The Angel of Death

                The first time she saw him, he wore a cloak of black, with a collar that exposed nothing below his eyes. Underneath the floor-sweeping cape, a black tuxedo could be noticed. He came to her one night, while she lay in bed, in a room that reeked of bleach and urine. The beeping of the monitors continued steadily as this strange man entered her room. Everything about him was sheer blackness, even his large wings.

                At the time of this encounter, she was so sick she thought nothing of his appearance, or even his presence in her room. The large black angel wings did not even seem strange to her. She just laid, a wasted body, in the hospital bed, awaiting death. When the man walked in, she knew that it had finally arrived for her.

                “Are you here to kill me?” she asked in a whisper, which was all she could manage to speak in. The energy had been drained from her body. She was no longer a strong twenty-three-year-old woman. She was a ruin, a prune, a lifeless doll with the thoughts of a philosopher.

                “Not yet,” he said to her, with surprise in his eyes. He sat on the chair next to her bed. “I’m the angel of death, and I will be taking you to heaven. But first, I must ask you to hold on a little longer. I have business I must take care of before I leave this place.”

                She drifted off to sleep. The angel watched her for a few seconds before disappearing.

                When she awoke, it was morning, and the pain was back.  She pressed the button to alert the nurse she was in need of help. It was only then she noticed she was alone. Had she dreamt the angel up? Was she that impatient to die? It is a sad existence, having no family, no friends. Dying of cancer.

                Her pain vanished with a fresh morphine drip, and she sat in a euphoric-like stupor for a few hours. Then, a shadow entered her room, and she turned to see the angel. Was she asleep again? She rarely dreamed of the same thing twice. She believed she was awake.

                “Penelope,” the man called out softly. She was unaware of who Penelope was; the wasted body went by the name of Renee. He looked at her, and sat by her again. However, the angel did not even see the woman in the bed. “Penelope,” he called again. Soft, so soft, was his tone, one would almost think this dark angel was in love.

                His eyes stared through the wall, as if he were watching something else. A movie, perhaps, he was watching. One from long ago; a memory or a feeling that can only be comprehended by the rememberer or the feeler. Renee watched this with drooping eyes, and she slid off into a short sleep.

                The angel looked down at the young woman. The woman had her entire life before her, but could not live it. Her expiration date was coming fast, and the only one who could stop it was the angel himself. However, there was no reason to do so, other than to talk to Penelope.

                On the third floor of Valley Hospital, a woman swaddled a crying baby and hugged it close to her chest with a low coo and a smile. She placed the innocent bundle back into the incubator and stood up straight. She looked at her reflection in the window of the viewing room, thinking thoughts of a man she knew long ago.

                Three floors higher, a man in all black was watching a young girl sleep. The thoughts could not stop from passing through his head that she was a short 23 years into her life. She was nothing more than a baby, and here she was, dying and alone. The girl, Renee, was strong. She would cry for herself every so often; cry for the dreams left unaccomplished, and love never felt. She would cry because she was plain afraid of tomorrow. She would cry because there was no one else to cry for her.

                The angel watched as tears fell from her sleeping eyes, and he almost reached out to wipe them.

                She awoke.

                Renee looked at the man whose hand was halfway between them, and she became afraid. It is one thing to beg for death; it is another to receive it.

                “No,” she whispered.

                “It’s not time yet. Don’t be afraid,” the angel answered.

                “Will I get better?”

                “No.”

                “Why are you like this?”

                “Like what?”

                Renee thought a moment. “This. Angel of death. Why?”

                The angel smirked, but his mouth was hidden by his collar. “Why, indeed? It’s always been this way.”

                “How long is always?”   

                “Since the dawn of man,” the angel said, fidgeting almost nervously. “It is for this reason I came into being. Myself, and many others. We were meant to do this job. We save souls from the pains you know too well.”

                Renee smiled weakly. “What are you? Some sort of Shakespeare?”

                The angel let out a surprised chuckle. “Does that please you? I can be Shakespeare for you.”

                Renee shrugged gently. “Why would you be anything for me?”

                The angel moved closer to her, and was suddenly leaning over her. He held himself above her by holding onto the sides of the bed, never once coming into contact with her or even daring to touch her through the blanket. She noticed how broad his shoulders and chest were: how large he was in comparison to her. For a moment, she was afraid. He got closer and closer, until she thought their noses would brush. They stared at each other in the eyes. Renee noticed his eyes flicker down- to her lips? Then he suddenly looked terrified, and he disappeared into thin air.

                She was beginning to get tired again. When Renee got tired, she became completely fatigued. Moving became impossible; she felt like lead. She would begin to dream as she was thinking to herself. There was nothing that could keep her out of sleep. Soon, she was dozing off again.

                A dream interrupted Renee’s black sleep. In the dream, she was in the maternity ward sitting on the ceiling fan in the hallway. There were people walking down the shiny tiled corridor. A nurse with a clipboard in her hand knocked on the door of a room, and let herself in. She had pink scrubs and honey-color hair that she held up in a bun. The light wrinkles on her face betrayed her age, but her bright green eyes and sweet smile made her seem winsome. Suddenly, Renee was following the nurse into the room.

                “I’m Penelope, and I’m your nurse,” the scrub-clad woman said to a new mother. “Everything is going to be fine. The baby is just having a few simple kidney problems. Nothing some time in the sun won’t fix.” She smiled at the mother, who let out a few tears.

                “Oh, thank God. Can we go home now?” the mother asked. She looked up at a man-- her husband?-- as she spoke, as if she was talking to him.

                A young girl of about six ran over and hugged the woman in bed, yelling, "yay, Mommy, yay!"

                “Yes, you can leave tomorrow," the nurse said, smiling at the child. "We want to monitor him one more day, just to be on the safe side.  Just take these pamphlets and tomorrow you can sign these forms…” Penelope continued to talk, but Renee opened her eyes.

                It was night. She had slept for several hours. The morphine drip must have been changed, because she felt no pain. To her left, there was a thick, dark shadow.

                “I had a dream,” she said, turning to the shadow.

                “Of Penelope,” he answered. “I know. I sent that dream to you. That is the woman you must stay alive for. After you die, I will leave this place and I may never come back. I must use you to get to her, to pass on a message.”

                “What message?” Renee asked.

                “You’ll see when the time comes.”

                With a deep breath, Renee fought to say, “did you love her?” The words tired her out. She was not used to speaking anymore.

                “Yes. I loved her.” The angel looked at his dying acquaintance, and continued. “We met twenty years ago. She had been in an accident; she was comatose.  When I was sent to collect her, she spoke to me with her thoughts. I sat by her bedside, and she introduced me to her family, who mourned her around her bed. She showed no fear towards me. I have been feared all but two times: once by her, and once,” he paused, “by you”.

                “I was ready,” Renee said, realizing how morbid her words were.

                “Nobody is ever ready for death. You just understand that it must happen.”

                “What’s on the other side?”

                “That’s confidential.”

                What do people do when they see you? Renee thought to herself, but she was too fatigued to speak. She wished the angel could read minds, but believing he could not, she just closed her eyes to go to sleep.

                “They close their eyes, mostly,” the angel said. “We try to not give them reaction time. Yours was a special case, and Penelope was comatose. She couldn’t react. We communicated telepathically, such as you and I are now.”

                Renee opened her eyes and looked the angel over once. On his lapel was a dead Easter lily.

                Why do you have a dead lily?

                “After days of talking with Penelope, I knew I could not let her die. I took the life of a baby on the maternity ward of this very hospital. It was a premature thing; it was meant to grow up a fragile child and die at the tender age of six of pneumonia. To fill my quota, I killed the child. In grief, I went for a walk, and came upon Easter lilies in the chapel. I picked one, and it died in my hands. I pinned it to my collar, to remind myself to never take an innocent life again. To remind me that I, even I, can be in love.” The angel looked down at the brown petals of the Easter lily that had been pinned on his collar for over twenty years. “From there, she woke up. We talked more, and she got stronger. We fell in love, and we could have been happy together, but she recovered completely, and one day, she could no longer see or hear me. But I’m back because-“

                The angel continued to talk. His tone became very low and sad, and Renee’s mouth occasionally twitched in emotion. The angel’s eyes were animated. Renee could feel his emotions through the genuine way he spoke as he recounted his tale of love and loss.

                “I’m here for that. To set it straight. I’m not evil.”

                Renee smiled. “I know you’re not,” she whispered.

                Once again, the angel almost reached out to touch Renee, and pulled his hand away quickly, with a pained look on his face.

                Renee fell asleep soon after. The angel did not move from her room. No one but the dying could see an angel of death. Penelope was no longer dying. He was an invisible force to her. He looked at Renee. At least she made him feel as if he did in fact exist.

                Soon, Renee opened her eyes. The angel smiled in spite of his stoic guise, but the smile died away instantly. Her eyes were wide, and her mouth agape as she let out a scream.

                Pain rushed through Renee’s ruined body: pulsing and stabbing pain. Suddenly, she began kicking and flailing, a seizure ripping through her. The angel stood up, panicked, as nurses rushed in and pushed the tiny body onto its side.

                “It’s a grand mal,” one nurse shouted out the door, and more nurses entered, followed by a doctor in a long white lab coat.

                “Get a morphine drip! She’ll be in extreme pain when she wakes up!”

                “She’s bleeding; she bit off part of her tongue!”

                “It’s stopping. Do you have the morphine?”

                “We need to sew up her tongue!”

                The angel backed up into the corner. He did not know that not everyone is as lucky as Penelope when they live past their expiration date. Renee was supposed to have died the day before.

                On the third floor, a mother getting ready to leave with her new baby realized her older daughter, a six-year-old named Kira, was missing.

                “Kira?” the woman yelled. When there was no answer, the mother stopped the nurse in pink scrubs that had talked to her the day before. “Please help me,” she said. “My daughter is six, blonde hair, blue eyes. She’s missing.”

                “I saw a little girl like that go onto the elevator. I think it stopped at level 6,” a man said from a couch in the waiting area. He pointed to the elevators immediately to his left.

                “You stay and rest with the baby,” Penelope said, her heart skipping a beat with fear of leaving the floor she was so used to. “I’ll find her.”

                The frantic mother was led to a couch by the helpful man, and Penelope left the maternity ward.

                She had not been off the maternity ward in fifteen years. She had not ventured into where he may be, not since she had met Marc.

                She got off the elevator and immediately noticed a small girl matching Kira’s appearance. She was staring into a room that nurses were running in and out of.

                “Kira? “ The nurse called out softly. The little girl turned to her, and pointed through the open doorway.

                “Why does that man look like that?” the little girl asked.

                “Like what, honey?” Penelope asked, walking over.

                “Why does that man have wings?”

                Penelope stopped in her tracks. With bravery in her heart, she forced her feet to move, and she looked into a room, where a woman was sitting up in bed with blood dripping down her chest.

                “It hurts,” the woman was telling the nurses.

                “Wait for the morphine to work,” they urged.

                The woman let out a pained moan, and the nurses left her.

                Penelope walked in.

                The angel gasped, and Renee followed his eyes to the honey-haired woman in pink scrubs. Kira rushed into the room and over to the angel. She reached out to touch him, and he dodged her pudgy fingers.

                “Don’t touch him!” Penelope yelled.

                Renee turned to Penelope. The tip of Renee’s tongue had been bitten off in her seizure, and her words were slow and slurred, a result of the pain.

                “He says,” she began, “that it’s ok. He knows, and he’s happy for you. Marry Marc. He says it’s ok. He says he’s not evil, and that he would never hunt down the man you love. He says to be happy, and he will be happy, also.”

                Tears formed in Penelope’s eyes. They dripped slowly down her face and off of her chin. Her fingers covered her gaping mouth.

                The angel reached out to Renee, who weakly reached back. She closed her eyes and smiled as his hand touched hers. Her body rested with the force of gravity. Penelope looked at the dead woman. She was surprised to notice how pretty she was; short red hair and a neat row of freckles across her cheeks, faded with sickness. She had porcelain skin and small, dainty features.

                Suddenly, there was a light. Penelope looked into the bright, but not blinding, light. She saw a man with large black wings and the woman in the bed, no longer wasted and lifeless, but full of life with her bright hazel eyes and a smile of one who has finally been rescued.   

                The man flattened his collar, exposing his hooked nose and thin lips. He had dark tan skin and light brown hair, with big brown eyes. He was very tall and muscular. His jaw was very pronounced, but not absurdly so. His fingers were long and masculine and attached to long arms. He had long, thick legs, ending in large feet.

                Penelope looked him over a few times. She remembered things from so long ago, things she had almost convinced herself were a dream. A feeling of love washed over her, and she was in love with the phantom standing before her once again. When she noticed his finger intertwined with another’s, she felt no resentment. She remembered the man whose proposal of marriage she had just rejected with a wince of pain. She and Marc still loved each other. She knew she was not too late yet.

                “Renee, did you know that you’ve fulfilled my quota?” the angel asked the girl by his side.

                “Quota?” she whispered through habit. She giggled and touched her throat. “Quota?” she yelled this time, and became embarrassed.

                The angel laughed. “Yes. I’m done. I can go with you. I’ve completed my job of reaping souls.”

                And before the two of them, as if they shattered, his black wings turned to white, and he turned to Renee.

                “Ready?” he asked.

                She nodded, too nervous to speak. Wings burst forth from her back, and the two of them soared through the ceiling.

                When the light disappeared, Penelope looked down. Through her blurred vision, she noticed something on the ground. She blinked away her tears, and noticed an Easter lily, the one that had been pinned on the angel’s lapel. The petals were a pure white.

                Three days later, a honey-haired woman stood up and blessed herself. She looked into the casket of a young woman, plucked in the middle of her prime.

                The funeral home was empty. As the body was loaded into the hearse, her car and her fiancé’s car were the only two in the funeral procession.

                The two threw dirt onto the casket after a short few words by an elderly priest. The two walked away, Marc’s arm over his wife-to-be’s shoulders.

                “This may be a morbid place to talk about it, but have you started thinking about the wedding?” he asked her.

                “Only a little. I know what kind of flowers I want,” she replied as the wind picked up.

                 “Already? What kind?”

                “Easter lilies.”