New Year’s Eve

Azra looked into the mirror and combed her long, red hair. Smiling at her reflection, she poked around in her Hermès handbag for a lipstick. It's a shame, she thought, that manufacturers could no longer put arsenic or lead in makeup. The staying power of lead-based lipstick was surprisingly good.

At least she still had a decent stock of Arsenic Complexion Wafers, last made in the late 1800s. People are such snowflakes these days. She rolled her eyes as she wiped a small mark off the side of the handbag. It has been a parting gift from her friend, Grace, in 1982. "Gift" might be stretching it a little, Azra admitted to herself with a small giggle. Perhaps better the better term would be "souvenir". 

Seeing the room behind her reflected in the mirror, Azra made a face. A layer of dust covered everything. She hadn't been home in a while. There was a famine in the Sudan to thank for that. "I really do need a new housekeeper," she said out loud, her voice echoing under the high ceilings. They never seemed to last for long. Could anyone have such bad luck with housekeepers dying? 

The last housekeeper, a friendly young man who scooted too and from her home on a Vespa, inexplicably suffered a heart attack on his third day of work. The one before succumbed to a sudden, brief illness. So sudden and so brief that they had popped their clogs seconds after turning the key in the front door lock for the first time.

Now, where were her Gucci fish-skin shoes? Finding them under the coffin in the living room that served as a coffee table, she slid them onto her manicured feet. She patted the ornate box. It held the first plague victim of 1666. Like all professionals, Azra liked to keep reminders of her finest moments.

She opened the closet by the front door that held her outerwear and selected a Burberry trench coat. It was a little chilly out. She noticed it still had a Harrods tag attached and gave a little tug to free it. She had picked the coat up in London while there for the 2005 terrorist attack. You'd be surprised at the things people dropped when running for their lives. Its previous owner had no further use for it, so Azra was just giving it a good home.

It was New Year's Eve, and Azra had two appointments today. Her first had managed to miss their meeting this time last month, but Azra was determined that they would finish their business today.

She stepped out of the front door and locked it behind her, dropping the key into the Hermès bag. It was a shame that the potted plants by her front door did so poorly. She had given up replacing them and simply let the only plant that thrived, Deadly Nightshade, take over. 

There was a bus stop in front of Azra's terrace house. A middle-aged man in a threadbare coat wearing a heavy backpack was waiting there. She smiled at him as she walked by, even though she knew he couldn’t see her. As she passed, he inhaled the top note of her perfume.  The sweet scent of tea rose, unbidden but not unwelcome, gave him visions of the rose gardens of ancient Egypt, and of Cleopatra's barge with its fragrant sails floating down the Nile. Then, the meaty decay of the base note struck him and he gagged.

***

Mrs Black slept fitfully in her four-poster bed, covered by an antique quilt of olive, russet and citrine. Her husband was seated on a chair next to her, holding her hand and lost in his grief. Azra strode through the bedroom door, without so much as a glance directed at the sobbing man. He might have been as invisible to her as she was to him.

"Not you again!" Mrs Black's astral hands jerked loose from her physical form. Mr Black didn't react at all, just kept holding her hand, feeling it rapidly becoming lifeless. Mrs Black's transparent arms reached up and clutched the bed head while her legs kicked out at Azra.

"Get away!" She ejected her astral body entirely and shot up to the ceiling. "Leave me alone!"

Azra gripped Mrs Black's ankles and tried to tug her back down. "Come on, it's not so bad. You've done this before. Let's just get on with it, shall we?"

"Not so bad? Look at my poor husband!" Jerking her ankles free of Azra's grip, she floated down and circled a ghostly arm about his shoulders. 

"I'm sorry you feel that way, but you were due to go last month, and we simply can't put it off any longer."

"But my first great-grand-child is going to be born any moment!" 

Azra sighed. "Yes, yes. It's all very sad, but that's life, Mrs Black. Now we really do have to go."

"Life?" An imitation Tiffany lampshade leapt into the air flew across the room and nearly gave Mr Black a heart attack as it exploded into fragments against the wall behind him, where Azra was now standing.

"Don't you talk to me about LIFE! What would you know about LIFE! You've never been alive!"

"Madam," hissed Azra, "One does not need to be a chimpanzee to be an expert in them! Now come on!" She gave the silver cord between Mrs Black's physical body and her astral form a sharp yank. It snapped and burst into glittering shards that quickly dispersed.

One last breath escaped the lips of Mrs Black's corporeal body, and she was gone.

A few moments later Mr Black tucked his wife's cold hand beneath the quilt and then turned to stare, stunned, at the shattered lamp on the floor. He thought he heard a woman's voice faintly in the distance.

"I shouldn't be telling you this, but that great-grand-child you're so keen to see? Well, it's going to be you so we'd better hurry." 

Then the phone rang, and the smiling face of his pregnant granddaughter, appeared on the screen of his cell phone.

***

At 11:59pm Azra arrived at the venue of her second appointment. The King and Moon was a favourite drinking establishment of her two younger sisters and judging from the ruckus within, Lilith and Babalon had already arrived. 

Azra stepped inside the pub as the crowd began the count down.

“10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1!”