The Game of Love and Death(86)

The earth rushed below them, a patchwork of color and shape, a view humans weren’t meant to have but had somehow managed, through a combination of persistence and passion. Death would never understand the urge to fly. Why do something that was not your nature? Why waste time on a temporary thrill?

Flora pointed at something below. The lake, perhaps, as smooth as glass and sapphire blue. It was beautiful. And the girl had courage, Death realized. She knew about the Game. Knew about its end. Rather than choose Henry, she’d chosen something else, something that had no word, although integrity probably came close. That, or maybe truth. This quality seemed in increasingly short supply with humans. It was a shame that she was blind to how little time she had left. But that was the way with humans. They always thought there would be more days.

The moment arrived. Death exhaled, and as she did, her Henry guise melted away. She did not become Helen again, but rather, wore her true form. Flora deserved as much. The look on the girl’s face when she noticed: It was one Death would remember for the ages, even though she’d seen variations on it for the entirety of her existence.

Blanching, Flora turned back toward the windshield. The plane dipped and banked, and Death understood the girl was trying to land, most likely to save anyone on the ground who would be killed by a falling hunk of burning wreckage. Ah, well. Everybody was to die someday, whether by accident or act of time. Death reached for Flora’s hand, pushing away ill-timed memories of a Spanish flower seller and a German zeppelin pilot. One wanted to live for love; the other was willing to risk his life for his fellow man. She never should have spared these souls.





HENRY and James arrived at the airstrip as Flora boarded her plane with someone who looked exactly like Henry. Death had stolen his guise, from his rampant curls to his scuffed shoes. Henry yelled after her, but she did not hear. The pair climbed into the plane. Henry ran toward them, holding a hand up against his face to block the wind from the propellers. But Flora did not see him over her tail wheel, and soon, the plane was airborne, growing ever smaller as it climbed.

Henry stopped running. He turned to look back at James. Words would not come. His body felt scorched from the inside out. Exhausted. Wasted. As though it would never quite be right again.

“Why couldn’t it have been me?” he said at last.

He stood there, staring at James, whose face was tipped toward the sky as his hands hung at his sides. After what seemed like an age, James turned to Henry. He shrugged. Then he disappeared.

Henry stood under the perfect blue sky, alone.

When he had most needed Love, Love had forsaken him. The feeling struck him like a cold wave. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, and did not know how he could go on living in the face of it. He fell to his knees, not even noticing when the gravel tore his pants and cut his flesh.

Then he stood and looked to the sky. He didn’t want to watch, but he could not bear for Flora to leave the world unseen. And so he waited. For what, he did not know. But he trusted this instinct, and he sent his love outward and upward, so that she might know he was there, answering her call, unto the end.





ONE moment, the figure next to her in the plane was Henry. The next moment, it was not, and suddenly, Henry’s strange behavior at the airfield made sense. It wasn’t that he was angry with her, or fearing the flight. Rather, it wasn’t Henry at all.

The figure sitting next to her, a woman of indeterminate age, was someone she’d never met. But Flora knew her. She knew her deep in her bones.

This was the woman who’d worn Helen’s face. The one who’d chosen Flora for suffering when she was but a sleeping infant. The gloves this woman wore now, the ones Flora thought had been her mother’s — they had belonged to this woman, this monster, all along. They were a small thing, the gloves. But sometimes the smallest thing is everything. Flora had believed these gloves brought her closer to her mother, that in wearing them, she was being blessed by her mother’s touch.

Flora knew now this was nothing but a beautiful lie. The gloves hadn’t protected her. They’d kept her from feeling the world. They’d kept her from living.

In that moment that Death came for her, Flora understood all of this. She understood the lessons Death had to teach. And she understood one last, worst thing: that these lessons had come too late. Had she known in time, Flora would have chosen differently. This is true for almost every human. Death is the finest teacher. The finest, and the most cruel.

She reached for Flora, who twisted away. First, Flora had to land the plane. She’d surrender afterward. To crash the plane would take the lives of innocents, and this she could not do. She banked and began to descend, determined to cheat Death out of everything she could. But Death unbuckled herself and moved in.

“NO!” Flora twisted out of reach. Be brave, she told herself. Land the plane.

They were speeding now toward the runway, faster than she would have liked. Her hands shook, and she wondered if there was any sort of deal she might make. She leaned as far away as she could while still keeping control of the yoke.

Death grabbed Flora’s hand. The horizon tilted. The color of the sky changed, and the plane itself seemed to shudder, as if it were a body losing its hold on life. Her fingers froze, and the heat drained out of the rest of her. In a way, she was glad. It numbed her to what she knew would follow.

Then something cracked inside of her. Her fingers and toes hummed. A different feeling crept up her arms, up her legs. It was as if she were being filled with some substance other than blood. The feeling reached her chest, her neck, her face. She could not move. There was a shock, a moment of confusion, a transformation. Her body was no longer her own, not entirely.