A Little Nudge

Trigger warning: suicide

“Hello.”

Sam knew the voice. He heard it when two policemen showed up at an apartment’s door to tell his mother that his father was never coming home, and he’d heard it in the days and years following. It was a languid itch that started in his chest and nestled in his forehead, an itch Sam had tried his best to ignore. In another life, a first love had told a younger Sam that she loved his laugh - she could always pinpoint him by the way the sound filled a room, like a rolling ocean wave captured in a bottle. A younger Sam decided to feel every emotion more strongly, to grow like a rose in the desert dunes. But tears couldn’t water the desert anymore than laughter could blow away the sands, and life replaced rose-tinted glasses with jade.

So Sam knew the voice. It sounded like the honks and hustle of traffic far below, and the silence of sitting in an empty room for hours on end. When he was sixteen, he heard it between the quiet road trips that became spontaneous new beginnings. When he was twenty-four, he heard it at the corners of memory places - where missed opportunities and lost loves lounged and gossiped. But it was not a word said by a human, and to his knowledge, Sam had only ever talked to humans.

“Hello,” the voice said.   

Sam lowered his hands, balancing on the stool and feeling every fiber of the coarse rope twist in his hand - he had wrapped it twenty eight times. Through the thin walls, he could still hear the unending bustling of the city - so continuous that it was silent before the voice had gently woken him from his trance. The voice appeared in his head like a thought, but not a thought. It was a word without a source. He looked for it to the left, at his single bed with its dark blue sheets and saw the moonlight shift on his covers. He looked down to the right and saw the quiet places where his old tabby cat disappeared to and never returned. 

Mother had always told Sam that moving to a new place was a new adventure; it was a chance to redefine yourself, to be someone new. But Sam found that even though the place was changed, he could not change the color of his skin nor the stretch of his pants. So he hated it when people who he had never talked to, people who he’d hardly met, told him how he was different from what they expected.

“Aren’t you supposed to have a skull?” Sam asked, and hated himself.

“Humans aren't the only ones that die, and I got tired of swapping the skulls,” Death said.

“You’re a bit early, I haven’t done it yet,” Sam heard his own voice say. Sam didn’t ever think he was especially brave. After all, when you feel every emotion strongly, you fear stronger as well. So the lack of dread and doom surprised him; but then again, he hadn’t felt strong emotions in a long time, and bravery wasn’t bravery without the shadow of fear. 

“That’s why I’m here,” said Death. Sam caught himself trying to determine if the amorphous shadow beneath the blacker-than-black cloak was a he or she, but realized it didn’t matter. Part of it was that nothing really mattered to Sam anymore, but also that Sam didn’t quite understand the ins and outs of gender theory. He regretted not taking those classes in college, but he had long ago decided that happiness was so rare, he wouldn’t be the one to stop someone from pursuing theirs.

“Well, I’m glad you’re here. My mother always did tell me I was a coward. So, how do we do this?” said Sam. The afterlife wasn’t looking all that bad; at least, this was the longest person to anthropomorphic-terror conversation that Sam had in a year.

With the slowness of a heart monitor’s last beeps, Death reached deep into the folds of his shroud, pulled out a small rectangle, and held it out delicately between two shadowy amorphous digits. 

Sam held out his hand, palm upward; he’d no choice in the matter. He’d heard of people fighting and running from Death, but he knew, at that moment, that they’d never met the bloke face-to-eternity. There was a magnetism around Death, a magnetism that didn’t suck you in but left the soft dew of inevitability clinging to your limbs. Perhaps great men might have fallen to their knees and begged for another chance, but Sam had long given up on greatness.

Still, though he felt a familiarity with the specter in front of him, he was leery of risking contact with the Cessation of Bodily Functions - the Reaper was probably very busy, and probably didn’t get around to practicing proper hygiene. It also wasn’t wearing a mask, a small indignant voice said at the back of his mind. In the face of D… well Death didn’t have a face, his mother’s germaphobia still dug its talons into him.

Death dropped the rectangle, and Sam’s arm dipped, but there was an absence of sound, no sound of the card slapping against his skin. It was cool to the touch, thin as a paper, but smoother than any lamination. Sam skimmed the etching of words by moonlight with both his fingers and his eyes, the whiteness of bleached bones written on a black field of the abyss.

“New Beginnings

Call 0 Today!”

Above the words there were two circles, a small endless hole at the center of a full moon like an open unblinking eye. A horizontal wasp-thin line bisected the eye into two equal top and bottom halves.

“New B-”

“Side income.”

There was silence. It was a different type of silence, not the silence of a city humming in the background or the silence of a life not lived, but a worse silence, one that had gotten Sam ostracized at new playgrounds and new classrooms. The silence of awkwardness.

“What?”

“Call the number.” The shroud started to wisp and waver, like black smoke floating off a block of black dry ice. 

“Wait.” The wispy sublimation slowed. Questions raced through his mind, vying and jockeying to be asked, but Sam knew he’d only get one question. “Why do you care about my life?” Sam asked. “Aren’t you, you know-” Sam flailed his arms up and down in the general direction of mortality. His mannered mother would be mortified. “Death.” 

The sublimation paused. “Life is part of death, just as living is part of dying,” Death said. “Some need a little nudge from death to want to live again.”

And then Sam was alone again. Still in the dark, but no longer entirely in a dark place.