06 Devouring Death

I'm having a great day at the beach with my girlfriend. The day is amazing, absolutely perfect and I have the perfect one at my side to share it with. The blue sky, the golden wave-washed sands, a green hillside behind us and everywhere in all directions the cries of hungry seabirds and laughter of delighted children. Walking quietly beside me, wearing a towel for a skirt and nothing more, she fits right in for she is all those colors and all those sounds, in one petite package of sexual dynamite.

She took off all her clothes a moment ago, explaining nothing. I was thinking at the time, oh goody sex in public, but she showed no interest, just indicated we should walk. As I was being distracted by her naked body she pulled a towel off a railing where someone had draped it and wrapped it around her hips.

Nobody noticed any of it. Apart from myself, and as we'd walked I had become concerned at her changed nature. How she's usually not like that.

Usually, she's just death.

---

There is something wrong. I noticed it earlier and asked her about it, but either she could not explain with words or else she didn't care to. I'm okay with the latter, death can do whatever she has to do, I'm just along for some kind of ride.

And man, what a ride it's been.

I'm paying no particular attention when she stops us in the path. Death turns and faces the sea. The sea-scented wind blows her hair across her face in strands, which she ignores, her eyes locked on the distant horizon like a widow searching for signs of her husband's ship returning from a long-ago voyage.

"What are you looking for?" I ask.

"It is coming," she says. Then she turns to me and her mouth opens as if she would say something more, but then she stops and bites her lip.

Death, being indecisive on my behalf. I am charmed and terrified in equal parts.

"It's okay," I say taking her gently by the shoulders. "Do what you must. I love you."

I've told her many times how I love her, in the casual flirty way that new lovers do. I had a wonderful day today I love you. You are so smart and funny I really love you. The sex last night was great I love you.

Death I love you and I am not afraid.

She smiles, maybe a little sadly. "I like it when you say that."

"I mean it."

Me, being gallant. She is deeply disturbed by something and I want to support her but I don't know how except that I can tell her I love her, in the vain hope the love of a mortal means anything at all.

"I feel you do," she says. "I don't quite understand it, but I like it and I want you to know that it matters a lot to me that you do."

I am delighted. Everything will be fine.

Death turns out from under my hands and walks down the path alone, looking a little bit withdrawn and sad.

Something is badly wrong for certain.

"Run," she says without inflection.

What? Run why? Is she worried she will suddenly kill her lover? I'm not afraid of death, she can kill me at her whim. I'm about to clear the air on that very point when I hear a sound.

A hiss, or a wet roar. A sliding, churning, swirling of water. Under the cries of the seabirds and the happy shouting of children, some other sound intrudes.

It is a sound from the sea. I pull my attention away from death, still walking slowly away, and my eyes turn instead out onto the water.

The water is pulling back from the shore. Has it ever done that before? Why would it do that? I can see others on the shore looking out at the water, pointing and wondering aloud. Some children take off after it only to slip and fall into the slick mud, tripping over slimy sea creatures. The latter spurt water into the air in alarm, or in the case of fish are flopping around in the rivulets of sea water, seeming as surprised as the humans. It's all wonderous and amazing.

And then suddenly no, it's not.

"Tsunami!" I shout at the top of my lungs. "A wave is coming! Get away from the shore! Get away!"

Nobody moves. Probably nobody heard me but even if they did, they are too mesmerized by the strange behavior of the water. Some are standing up slowly and squinting against the sun, looking out to sea. A few nervous mothers call to their children to come in but the children ignore them. So they pick up their babies, pick up a towel. Some start to walk up the beach in a slow way as if the day had ended and they were going to the car in an orderly way, nothing wrong.

I'm running down to the water. I don't even know why I'm doing it, this is crazy.

"Get away from here! Get to high ground!"

The children nearby look my direction.

"There is a wave coming!" I call toward them. "Run up the beach! Run to high ground!"

Amazingly, they do. It's muddy and slippery, many fall down but they run just because I said so. An older boy runs past me as quick as a cat. Others struggle. I run and grab some by the hand to pull them along.

Further up the beach, panic sets in. Parents calling for their children, the children crying for fear just because the adults are afraid.

But it's no use, death has come for all of them.

I know it in the pit of my stomach. It's why we came here, it's why death was unsettled and remote. I thought it was me, I thought all kinds of stupid things, but all that was wrong. What was the truth was that we were here together because she needed to be here.

That's what she said. She said some things are so bad, some killings so horrible, she needs to witness them herself. The part of her that feels -- that knows, that understands -- that part needs to be present.

The part of her that is, I suddenly realize, still human.

Everyone is screaming, children are frozen in place in terror, lost toddlers crying, mothers are hysterical running for their babes just out of reach. A mass of people is moving slowly up the beach. So slowly, as if the sand were clutching at them holding them back. Way too slowly.

They are not going to make it.

They are going to die.

I look up and see her on the path at the top of the beach, exactly where I left her when I ran down onto the exposed mudflat. Death is standing naked, her arms reaching up and forward, fingers extended, her hair lifted over her head as if on a wind. Death is shouting into the gathering storm, into the coming wave, calling words I cannot understand. Loud and echoing, an incantation bringing ruin and murder or something even more terrible than murder.

Then I see it, in her hands, as if it appeared from the air. Held over her head, in both hands a large -- what did she call it -- scythe. A slim wood handle and a curved metal blade reflecting the sky and sun soon to be obliterated. She's holding it against the coming wave and shouting her spell into the wind. Bringing it to her, or sending it away, or filling it with even more murder than just water would have.

So much power, so much horror. And I realize there is no way she is just killing. This is not an accident on the beach. Death is rampant, and she bis summoning annihilation.

I tear my eyes away from her just in time to turn and see the wave mounting into the sky, towering darkly over the mud and the flopping fish and the people who are all going to die. The sound of the water is furious. The wind is roaring ashore ahead of it. It is also translucent against the sky and I can see, in the water itself, there are people. Hundreds of them, maybe a thousand. Not struggling on the surface of the mounting water, but deeply part of it. Below the green surface, backlit by the sun, looking like kelp fronds caught up in the tow.

Drowned people, people already dead. People long dead and by the hundreds coming for death or because of death, or coming even as she tries to send them away, I have no idea what is happening. But they are here in this wave to destroy the living, to add the newly dead to the inventory of the sea.

Everyone has stopped and turned like me to see this terrible sight, unable to divert their minds away from the thing that will in a split instant more devour them whole.

So this is death, raw and unvarnished. Her world. This is what she is when she is not otherwise being pretty and smart and wise and kind and sexy. When she's really killing -- killing with purpose and on an industrial scale -- this is what she is like.

I don't have time to think anything else about it. This is what she really is 100 times a minute on a slow day and it looks like even the already dead will come to the party.

And you know what, I don't think I'm going to survive this party.

The wave takes me along with the others and there is only chaos and fear when it does.

My last thought in this world. Everyone has a last thought, right? You dig up some regret about unfinished business or something. I don't have any business finished or otherwise, but as I'm being killed by her I realize I was just playing around with death, not really understanding her. I had said I loved her, many times said it, but I'd never really thought about what it was I was loving or why. I regret not having looked deeper than the exterior, that I didn't say more than words of love.

Seriously, what do I know about loving a goddess?

Nothing is what.

The obligatory self-flagellation completed I am dead almost instantly.

Damn it I should have been with her.