In this life, I was born girl-shaped.
My mother didn’t know how to read. When I started speaking dead languages to her, a little after my tenth birthday, she looked at me like I was speaking in tongues. Our neighbor died — they could smell him stinking in the narrow hallway — and I went in with some of the other kids and took some of his stuff. Some books, a small chess set. You were always good at chess. After I find you, you can teach me the rules all over again.
When my mother found out I could read, she tried to smother me in my sleep.
She was crying, which was why I woke up in time to fight her off. I kicked her in her belly and ran. By that time, I already remembered what it was like to kill someone, but I let her live. You’re the one who told me it was bad luck to kill mothers.
In this life, the world wasn’t kind to lost children, not that it ever has been. The city I was born in had sludge in the drinking water, and the sky was so full of smoke from the wildfires that a lot of babies choked to death just from crying too much. The kids who survived scavenged for food in the dark coal city, breaking their backs for the factories and the mines, or they got lucky enough to get into an orphanage where at least they had a bed and two meals a day.
I wasn’t born lucky in this life, though. So I watched the orphanage girls from the other side of the fence as they milled in their little concrete yard for some sunshine, their sweet pink lungs protected from the air with fogged-up breathers.
I was pretty close to dying, at that point. I could feel myself getting sick. Soon I’d be sludge. It would have been fine, except I wanted to live long enough to see you.
So I waited until they all started going back inside, and there was only one left, a girl about my size. Her arm was wrapped in gauze, stained in dark splotches, like it had started festering. She walked like she was dizzy.
It was easy enough to climb the fence and get my hands around her neck.
When it was done, I switched out our clothes and hid her body where scavengers wouldn’t come. I made sure she was comfortable, that her death was dignified. Dignity was always important to you. Then I took her breather mask and wrapped my arm in her gauze and I stole her life.
You saved my life, once. You didn’t even know it was me. That was just how good you were.
I had been looking for you in one of the old cities, the ones that were just saltwater marsh now. The ocean hadn’t reached them yet, but that didn’t mean the salt hadn’t crept its way inland, turned everything alkaline.
I fell into the marsh. I was born a slight thing in that life, barely any meat on my bones. I remember the lives when I was born fearless and huge, when I was born warrior. I barely had any strength left in me to fight off the mud. The earth tried its best to smother me in its decay that day, and it almost won.
You took my arm and pulled me out. You said it wasn’t my time to die yet. Do you remember? You wore your hair long in that life — you liked to braid it out of your eyes, your fingers twisting in the dark. I decided not to tell you who I was, just so you’d tried to save me again. But when you finally recognized me, of course, you tried to kill me anyway.
When I was old enough and I had my strength back, I left the orphanage. Some other girl who needed it would take my bed and my place, and I would not be missed.
There were lots of places you could be. When I searched for you, I always liked to start at shrines.
Yes, even in this life, this world still had its shrines. It still had its pilgrims too. It was simple enough to join a group of them.
It wasn’t an easy journey. Only the desperate preyed on pilgrims, but as there were many desperate, this didn’t help matters much. I kept my head down, and when we said the prayers to you aloud, I tried not to smile.
I liked my group of pilgrims. I made sure all of us survived on our way to the shrines. That’s not the way you would have done it.
One thing I loved about this life was its jungles. Out of the saltwater and sludge, out of the toxic waste and the oxidized steel fossils of skyscrapers, there grew trees. That’s where your shrine was. I never asked you about it, but I’m sure you hated it. When that shrine was built, there was nothing there but wasteland. You were the biggest thing around — the only thing around. They built you sitting cross-legged, your huge shadow stretching across the emptiness, your head bent down towards the pilgrims.
In return, you gave them swift deaths. That’s how the prayers went, anyway.
In this life, there were birds perched on your bent head. You were shaded by trees that had grown taller than you, their vines draped across your shoulders. I sat in your cupped hands, my feet dipped in the pool of gathered rainwater, minnows swarming beneath a film of green. God of Death, holding life in your hands. I bet that pissed you off.
Where were you? I would wait here, as long as I could.
I liked to talk to strangers who reminded me of you, just in case that was who you were in this life. The crouched pilgrim had ears that stuck out, just like yours many lives ago. The thief who thought I was an easy mark held a knife just like you did. The graveseller’s eyes followed me as I passed, sizing me up for my own grave, and I couldn’t help thinking about your hands on me.
But you weren’t anywhere I looked. Every stranger stared at me with confused eyes and not a small amount of fear when I called them by your name.
You weren’t at any of your shrines, any of your haunts. Have you gone missing from the world? We were already the last of our kind. Did you leave me without even saying goodbye?
You never came to your shrine. I spent years of this life looking for you, and just as I was going to start a war in your name, there you were, sitting by a river with a fishing rod in your hands.
I knew it was you. No one fished in this life anymore — the water was too foul to trust anything that grew in it. But you always did like to fish. The lure, the hook, the gutting. You liked the elegance of it.
When I sat next to you, you looked at me startled, and propped your fishing rod between your knees so that you could speak to me with your hands. In this life, your mother was scared of you just as mine was scared of me, but instead of trying to kill you, your family cut out your tongue.
What do you want, you signed. You didn’t recognize me. I smiled.
“I want to know what you’re doing.”
I don’t have anything for you to steal. Your hands were beautiful in every life. I loved to see them speak.
I widened my eyes with innocence. “I don’t want to steal from you.”
You looked at me with suspicion. Then what?
“Can you actually catch any fish with that thing?”
Your breath huffed out. I’d rarely been able to make you laugh, not for thousands of lives, but maybe one of these days I’d get it right. Sometimes, if it’s quiet, you signed.
“Oh, I get it, I’m disturbing you,” I said, propping my head in my hands. Now I was leaning in too close. You looked like you were ready to bolt at any moment. You could use the fishing rod as a weapon, fight me off. Fighting was never your first instinct, like mine was, but you were good at it. “I’ll just ask you one last question, and then I’ll be off.”
Ask it already.
“I seem to have misplaced my name. Would you happen to know it?” I asked.
The expression on your face when you realized it was me was worth every year of this life, every lost lead, this whole damn quest. You made a snarling noise and pushed me into the river. Luckily, in this life, I still remembered how to swim.
Look around you — this world is full of death, and you are god of it. The pilgrims raised you up, they called you from the bones of mass graves, and all that wordless fury swept over the world, nearly leveling it. How many of your lives did you spend on that reckoning before you finally learned mercy?
Eventually, I pulled myself out of the water, and fell at your feet.
Why do you always find me, you signed. You know how this ends.
“I just can’t get enough of you, sweetheart,” I said.
You crouched over me, studying my face. We looked different in this life, but we were the same age. I liked the color of your eyes in this life. Did you like the color of mine?
You forgot your name again. Why can’t you ever remember?
“It slips away every time I die, so really, I feel like this is on you.” I sat up, wiping river sludge off my clothes. “If you only tell me my name, I’ll be on my way.”
No, you won’t. With only your hands and the guarded expression on your face to go by, it was hard to tell whether it was a threat or just a statement of fact. We both knew that I wouldn’t leave your side until you decided to kill me.
“No, I won’t.” I pulled out my chess set, and shook river water out of it. You sighed at me, sat across from me by the river bank, and began to set up the pieces.
In this life, you let me grow old with you. Wrinkles folded one by one at the corners of our eyes, and on cold mornings, I could hear your bones creaking alongside mine. You went gray before I did, in this life — you blamed me for that.
Every night, I asked you “Is it time?”, and with your hands, you signed, Not yet, until I knew it by the feeling of your fingers moving against my skin.
I was with you for twenty years of this life before it started to rain. And not the refreshing summer rains I remembered from many lives ago. This rain would be a calamity upon a world already far too familiar with calamities. One morning, you looked out at the darkening sky and told me that the flood would take our house. We had built it right by that river where we had met, and the riverbanks would soon be overwhelmed. Our little house wouldn’t stand a chance.
“That’s fine,” I said. “We’ll build another one somewhere else.”
I don’t think anyone will be building houses again for a long time.
“I’m pretty sure the ceiling of the sky could be falling in and fire could be pouring through, and someone, somewhere, will be building a house. That’s just what people do. How many times have you and I seen the world end? And haven’t there always been houses?”
You looked at me strangely. Outside, the wind began to howl.
Yes, you signed, after a time. I suppose there have always been houses.
“We might not weather this storm,” I said. “But someone will.”
You put down your hands, so I went back to my knitting. Knitting was one of the few things my mother had taught me in this life, and I liked to remember her by it. I also liked to gift you the products of my labor — you wore each of my lopsided hats and lumpy scarves with such solemn dignity that it was impossible to laugh at you.
By the time we went to sleep that night, the windows were being lashed with torrents of rain, and our roof leaked in several places.
“Is it time?” I said.
Soon.
Before the sun rose the next morning, the flood broke down our door and the river swept in. We stood in the middle of our small house, our belongings falling and shattering, this life we had built washing away before our eyes. I couldn’t help but blame you for it, hate you for it. But, God of Death, I still held you close.
“What’s my name?” I asked.
Even with the rains rushing in, even with the roaring of the storm deafening us to anything else, your lovely hands never faltered in their measured pace, signing each word.
Take a deep breath.
You pushed us both down into the water. I could not speak anymore, but you could.
God of Survivors. I’ll see you in the next life.