Recent Edition

Untitled (Glass) - Leigh Ivanova 

The window in the attic loved telling lies. 

You would look at the sun through the hazy glass,

caressing the spiderwebs under the ceiling, 

you’d sway in the waltz of sun rabbits in the dust octave,

and run to the stairs,

only to find the rain

drumming Vivaldi’s “Winter” allegro.

I think the lying window was in alliance with books,

borrowing the July moth snow from C. S. Lewis, 

as once in a while you would catch a glimpse of a lantern,

licorice of a metal stem, luring clicking of hoofs.

knock knock

who’s there

a woman

a woman who

a woman in the shape of monster 

the skies are full of them                                              Adrienne Rich Planetarium

The window who lied was silent, but the creatures behind it weren’t.

We’d talk for hours, tales interwoven with the threads of gold,

that I weaved into baskets, 

sipping on poison to uncover the name signed on the bottom of the cup.

We would put our palms to the glass and trace over the lines

with a Sharpie, so the window soon became a permanent net of destinies. 

Your left hand is the fate you were given at birth,

your right hand is the one you make for yourself. 

They taught me how to read tea leaves, 

and ask questions for the deck of cards

to become a dictionary.

The mirror in the attic hated lies,

it was aggressively honest, choking you with verity. You’d

look in it to find the wrinkles and bags under your eyes.

Jeez, a few more nights like that, and you can carry a chihuahua in them,

dye your hair platinum blond, so it would suit your newly-obtained identity

of a trophy wife

to the corporation that exploits you with no end in sight.

The truthful mirror was placed right across the window,

looking at its tricks with unbearable condescension. It wouldn’t agree

to reflect the vampires with their ultrasound pleads on the windowsill,

so I’d have to sketch them, while they were cutting their hair or drawing eyeliner.

And every time I’d put the candle in the bucket of rain

and beg the light of the full moon to

reveal my betrothed,

the mirror would simply reflect 

a little girl in oversized white dress, stolen from mom’s closet,

and chips of dust on her cheeks.

But when the neighbors’ boys’ stone flew through the attic, 

shattering lies and truth,

I organized a funeral for both of them,

and creatures read their eulogies through the whispers of wind

and glimpses in the broken glass.

Scavenger - Mason Blank

A squirrel awoke to another cold February morning. Eager to feast on acorns he had hidden months before; he scampered down head-first from his resting spot in the branches to locate the buried treasures. His eager mind wandered; the safety of his nesting place in the trees was no longer. Someone else’s mind was wandering that morning as well. A professor, late to his own 8:30 lecture, sped down the narrow road. He paid no mind to the bump, never even giving it a second thought. The car’s front left wheel collided with the overeager squirrel; in an instant, he was dead, having felt no pain at all in his final second. His immediately lifeless corpse came to lay in the shallow groove between the road and a small walkway. The fur on his lifeless body blew slightly as more cars passed. For the most part remaining undisturbed in his mutilated form. Gaining curious gazes from students on their way to class. Some held looks of disgust, others sympathy. Some didn’t seem to feel anything at all.

The morning passed and turned to afternoon. It was only then that another creature took notice of the squirrel. The circiling shadow loomed over his flesh. The raptor had been idly scouring the campus for hours along thermals, barely even flapping his wings. Upon spotting the squirrel, he descended. Landing gracefully near the corpse, the curious carnivore stood directly above the squirrel. One glance to the right revealed nothing, and one to the left yielded the same result. The vulture was alone, and free to feast. How would he start? Well of course the eye. It’s the easiest part. His beak thrusted forward puncturing the eyeball perfectly. With a swift movement it broke free from the socket, and in less than a second, a gaping hole was all that remained. Taken aback by this disturbance to its body, the corpse began to speak. 

“What are you doing? That was my eye!” The squirrel’s corpse protested, to the vulture’s utter bemusement. “Well,” the vulture said, “I am eating your eye, and now I will eat the rest of you.” “What on Earth would drive you to do such a thing?” the squirrel snapped at the vulture,  “Look at the amount of plants around us. Eat those if you so desire to have a meal. Leave my body to rest!”Despite the squirrel’s pleas, the vulture continued to feed. Using its sharp talons to pin down the corpse, simultaneously ripping chunks of fur and flesh from the squirrel’s midsection. “Well,” said the vulture after swallowing, “I am a carnivore. Digesting plants takes a very strong stomach and gut, which I lack. Even harder still would be turning the sun’s light directly into food, for I have no chloroplasts and no desire to learn how to acquire any. Herbivores such as yourself have already done all the hard work of breaking down the sun’s energy within plants, so it is much easier for me to simply take it from you. How hypocritical of you to berate me for consuming your flesh,” the vulture proclaimed with a hint of annoyance in his voice, “when even your herbivorous friends agree with me; cows, horses, deer and even turtles will eat carrion when available.” Blood dripping from his talons, he reached towards his meal once more. “Okay…” said the squirrel. A hint of annoyance lingering in his words. This was clearly not a worthy explanation for his posthumus consumption. “But I am already dead and have been dead for hours! Why not hunt live prey like lions and wolves if you are a carnivore?” The vulture continued its desecration of the mammal even while being chastised. Ripping off appendages, chunks of tail to be swallowed whole. He began to speak once more, “Well, I may be a carnivore, but I am no hunter. I am not strong enough to fight large animals like deer, nor quick enough to catch small rodents such as yourself.” Pridefully he raised his mighty wingspan to the skies, “I am a scavenger! I find that which is already dead and consume it.” “That is ridiculous!” The squirrel shouted, preventing further explanation from the vulture. The vulture almost chuckled at that comment. Almost. Instead he continued to dig his beak into flesh; reaching so deep within the corpse that it could taste the rodent’s most delicious organs. “Predators work for their food, even if it is cruel, and hurts herbivores like me. Who gave you the right to steal that which others worked so hard for?” 

The vulture was in the process of swallowing his liver as the squirrel protested. The organ went down his esophagus without issue. The vulture spoke once more. “That is a common misconception about scavengers. Yes it is true that sometimes hyenas or bears will scare away a cheetah or pack of wolves to eat what they had recently killed. However, most of the time us scavengers eat those which die of natural causes, or that which predators are unable to eat, or that which die of unnatural causes, such as a passing vehicle.” His annoyance grew, “You see, we provide a needed service! You are selfishly hoarding all those nutrients within your body and hogging them from the rest of the food chain. By consuming your flesh and later defecating the waste, your nutrients rapidly return to the soil, which will be consumed by ferns in the forest, which will then be met by the mouth of a white-tailed deer, who will then be shot by a human, and turned into their next meal. Even that human will fall victim to a passing mosquito who will suck the blood from his veins. Yet even still the human will squash it, its body will fall flat to the forest floor, where it will be absorbed by growing mushrooms that lend some of those precious absorbed nutrients to nearby trees. Those tree’s acorns will provide for future generations of squirrels, and the cycle will begin anew. ” The vulture, content with his own explanation, began to feed once more. “That is a ridiculous system!” The squirrel protested once again, “Surely there is a better way to orient a food chain without so much undue suffering!” 

The vulture, at this point, became visibly annoyed with the squirrel’s repeated attempts to defame his good moral character. Once more, he finished swallowing a morsel of flesh and fur, and spoke, “How dare you, ours is the most perfect relationship in all nature. Before humans constructed their ivory towers, before apes walked upright, before dinosaurs roamed the Earth, before the first amphibian clumsily clambered out of the water, before bones, before exoskeletons, before multicellular life, there was the dead and that which consumed it. It is nature’s oldest and most beautiful dance. For billions of years trillions upon trillions of dancers, from bacteria, to the mighty tyrannosaurus rex, to turkey vultures such as myself, have participated in the beautiful tango between consumer and carrion. And here you lay; taking part in the most vital portion of this interconnected web of life. You should be nothing short of grateful for the opportunity!” The vulture seething with anger crushed the squirrel's skull in its powerful talons, clawing for the brain within.

“Okay!” Said the squirrel, now so totally mutilated that it was barely recognizable as a mammal, “I know why you cannot easily leave this system of consuming flesh, I get that you cannot perform the manual labor of hunting for food on your own, I know why this system exists, and I am grateful for the part I play! B-but answer me this; if there was no interconnected system, no great dance, no grand purpose, why are you eating me right now?” The vulture had no hesitation in his answer, he simply looked down into the shattered chunks of the squirrel’s former cranium before speaking the words, “I ate you, because I was hungry.”

Fingers - AE Zaiden

“Two packs of Camel reds,” says the man in the green bomber jacket. It’s not a lush forest green or a bright neon, it’s that sickly green, the color of puke or piss or bogs. It’s pilling and stained in many places. He hasn’t had a haircut in ages but his face is rather handsome, clean-shaven, and he has the best skin I’ve seen in years. The skin on his face, that is. When I look down to take his cash, the sight of his fingers takes me by the neck. 

Dry and cracked, the color of snow, the nails so short they disappear into the tips. His fingerprints are covered in yellow pus-filled callouses, more of them than any beginner guitarist can imagine, and they all look like they’re about to burst. His fingers have an awful stench, too, like a rotting corpse, sizzling at the edges of my nostrils and nearly knocking me out. I wince as I attempt to take the cash without touching him. I can’t imagine what money must feel like in those hands, what anything feels like in those hands. I bid him good day and he finally leaves. 

Not many people come in on Christmas. The man in the green bomber jacket ended up being my only customer for the next four hours. I look at the clock, the security cameras. I carefully reorganize the chip bags by expiration date and the bongs by color. It’s the first white Christmas in years and the wind rattles the windows, the snow piled up against the walls. The roads are safe enough for me to drive to work but supposedly not safe enough for anyone else to do so. I want to be at home, our dog, Casey, curled up against my legs; I can feel myself sinking into our slowly-rotting couch with all its mystery stains, I can feel the same shirt I wore yesterday on my skin, and the couch sinking once more as my girlfriend, Andrea, the source of my every our, every waking moment, joins us and snakes her hand underneath my shirt and around my waist. Early this morning I could barely stand to get out of bed and leave her; already I miss her touch and the warmth of her breath. We’ve been together six months and I still cannot believe she chose me, all these ugly parts, this ugly life. I want to keep thinking of her, keep looking forward to going back to her, but my mind keeps wandering back to the man in the green bomber jacket. My imagination can’t stop itself. At random intervals a close-up image of his hands flash in my mind, interrupting my daydreams, sickening me more and more each time I imagine it. 

I wonder if he has some kind of disease, where it came from; whether it’s contagious. I wonder what he has to do at home, what he cannot do, with this condition. I wonder if he’s celebrating. I wonder if he’s alone. Whether it’s contagious.

He comes in again the next day at around four o’clock. I am itching for the night shift fellow to come in and let me be; I’d been here since seven in the morning and I don’t want to be here any longer. I recognize him at once, and I put my tiredness aside to make room for a sudden, nagging curiosity. While he’s busy examining our soft drink selection, I find myself staring at him, moving my eyes along his body. There’s a brownish mole on the side of his face, near his sideburns. Acne scars sprinkle across his face like little craters. His hair is wet and slicked back; he must have just showered. A whiff of his cologne floats towards me. He’s in the same jacket, same disgusting color, and skin-tight leather pants and combat boots. My eyes drift across the opaque black material, stretching and bending across his thighs, knees, up towards his ass. I wonder how he can even walk in those. My gaze circles his hands a few times—I dread looking at them, but I must, I must see them—

I blink. He has turned and is walking towards me. I lower my gaze to my phone and do my best to look like I don’t care about him at all. He places a bottle of diet coke on the counter. I meet eyes with the bottle, and there they are again. Those hands. Soft, clean, perfect skin—not a scratch or hint of texture in sight. Shining, as if he’d slicked them in oil, pillowy fingertips like those of a newborn. Fingers that look brand new, like they’ve never touched anything in their lives.

“Uh,” he says, noticing my stunned silence, “how much?”

I blink and shake my head. “Sorry, uh— two dollars.”

He hands me the cash. I can’t help but stare. He notices this and smiles. Pearly white teeth without a single tinge of tobacco stain, and perfectly smooth pink lips. “Nothing like a fresh skin,” he says.

He leaves. The little bell on top of the door tinkles. I stare at a spot on the floor. I hear his car engine start up; I hear him drive away but in my mind he’s still here and I can’t think of anything else. The night shift guy, Brody’s his name, finds me in this state. He saunters inside sporting his signature leather jacket and an itchy Christmas sweater. He’s a nice guy and he usually finds a way to make me smile but I can only give him a curt nod and step away from my place behind the counter. “Afternoon,” I say. 

“I’m sorry I’m late, boss,” Brody says in his hoarse, young voice. As he speaks I look at his tooth gap instead of his eyes. “Traffic was nuts, and—”

“Don’t worry about it,” I murmur and turn to the break room. 

Before I can leave he shouts after me: “Hey, what’s the matter, boss?” 

The question cuts deeper than I imagine he intended it to. I can’t look him in the eyes. For a reason unknown to me, I feel choked by something; every word that bubbles up in my mind gets caught in my throat. After a few seconds of convincing I finally make eye contact with him. 

“Jesus, you look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Brody says. 

I look at the clock. It’s 4:35pm. I have to be home soon to make dinner for me and Andrea. I intend to leave but instead I just stand there. 

“I think I did.” 

That night I dream about the man in the green bomber jacket. In the dream, I am walking down this suburban road. For some reason, I cannot stop wringing my hands and picking at the skin. It’s pitch black outside and the street lamps above me can only glow so far. From this glow I can see the outlines of houses. Each house looks exactly the same: the same greenish color, the same placement of the windows, the same stone pathway to the red front door. There’s something menacing about these red doors. I stop and look at one and the longer I look the taller it gets, until the house becomes a giant’s mansion that towers over me and my knees begin to wobble. A deep, bloody red wooden door. Right above my head sits a rusted iron knob in the shape of a hand, and a few feet above that, two long thin stained-glass windows. I crane my neck and squint but I cannot see what’s inside. The other windows to each side of the door are boarded up. I scratched and scratched my hands until they become raw and damp.

I reach for the knob and grab onto it with these bloodied hands. I pull but it won’t budge. I pull harder. I squeeze and feel the rust crumble into my hands and close my eyes; I let my entire body weight fall against this door and let it fall again, again, again, until my head spins and aches. Nothing. 

I fall to my knees. There is no sound but my own heaving breath, my breath in sleep. Until I hear a rustling. My breath hitches and stops in my chest and I hold it, mouth hanging slightly open. Somebody is standing behind me. I can feel his cold stare. I keep my eyes glued to the peeling blood-red paint of the door; I cannot blink; I cannot bear to see the outline of his figure reflected in the stained glass window but I do. I can hear his breathing now, shallow and desperate. Hungry.

I squeeze my eyes shut. I attempt to scream but my lips glue themselves together as if sewn shut and nothing but a pitiful muffled whimper comes out. I feel his hands—his disgusting, diseased, rotten fingers—close around my throat. The edges of his peeling skin hitch onto my flesh like razor blades and again I try and fail to cry out in pain. The smell engulfs me. Warmth drips down my neck. 

And I wake up. As quickly as it started, the dream ends, and I’m sitting upright in my bed at four in the morning. Andrea sleeps soundly next to me. Sweat pours down my forehead; the sheets beneath me are damp with fear. I look to my left, out our bedroom window; we never close the shades at night because it looks out at the lush forests, and always has a lovely view of the moon. But dense clouds hang over the trees tonight, and the pale brown sky indicates that soon the sun will rise. I look to my right, back to my Andrea, the most important person and light of my miserable life. Her soft face, her body curled in comfort, her beautiful hair hidden in a towel. My racing heart eases itself just looking at her. A dream, Darryl, only a dream, only a compilation of randomly selected information from your daily life. Surely it can’t mean anything. That is, until I look down.

Two hands rest on the blanket. They connect to my arms, which connects to my body, but they are not my hands. They have nerves sending signals of singing pain to my brain, but they are not my hands. Monsters, they are. Layers of skin peeling off, revealing blood, muscle and tendon. Littered with callouses and pimples. It feels infinitely more awful than I had imagined, having these hands, how it feels to touch the bedspread, to touch my skin, to touch the air. 

I hear a panicked, racing breath and the rapid pumping of a heart. Tears gather in my eyes and fall into my open mouth. I don’t know how, or why, but his fingers have poisoned me. I’m convinced that I’ll be cursed to live this way forever until I realize how the man in the green bomber jacket looked when he came in yesterday. 

I turn to my Andrea. She looks more beautiful than ever. My body quivers and jerks as I reach for her throat. 

Jona and the Grim Reaper - Yale Coopersmith

Jona woke to find the Grim Reaper floating behind her. She thought that she must be dreaming. Her dreams had been weird since lockdown began a month ago. Hadn’t she just read an article about how people were reporting unusually vivid dreams? She decided this had to be it. Considering the bright, sunny Saturday morning, she figured she could go back to sleep for a bit and let her mind work itself out. But when she woke up, the Reaper was still there. She sighed, scrubbed her hand across her face, and sighed; she didn’t have time for this. 

“I know people are dealing with weird mental breaks because of the isolation, but this is ridiculous! This thing is not even scary!” she muttered as she got out of bed, hauled herself to the bathroom, and stuck her toothbrush in her mouth. She’d made sure to remember to brush her teeth every morning since lockdown began, as her mom somehow always knew when she hadn’t brushed. Maybe moms had telepathy. She then got on proper clothes, and dragged her computer out to the kitchen table. 

She boiled water on the stove for a brunch of boiled eggs while answering some emails; during quarantine, more people needed help with computer glitches than ever. The Grim Reaper still floated behind her, more like a kid’s balloon toy than a specter of death. It didn’t scare her. It didn’t scare her as she continued to answer emails, or when she ate her breakfast of boiled eggs, or during the rest of her day. It didn’t even scare her as she turned off the lights, and tucked herself into bed. The fear got her when she checked the news. Jona tried to stay off the internet during the day, opting for books she had always meant to read, or TV shows friends raved about endlessly. But at the end of the day, in the lonely darkness of her room, she gave in to the urge to see what was happening in the world beyond the walls of her apartment. The picture wasn’t pretty: 23,000 deaths, 600,000 confirmed cases. Images of bodies in white trash bags being piled on top of each other, driven to funeral homes to be cremated. Nurses caught on camera in hazmat suits, their tears staining the plastic inside their face shields. It was gruesome, downright biblical. 

For some reason, Jona thought of Noah’s Ark, the waters swallowing the whole wicked world. Hadn’t God sent a dove with an olive branch as a symbol of his promise to never kill off humanity again? To Jona, that promise had been snapped in half across the world’s knee. It felt like the world was ending, that this virus would be the thing that killed her. Jona tore her face away from her phone, her heart racing. In a moment of horrific judgment, she chose to look back at the specter of death following her. 

How do you describe death? Some people think of worms burrowing through dirt and flesh. Others think of a gush of warm, red blood and sharp teeth. Yet others see the frenzy of an ICU, and the haunting tone of a flatlining heart monitor following it. 

Jona couldn’t articulate what she saw, but she knew it was death incarnate. People don't like to confront their mortality for a reason. The moment you understand just how fallible your entire existence is, you feel like you could be taken out at any moment. You could eat a nice breakfast, or you could choke on a boiled egg and die because you’re all alone or with people who don’t know CPR. You could be walking around town, and die suddenly from an imperceptible heart murmur that no one found until it was too late. You could feel a soreness in your chest and develop a small cough, and find out you have untreatable lung cancer. There are so many ways to die. 

Until the pandemic, Jona had felt mildly invincible. Her job as a trade-school trained computer programmer felt fulfilling and intellectually stimulating. She enjoyed good health; she exercised every day, and tried her level best to eat right. She could spend a night out with friends and not feel bored. She had a nice apartment in the heart of her city’s downtown. Life had worked out well for her. And yet, her life would never again be able to stave off the knowledge of her inevitable death newly lodged in her DNA. 

She tried to suppress a scream, and failed. She looked at the Grim Reaper again, to see if maybe looking at it would get rid of the panic in her soul. It didn’t. The Reaper smiled grotesquely, and beckoned her towards it with a bony finger. In that moment, Jona knew: if she walked towards that Reaper, then her life would end. She didn’t know how to explain how she knew, but she knew the same way every small forest animal knows a mountain lion may be waiting in the bushes. With that, Jona ran out of the room, pillow in hand, into her bathroom. She locked the door, and turned on all the lights. The Grim Reaper still floated behind her, and she could still feel its presence with her eyes closed. But the light made it seem less real. Jona fell asleep in the bathtub, clutching a small rubber duck tightly like a talisman that could ward away death.

The next morning, she couldn’t pretend nothing happened. The fear still coursed through her, unmoved by sleep. She got up and brushed her teeth vigorously; if she missed a spot, she could get a cavity which could turn into an infection which could kill her if it was a strain that couldn’t be treated with antibiotics. She then heated up water on the stove for boiled eggs, and took care to place each egg into the water carefully; a splash of water could burn her skin which could lead to the burnt skin becoming infected which could turn into a whole body infection which could turn into sepsis which could kill her. When eating her eggs, Jona mashed them with a fork; if she took too big of a bite, she could choke on it, which would cause her to pass out alone in her apartment, which would mean assured death. She spent the rest of her day afraid. 

Same as yesterday, she answered emails, watched TV, and read books. But now, with the threat of death literally looming over her, she went through her day with an abundance of caution. When she went to bed that night, she spent hours staring at the horrifying news sweeping across her phone screen. She could practically feel the Reapers’s breath on the back of her neck with how close it got to her during those fear-filled nighttime hours. Life, however fragile it now seemed to Jona, continued. The early spring months of the quarantine melted away into summer. Higher death counts accompanied higher temperatures, which she spent with the windows open and the AC on full blast, watching TikToks on her phone. Summer turned into a crisp fall, full of more death and more movies and more mashing of eggs. She watched the autumn leaves fall from her window. She knew other people went out on walks every once in a while, or drove out to the countryside. Jona hadn’t left her home since the Grim Reaper started haunting her. She took enquiries over Zoom, people asking about their buggy laptops from their obviously cracked phones. Her conversations consisted of an endless chorus of, hello? are you there? can you hear me? Sometimes Jona stared out her apartment window, and wondered if she wanted anyone besides the Reaper to be able to hear her again. 

Then winter arrived, a flurry of cold rain knocking against the apartment windows. She watched old Christmas movies, and wondered how the characters didn’t die of frostbite; none of their clothes seemed thick enough for the technicolor flurries on-screen. She checked her phone, and felt the Reaper back up a bit, trying to get away from her sheer joy and relief: there were Covid vaccines, and they would be available to the public in a matter of months. She would have jumped for joy in that moment, but was afraid she would bump her head on the low apartment ceiling which could lead to a concussion which untreated could lead to death. Spring came back around like a dog hiding its tail between its legs. She got her vaccine early April, and slumped onto her sofa in utter relief. She glanced up, wondering if the Grim Reaper would leave her alone now; there was almost no chance she was going to die of Covid. And yet, there it was, floating as menacingly as it had the last April it first appeared. She groaned, more annoyed than afraid at that point.

For Jona, fear had become a familiar fixture of her life. Fear lived in her heart, but the raw wound of that fear had scabbed over. She thought about the many ways she could die every moment of the day, but it had become a normal mental checklist to go over while making her breakfast of mashed boiled eggs. The fear hadn’t changed in the last year; she had. She hosted Zooms while thinking about death by electrocution. She watched people go out into the spring afternoon, laughing, and thought about death by allergic reaction from bee-stings. Summer came, and she slathered her skin in sunscreen, thinking about sunburn and melanoma. When she went into clients’ homes to fix their computers, she didn’t speak to them; she kept her lips sealed as tightly as her mask. 

Fall came and left, winter blew in with cold wind, snow, and coughs from every direction. Her family was hosting a gathering for the holidays for the first time since the pandemic began, but Jona declined attending. She thought about choking on turkey legs or getting frostbite from a snowball thrown by a younger cousin or getting electrocuted from a faulty TV she was asked to fix even though she was a computer programmer and not a TV technician. She instead opted for a Christmas spent alone with the single gift she’d bought for herself: a toy Grim Reaper statue. She thought the specter might appreciate some company, but felt too afraid to look backward and find out.

New Year’s Eve arrived. Jona sat on the couch with a cup of sparkling water, sipped through a straw to prevent choking. She left a half-filled glass on the side table, in the event that Grim Reapers liked sparkling water as a New Year’s Eve treat. She had taken to talking to the thing; she had no one else to talk to anymore. “So, happy new year, huh? I mean, is it so happy though? It’s just another year full of chances to die, isn’t it?” The Grim Reaper didn’t respond; he never did. She drank her water in silence, and watched the ball drop in Times Square on her TV screen. She looked and saw happy, masked people celebrating. A feeling bubbled inside her, different than fear but not far from it. She tried to pin it down: Despair? Loneliness? A thought came from the feeling: touch the Reaper. Touch it. There’s no point not to. You won’t be afraid of dying anymore.

Jona turned around, and stared at the Reaper. She felt like she’d had wine rather than bubbly water; the room seemed to spin, and then float away. She was surrounded by darkness. There was a swirling vortex at the heart of the Reaper, a black hole where a person’s heart would be. She placed her finger just above it; it felt warm, inviting. Irresistible. Then, a mistake on her part: she looked up at the Grim Reaper’s face. She saw the same grotesque smile she’d seen that long ago night in April of 2020. She realized what she was about to do; she screamed. The darkness abated, the room came back into focus, Jona panted on the sofa. Auld Lang Syne played in the background as she started to sob.

She woke up the next morning on the couch, her whole body aching. She looked around, and saw the Grim Reaper floating nearby as always. Jona had come to disregard its presence; it had become background buzz in her life. But in the morning light of a new year, it once again seemed as monstrous as it had during the quarantine spring. She decided that morning she was going to have boiled eggs. She still placed the eggs into the water with care, but tried to not worry about what would happen if she got boiling water on her hands. When the eggs were done, she set them on a plate, and ate them one exquisite, unmashed bite at a time. The gush of yolk in her mouth felt like an awakening; how had she stopped doing this? She still made sure to not take huge bites, but she took bites. She watched a nature documentary, and marveled at the landscapes instead of wondering what lethal viruses lurked amid the trees. She spent a whole day trying not to worry, and she felt…happier. It surprised Jona how much nicer a day could be without thinking about death. She’d nearly forgotten.

That night, when she opened her phone to scroll the news, she clicked on an article about a recent medical advancement; it filled her with hope. Then, without her consent, she felt herself click out of that article, and look at coronavirus death counts. She hadn’t meant to do that…but knew what did. She glared at the Grim Reaper, floating behind her in the dark. Jona felt tired of the worry, tired of the fear, tired of what death was doing to her. She knew she was going to die. But right now? Right now, Jona wanted to live. Without thinking, she punched the Grim Reaper in the face. Rather than cause her instantaneous death, the punch connected with the Reaper, and made it disappear in a small, black cloud of smoke. Jona blinked in shock, and said: "That was easier than I thought…" Her whole body relaxed as she fell into a dreamless sleep.

The next morning, after breakfast, Jona rummaged through her closet to find her old running shoes. They were dusty from disuse, but still wearable. Jona swore they'd never be dusty again. She pulled them on, laced them up, adjusted her mask, and walked out the door. She walked to a local park she hadn't visited in years. She found a spot far away from other people, and took off her mask. She lay down in the snow and listened to the sound of families playing together. She listened, and she breathed, her lungs whooshing in and out. She breathed, and basked in the feeling of being alive.