03 My Goddess Death

My girlfriend and I are lazing around, back in bed after a refreshing hotel buffet breakfast. It’s raining outside and while snuggling under an umbrella has it’s pleasant moments, we seem to have agreed that we’ll sit this one out.

I grabbed a copy of the New York Times on the way up. From just the front page I learn that while we ate dinner the prior evening a gunman killed six at a mall in Los Angeles. Later while we slept someone else bombed the French embassy in Indonesia, killing 17 and mostly school children. Sickening.

Don’t people have anything else better to do than this? Where are the women in these men’s lives? For they are mostly men. Have they no families? Have they no pleasures? I sense they’ve thrown off the feminine in their lives and then they kill. Little do they know they summon nature’s most potent female to the scene of their desolate madness.

Explains why my girl was gone from bed for a while in the night.

What is the connection you ask?

She’s death.

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“Did you know. There was once a Native American tribe in what is now western Canada who had 17 different words for death.”

Death has cataloged everything there is to know about dying, including the vast and dense anthropology of death cults and rituals. I get the feeling she has promoted a lot of it herself as a way to relieve the tedium of the ages. That, and she’s a little twisted.

“I did not know this,” I reply absently while reading the newspaper in bed. “They sound like your kind of people though.”

“Oh they were.”

I look up. “Wait, you said were. Past tense. What happened?”

“They are all dead now,” she replies. Our eyes meet and she smiles.

Note to self: Death abuses her groupies.

She has suggested in the past that them as yearn for power over death eventually summon her, but only to their sorrow. Fortunately I love death for her body. Well that and her mind and soul, of course. Never for her power. Though being able to skip on bar tabs is pretty sweet.

Since she’s brought up the subject on her own it’s fair game.

“So tell us death, how do you feel about being worshiped?”

Uncharacteristically death appears to consider the question seriously, lacing her hands behind her head on the pillow and staring up at the ceiling over the bed. I put my paper down and look over at her. She is completely naked. The sheets are tangled around her bare legs and her smooth, rich chocolate skin still shines faintly from the exertions of recent love-making.

Death is beautiful, I marvel for about the dozenth time today.

“I approve, generally,” she says suddenly, interrupting my lustful thoughts. “There was an interesting cult to Kalima in the south of India who considered death a potent aphrodisiac. They deployed all manner of death-defying rituals to turn themselves on. Only some of which involved any actual killing. I was amused, as I recall.”

Then she’s smiling over at me like a maniac, blue and green eyes glittering with consuming insanity. Though the green eye is looking more insane than the blue one.

“Oh no you don’t!” I warn her, rolling up a section of the newspaper. “None of your unholy sacrifices for me, witch!”

She flips over and pounces on me like a cat. I bat at her with the newspaper and she snarls and spits in mock ferocity, by degrees forcing me down onto the mattress.

After a short battle she wins. The wise do not struggle unnecessarily with death.

The sacrifices turn out to be kinda fun, actually. I wasn’t too worried. We’ve recently reached that well-worn, comfortable point in a relationship where death and I can be open and honest with each other, expressing our needs without fear of the other being judgmental. It’s a beautiful thing.

----- 

“Worship me!” death commands from where she lay again panting amid a tangle of sheets.

I feel like I'm already doing my best, so I ignore her.

“Not there!” she says hauling me up by the hair to lay next her.

I comb back my hair with my fingers. “Aren’t I allowed to worship the goddess as I feel compelled?”

“No you are not”, she says imperiously, then hitting me with a pillow. “Worship me properly.”

Okay, so this is sounding serious. I prop myself up on an elbow and look down at her. Her chestnut hair lays strewn over the knotted up pillows. Eyes blue and green blaze up at me hotly and just under the soft female exterior that I can barely manage to tear my attention from, the dark will of an immortal smolders.

I think about my situation only a moment. A part of me fears death of course, I’m not stupid. But the greater part of me trusts her. Death may take me, if that is her will. I accept her will because I have absolute faith that she will do exactly what she has to, neither more nor less. I can only hope she will respect what I was after she is done killing me. To ensure this, she will have to take me as a man and not as a fawning fear-slave.

“No,” I say down at her.

She swims up to her knees, her hair falling wildly neglected about her face. She looks suddenly insane and murderous.

“Worship me, mortal,” she commands dangerously. “Fear me or I will surely kill you.”

“You will kill me eventually anyway,” I retort calmly. “I’m not going to massage your ego on the way out the door.”

“— much,” I hastily add.

Her eyes are laughing. This could go either way.

Death crawls across the covers towards me, places her small hands on both sides of my head, and drags me slowly to her lips. She is really strong and her pull is as if she were bolted to the floor and not sitting sideways on the bed. I suddenly realize she’s been holding back all this time.

I have no idea what death is up to. Is this her at rough play? Or is she in a full raging psychotic episode? Or is she instead establishing another kind of limit between us? And if so, what does death know about relationship that a mortal woman cannot? Could be lots.

Or could be nothing at all. Maybe death wings it right along with the best of them.

Our mouths meet and she closes her eyes and kisses me softly, our lips just brushing. I’m busy wondering what the real kiss of death must feel like when she suddenly releases me and then falls away backwards like her tether had been cut, to lay on her back bouncing among the sheets, just a woman again.

And she’s laughing, convulsed with delight. I smile over at her, my heart pounding loudly in my head, wondering what the last 90 seconds were really about.

“You pass,” she says at last, breathless.

----- 

Behold death. Crazy at times, gentle and serene at others. Just a little insecure. Demanding, furious and destructive, and then summoning down all earthly pleasures with her ringing female laughter.

Strange that all I know of woman I would learn here. Laughing and playing and living with death.