The Other Side

Death's Girl

My mother once told my brother and me the tale of a boy and girl who sat on the shoulders of Death.

I remember the day was hot, too hot to do anything but lay on the chilly wood floors of our half-empty house. And that was just what we did. Eyes on her as she entered the common room. Poised, smoky-eyed, and beautiful.

A woman who hid spite in her eyes and half-truths on her tongue. She had a pitcher in her pin-pricked scarred hand and a tray of glasses in the other.

She swept her skirt to the side with a ladylike kick, stern expression breaking as she eyed my brother, and lowered herself to the ground beside him. Quietly and with a guilty feeling creeping in my chest, I crawled away, finding my favorite nook on the edge of the bay window. Distant, but still too close.

There wasn't a reason for it, this story, other than my mother is a story-teller. Somehow, I have this trait too. It makes me happily daydream, but it always haunts me when I'm in shadows.

She began as soon as my brother rolled himself to a new spot on the floor, belly exposed to cool himself off.

The boy positioned on the right, the girl on the left, she'd said.

She never once glanced at me as she spoke. Not even in creative curiosity. My mother kept to my brother, engaged, vivid, nearly human to me.

My brother, there's something about him, something we share. He fills the void she leaves, but not exactly as she leaves it. Somehow, when I look at him, there almost is no void. Almost. In my world, we were the only true existences. I keep everything else out.

He rolled on his back and faced me. He watched me with the same expression as mother as she watched him. My heart trembled as I looked at him.

In her story, Death traveled the world but didn't dare touch its feet to the ground. The children on its shoulders were free to explore under Death's watchful eye.

One day, Death turned its head for a moment- and the girl was put under a curse, one that blinded her eyes from what she once could see. Her world became absent of Death and the boy. Lost, she traveled alone in search of them. They always followed close behind, watching and waiting for her curse to break... for the rest of eternity.

This was the first time and the only time my mother told a story about a girl. My brother is her audience, not me. The slip of one dangerous thought into another and I had briefly wondered if that I was the girl my mother spoke of.

I held my breath to hold onto the thought, but it died with my exhale.

Curses are living things too. The thought struck my heart. In my melancholy, I hurt myself, as dreamers often do.

Perhaps, I am the curse upon that girl. The one that made her lose everything she loved.

Because I am the curse upon my mother and that is why she cannot bear the sight of me.

That thought was the reason I went missing that day.

My last memory before the dark took me.