She Danced with Death

I met him the day my brother died.

The nurses said the bleeding had stopped, but the monitors betrayed them—one slow, dragging beep followed by a flatline. My mother collapsed. My father screamed at a god he stopped believing in years ago. I stood perfectly still, like if I moved, the world would crack beneath my feet.

And then I saw him.

He stood in the corner of the hospital room—tall, thin, wrapped in something darker than black. Not a cloak, not a robe, but a presence. I should have screamed. I should have run. But his face wasn't a skull, nor a monster’s, nor a man’s. It was shifting, soft and cold like fog. His eyes—if they were eyes—glowed like embers swallowed in ash.

He tilted his head at me. No one else looked. No one else saw. Just me.

“Why?” I whispered.

He didn’t answer. He simply raised a long, skeletal hand and traced a finger across the windowpane, fogging the glass where no breath should be. When he was gone, the fog lingered in the shape of a heart.

I was sixteen.

Grief is a strange thing. It numbs first, then burns. Weeks passed, then months. I stopped talking to friends. I stopped painting. I stopped feeling much of anything—until he came back.

It was night. A thunderstorm had dragged itself across town and parked over my roof. I stared at the ceiling, listening to the static hiss of rain. Then my bedroom light flickered—and he stood at the foot of my bed.

I should have screamed.

I smiled.

“You came back,” I said.

Death didn’t speak. He stepped closer, and I felt my skin crawl—not with fear, but with a strange electricity. He reached a hand toward my cheek, paused, then let it drop. I wished he’d touch me. Even frostbite would have been better than the aching emptiness I’d carried since my brother died.

“Take me with you,” I whispered.

His head shook slowly. No.

“Why not?”

He stepped back into the dark, becoming part of it. His voice drifted to me like smoke: “Not yet.”

Over the next few years, he came often.

He’d show up on park benches, in the backseat of my car, in the shadows of trees that shouldn’t hold shadows at all. Once, I saw him on stage during a school play, his tall form draped in black among the audience, clapping silently while the others laughed and applauded.

No one else saw him. Just me.

I’d started talking to him like a lover. Whispering secrets before I went to sleep. Writing him letters I burned in the fireplace. My mother thought it was therapy. My father thought it was a phase. I knew better. I was falling in love—with the one thing that would never leave me.

Death.

The first time he kissed me was the night of my high school graduation.

I stood alone in the cemetery behind the old church where the ceremony had been held. The moon was fat and dripping. The air smelled of damp stone and forgotten flowers. I waited beside my brother’s grave in a black dress I hadn’t meant to wear.

He came without sound, standing behind me, a presence so cold the grass around my feet frosted over.

“Did you come to see me?” I asked, not turning.

“Always.”

I turned to face him. His shape was more solid now, though still not quite human. He had no face, no features—just the idea of a man, cloaked in night. But I could feel the weight of his gaze. My heart stuttered in my chest, not with fear, but longing.

I stepped closer. He didn’t retreat. His hand rose, and this time, it touched me—just a graze of his fingers along my jaw. My skin went numb where he touched it, then hot, then cold again. I closed my eyes.

He kissed me.

It wasn’t lips on lips—it was a stillness, a pulling, like the edge of a dream you never wake from. For a moment, I thought he would take me. My soul trembled at the edge of his.

But then he was gone.

And I was left wanting more.

I stopped dating. Stopped pretending anyone else would ever matter. My friends drifted away. My family was worried. But I felt more alive in his absence than I ever did in their presence.

When I turned twenty, he came to me during a blizzard. I was walking home from my shift at the diner, the wind cutting like knives, when he appeared on the sidewalk ahead of me. I smiled and ran toward him.

“Take me,” I begged. “Please. I’m ready.”

He didn’t move.

“I don’t understand. Why do you keep coming if you won’t have me?”

He reached into the dark of his cloak and pulled out a single black rose. It pulsed in his palm like a heart. He handed it to me.

“Soon,” he whispered.

The rose wilted the moment it touched my skin.

One night, I drank too much. I don’t remember what I was trying to forget. Maybe it was the way my father had started avoiding eye contact. Maybe it was the note I found in my mother’s drawer—"She talks to shadows again."

Maybe I just wanted to see him.

I drove too fast. I didn’t see the red light.

The crash folded my car in half like a paper swan. I remember glass in my mouth, blood in my ears. I remember floating.

Then him.

He cradled me in the wreck; arms gentle as fog. I could see the paramedics through the cracked windshield, yelling. Rushing. But none of it mattered.

“You came,” I whispered through broken teeth.

He nodded.

“Take me now. I’m ready.”

He tilted his head, and for the first time, I saw sorrow in his featureless face.

“I cannot love what is already mine.”

Then he kissed my forehead—and left me in the arms of strangers.

I spent a week in the hospital.

I dreamed of him every night. He stood on the edge of cliffs, on hospital rooftops, in the corners of burning rooms. But he never reached for me again. Never touched me.

Until the day I stopped breathing.

He was there.

He held out a hand, and I took it.

The world fell away.

But death, it turned out, wasn’t the end.

It was a ballroom.

A grand, endless hall lined with mirrors that reflected only smoke. The air smelled like night. The ceiling sparkled with stars I’d never seen. And in the center of it all, he stood—waiting.

He offered his hand.

I took it.

We danced.

For what felt like centuries, we twirled through silence. I melted into him, into the space between moments, into the hum of forgotten lullabies and ancient endings.

He never spoke again.

He didn’t have to.

I knew now.

He had loved me all along—but Death cannot take what belongs to it willingly. I had to live, and ache, and yearn. I had to earn the right to fall.

And I had.

They say Death is cruel.

They say he is merciless.

But they are wrong.

He is patient.

And he waits for love like no living man ever could.