Godkiller

lemon pastries

I can't help but raise my head to look at him.

His lanky profile briefly occupies the space between me and the entrance to the tea room. He projects a long shadow that touches the edge of my table and disappears in the corner of the room. The lemon pastry in my hand stops midway to my mouth and my eyes follow him spontaneously, for I noticed there is something important he lacks.

The background clinks of the cups that fill the space are suddenly nonexistent to my ears. Instead, I watch him sit, his back kissing the velour of the cushion with a quiet thump. I hear the rustle of his slim fingers caressing the fabric of his overcoat, down to the creased dark hems which he carefully straightens. He crosses his legs, exposing one of his leather boots. My eyes trail up his figure, my gaze dwells on his fingers drumming on the table - tap, tap, tap - right before finally settling on his face.

Only then I realise what he is missing.

I look around the room, just to confirm it. There's a man sitting at the table across from mine; the cup he's drinking his tea from is the only spot of white on his otherwise round, red face: he has it. The younger man sitting in front of him, with a suit half as expensive and yet twice as elegant, has it too - if that youngster could see how short the fat man's is, he probably wouldn't be fidgeting with his hands under the table anymore. The little girl sitting two tables over, sinking her teeth in a big slice of chocolate cake, has it, and it's tragically shorter than one would expect. Even his father, busy trying to prevent his daughter from staining her pretty lavender dress, has it longer than hers. My gaze then follows the waitress, who has only just noticed that a new customer has arrived and is walking up to his table; she has it too.

It isn't a number hovering over a person's head like some people imagine, it's more like something about their aura, a feeling all kinds of living beings manage to sense more or less strongly, but that only I can perfectly decipher and interpret.

The waitress is taking the order from the newcomer, but she doesn't seem to be bothered by him at all. Thinking about it, no one seems to have even noticed him, as if the strange, incomprehensible aura around him only bothers me, and instead makes him invisible to everyone else.

"Anything else?" I hear the waitress ask. If I focus enough I can feel the seconds of her lifespan flow away from her, one by one. She has, right now, 53 years, 5 months, 1 week, 2 days, 3 hours, 12 minutes and 47 seconds left to live, which means roughly 1,680,923,567 seconds. I can already see how, in her last ones, she'll smile at her grandson.

However, her client, the mysterious man in the dark overcoat, doesn't give me a clear number. It's as if his lifespan is some muddled, blurred value I can't clearly put my finger on. And I can't accept that.

Everyone has a lifespan. Even angels and demons have a finite existence, even Gods can be killed. Only I know when their end will come, when everyone's end will come - even my own. If I focus on someone I can see their past and their future, more or less clearly. Sometimes, very rarely, their numbers change, and it's a split second of pleasant unpredictableness. Only a split second, though, then everything goes back to its grey boredom.

The waitress brings him a teapot and a cup. They're both white with a pale pink flower motif. She sets them down on the table with a thud that's too loud to my ears, but no one else seems to notice. I watch him pour the black tea into the cup and then sip it, and he looks like he's come here just for that, to enjoy the mediocre tea, the vaguely decent-tasting pastries, the cheap porcelain of the tea set and the fake velvet of the chair cushions.

He ordered marmalade buns. The waitress places two of them in front of him and he promptly digs the tips of his fingers into them, breaking them into two pieces before bringing one peach-marmalade-dripping half to his mouth and biting it while I loathe his manners. His teeth flash white when he bites it - they would be unnaturally bright for a human, but I know he isn't one.