd said, "No, you're not. I won't let you go."

Her blood mixed with whatever flowed through Death's reconstructed veins, and the body on the table shuddered. Rita stepped back, breathless, as Death's chest rose and fell once, twice, then settled into a rhythm like distant thunder.

His eyes opened—no longer empty but filled with something ancient and patient and impossibly sad.

"You understand now," he said, his voice carrying the weight of every goodbye ever spoken.

Rita nodded, the truth sharp as the scalpel she'd used to kill him. "He wanted to die."

Death sat up slowly, his reconstructed body moving with careful precision. The scythe blade had fused with his ribs during the surgery, becoming part of his skeleton. Rita's blood still stained his chest where she'd sewn him back together.

"The cancer had eaten through his spine," Death said, his voice gentler now. "Every breath was agony. But you wouldn't let him choose."

Rita thought about Tom upstairs, still trapped in his failing body, still unable to find the peace he'd begged for. She'd been so afraid of losing him that she'd turned his dying into a prison.

"I was a surgeon," she said. "I save lives. I don't give up."

"Sometimes," Death replied, "the greatest mercy is knowing when to let go."

He stood and walked to the basement stairs, his movements fluid despite Rita's patchwork reconstruction. But he paused at the bottom step and turned back to her.

"You brought me back," he said. "The choice is yours."

Rita understood. She'd killed Death, and in resurrecting him, she'd earned the right to walk beside him. She would be his student, not his equal. She could learn what he knew about mercy, about the difference between saving and prolonging, about the courage it took to let go.

"If I come with you," she said, "will you take him?"

Death nodded. "He's been waiting."

Rita climbed the stairs, her legs heavy with exhaustion and grief. Death followed, his presence no longer terrifying but somehow comforting. They found Tom exactly where she'd left him, his breathing shallow and labored, his eyes bright with pain and infinite patience.

Rita sat beside him and took his hand. This time, his fingers squeezed back, weak but unmistakable.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

Tom's lips moved, forming words she couldn't hear but understood completely. It's okay. I love you. Let me go.

Death approached the bed, but he didn't reach for Tom immediately. Instead, he looked at Rita with those deep-water eyes.

"Are you ready?"

Rita kissed Tom's forehead, tasting salt and sorrow. "I'm ready."

Death extended his hand toward Tom's chest, and this time Rita didn't interfere. She watched as her husband's face relaxed, the lines of pain smoothing away like wrinkles in silk. His breathing slowed, then stopped. Death reached down and gently closed his eyes.

Rita felt something break inside her chest, not her heart, but something harder and more stubborn. The part of her that had always believed she could fix anything, save anyone, hold back the tide of loss through sheer force of will.

Tom was gone. But he was free.

Death turned to her, and she saw that his face had changed. There was something of her in it now, something human and scarred and capable of terrible love.

"The world is full of suffering," he said. "But it's also full of people who need to be shown the way home."

Rita stood and took his offered hand. Her fingers were steady, surgeon-steady, as they had always been when it mattered most.

Outside, the sirens were finally beginning to fade. Around the world, the trapped were finding their release. The almost-dead were becoming the peacefully departed.

Rita walked with Death into the night, and for the first time in three days, the world remembered how to let go.