Inyanga's Star and Other Constellations

The Day Moarte Ended - 317 S.E.

Moarte could still remember the day she didn't die. The first time.

The city girl had gone sleepwalking down the sidewalk in the pitch hour before the sun came up, and her somnambulism had led her straight into traffic. Sleepwalking down the street, and into the street.

Now, that part she didn't actually remember.

That part she had put together from witness accounts later. Under street light, the girl, unconscious and luckily clad in an opaque housecoat tied with a strap (lucky because she always slept the way she came into this world, naked), waded right into the traffic stream at Capricorn and Ara, arms in front as if to part water.

Since the cars were congested to a stop, they allowed her to pass with no harm except to her eardrums — from all the honking.

Incredible that the motos' horns hadn't woken her. Right under the round red light beaming and gleaming in the darkness, the only sun that was up yet that day, she passed safely.

Once on the curb, a barista who knew her from the cafe on the corner yelled, "You're going to get yourself killed!" When Moarte kept on going with no indication that she had heard the warning, her barista friend, Bay, started to follow Moarte down the street. Bay later reported that by now she was getting a little dazed herself.

When Moarte got to Circinus Street, it was her habit to cross to the other side of Ara. The light was green, and there shouldn't have been any trouble crossing. Except. Except for the right on red. Except for the blindspot. Except for the fact that it was not her habit to cross straight ahead, but to cut the corner here.

In order to do that safely, one needed to be very, very cautious.

One needed to be looking. One needed open eyes and needed to see. When the sleepwalking girl veered off the sidewalk and started off into the street, the timing was just wrong; the streetlight pole blocked the view of the moto driver who took this route every single morning at the pre-dawn time when hardly any pedestrians were out. When the moto tore around the corner onto Ara Street and bowled right into Moarte, the only person who saw it was Bay.

That's when Moarte woke up; that's the moment from which Moarte could remember.

The red on her palms when she tried to touch her back. The pain in her belly. The numbness in her spine. The sound of the driver shrieking when she slammed the car door and ran around to witness how Moarte's corpse lay crumpled on the pavement.

But that day death had ended. It wouldn't come for her. That was the day, in 317 S.E., when death ended. Or at least that was how she would always think of it.

The day death ended, not the day Moarte ended.

Shrieks attracted a crowd, and from that crowd emerged a licensed magician — not a doctor, mind, but a magician who could call for a doctor. Out of the link a doctor emerged, and right there in the middle of the street, Moarte's cuts were sewn with starlight, her bones drawn back into alignment, her spine pulled back to its healthy curvature, the wounds to her organs sealed, the flesh grown anew, perhaps healthier even than before.

And to calm her the doctor told her stories. Stories of all of the patients she had had already that day.

She worked in the ER. Since midnight, not a single patient had passed. She had taken a spike right out of one patient's torso, looked through a hole the size of her two fists together, and sealed in the vast opening with energy of suns.

She had put back together a heart that had been blasted apart with a stellar pistol.

She had held a severed head in her hand, its long silky hair drooping across her palm.

"Comparatively speaking, you're not doing so bad. You might want to install a lock spell on the door. I'll see if I can get you a discount. It might save the hospital on streetside visits."

Thank you for reading this flash fiction story, Moarte's Star Episode I, or The Day Death Ended. If you got a kick out of this short short story, please leave a star for me!