Tw Poison - Blog Posts
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Goretober Day 5: Poison🍷
Those Who Betray Death
‘I was poisoned by my daughter,’ the woman tells Death. Her lips are bloody, her words choked out, past rattling lungs. Chintz teacups on the table—half-full of Oolong tea—are just out of her reach from her body on the floor, curling her body in a fetal position. Mara isn’t looking for sympathy, but Death gives it anyway.
It replies with the smile of an exhumed corpse of a nun—distantly kind past the grave. It has heard this story before, and this isn't where the story ends.
Death knows endings well but listens. You poisoned her ears first, it does not croon, corrupted her serpent tongue, then her greedy mouth. The human venom is poisonous to its own kind. She hears the truth anyway. Denial has no use in Death.
It bends low at the waist and kisses the woman's paper-skinned knuckles, tasting life's flesh and the faint pulse that precedes its domain—jackrabbiting at the touch. She is scared.
Once an empty hand, now not, Death holds a withered spider-lily in its hand, flourishes it out to her like magician at a child’s birthday party. Her daughter has left long ago. No one will be here to help, which is why Death is. A tear drips down her crow’s feet etched permanently around her eyes as she looks upon the flower with wonder.
As she grasps the stem and pulls it close to her chest, she asks, ‘Have you ever been betrayed?’ What an odd question to ask a god-like entity, she thinks.
Death kneels in front of Mara—hardly the first of her name or the last—and sits cross-legged, like you would on your childhood friend’s bed at a slumber party. It replies matter-of-factly, ‘Yes.’
When it picks her up, it’s head lingers in the direction of the cups. It lowers its head as if to look at her; she can’t see its eyes, so she cannot be sure, but she gets the sense that is the answer in itself. Her lips and fingernails turn blue to match her eyeshadow.
‘I know the time to collect each being. That is the promise made at the beginning of each beginning. I do not like those who hurry me,’ Death curls the corner of his top lip in half a sneer and half a snarl, ‘but never mind that, I will see them soon enough.’
That is the last thing Mara hears before her pulse fades, suspending her in Death’s domain.