100 Grim Reapers, Part 1
by Ava Arsaga
One hundred grim reapers wafted along the river valley, toes pointed downward, dragging in the red clay mud. Every mile or so, one or two would break away from the group and venture up a hollow, parting the fog and taking souls as they found them, dragging them helpless below the ground, or hoisting them elated towards the heavens. Up or down. When they came to my drafty home, I was waiting at the front door, pieces of sheet tied in my hair, torn bits of moss coating my teeth, and as they took hold of my wrists, I went willingly forward. I am April Stonebody in life and in death. I am no devil and I am no angel. I believe in neither. I am April Stonebody and I will never leave this hollow.
When my dying was done and my rest was abandoned, I began to live within new boundaries. Because I did not grow tired, I did not rush. Because my work and my wage was subtle existence, I learned to pay attention. And because my web had broken, my days no longer numbered I could replay those days I did have, over and over, natu rally, like the seasons I left behind. Take, for example, my birth. My life did flash before my eyes before death, it is true, but not for the last time. In death, I review it in closer and closer detail as I tease strands of hair loose from my newborn head.
All my life I feared dying would be the hardest thing I’d face, but little did I remember the exhausting and impossible triumph I’d been part of in birth. It happened right here, in this same drafty cabin that I will always call home, even after it crumbles into dirt and is covered by the ocean. I was in an ocean here once before, inside my mother, Caddie. And when it came time for me to gulp the hot, wet July air, I had to swim and push through crevice and lava tube. I had to let my head be compressed, to take a whole new form, my face smashed up against her red coated pelvis, to wait with the patience of the dead on the first day of my life.
God! The balance of knowledge, right there in my tiny head - I forgot what that pristine life felt like incrementally. Each day I learned a new feeling, a new shape of colors, a new face, and I forgot what it was to not know. Eventually I needed a photograph to remind me how I looked as an infant, so thoroughly I faded into life. Maybe if I hadn’t forgotten, I would have been forever preoccupied with returning to that place. I know there were times in my life where pain or joy gripped me with such a tight fist, that had I the option to disintegrate back to infancy, I surely would not have been able to stop myself.
One thing I find myself doing lately is revisiting those times when fear did have that iron grasp. I love to live those moments through now, sometimes knowing the outcomes, sometimes not – my choice now. It is best knowing the outcomes of the little ones, like the sound of someone breathing behind me at night. Those I get to laugh at. But the fear, for example, I felt when my first child left, unscarred and in experienced, that can still be painful – especially since that baby girl is still with the living. It takes all the restraint I can muster not to intervene.
