Death but with Bubble Tea
Like so many stories, this one starts on a warm night that feels like summer. The sun is just setting on the horizon, the sky filled with drab, milky oranges and purples with eventual navy hovering above it all. Jupiter hangs just above a brighter Venus. No stars are visible; they’ve all been drained of their brilliance thanks to bright gas station signs blaring cost in cash and credit.
But then again, how to choose when a story starts? Our beloved protagonist sits at a gunmetal table sipping on bubble tea, but he didn’t just appear there out of nowhere. Before this decent, Thai tea-flavored bubble tea, he drove his car to the shop; he has history. A past. But the past is a place where he never spends much time. Ask him to recount favorite birthdays or tales of his childhood, and he can’t. Time stretches back before this night all the way to the start of the Universe. Maybe that’s in fact where this story starts.
Tonight, as always, the story’s protagonist instead stares down the barrel of his future. He’ll mark 40 revolutions around the sun this year. An impending mid-life crisis? It’s hard to have one with so little to his name by choice. At the same time, he’s achieved so many of the things he set out to do. Overseas travel, a master’s degree, a successful career, the lifestyle of a digital nomad. He’s made a difference in his community, but is any of it ever really enough? New goals keep needing to made, new plans woven, new webs entangled in the thoughts and ideas that possess him at each moment. They draw him along of their own agency, and maybe he just follows. “What’s next?” he asks them.
He puts his headphones in and looks out into the darkening night. Raised in the frigid north, the warmth of a Florida evening in February still feels novel to him. Reflections of the fact that he’s finally experiencing heat in what should be an icy cold winter filled with snow and the Wild Hunt. Another goal accomplished. His tea tastes milky and mildly sweet, and the magenta straw is so wide it’s almost obscene.
He searches for a prayer and thinks of the Death card that started this year off for him, the first card he flipped on New Year’s Day to gauge the shakeout of 2023. Death was not fucking around that day. So much of what he had known just mere hours before had been cut down with Kronos’s foreboding scythe. This Saturn’s Day, he looks to Death for holy inspiration, and he pulls the reading up on his phone.
There stands Death above the black, burned Earth in the Marseille deck. Hunched over and possibly the worst-drawn skeleton the World has ever seen. Hands and heads of peasants and royalty alike scattered across the ground. Not all is lost, though. Yellow grasses sprout from the eviscerated bodies; the cycle of life continues, and Death is above it all harvesting and reaping. Reaping and harvesting. Turning itself into what comes next. Time and Death must exist together on this Saturn’s Day, thirteen and unnamed.
Maybe that’s the prayer, he thinks. All change needs Death including whatever is just around the corner for him. Every moment is filled with choice, and every choice leaves a little death in its wake trapped in the medium of Time. All he wants is to write and make friends with plants, but the systems and structures his European ancestors have created leave him and so many others wanting. Desire for something else rips him open every day, and he’s left bleeding on the altar of unfilled everything despite having achieved so much. A walking talisman of Venus, she tears open his chest and feeds on his aching black hole of a yearning heart laid bare to the world. She watches from the horizon chased by Jupiter above in the now-black sky. Meanwhile, Saturn sits just below the Sun under the edge of the world, and he lets the chase continue.
Tonight, he calls in Death. A Thanatos, not Kronos, though Kronos lends his weapon to what becomes of Death in Europe. The man stews in all these myths, but do they make his life better or do they just take and take and feed and harvest on his story? Is that not just the natural order of things? He only wants to feed the Earth, the Universe, the forces that move everything.
He draws a symbol of a scythe on the ground with his sandal and notices that it looks just like a lower case r without the tail at the top. Or maybe the rune Laguz, all sharp and cornered. He just spent some time wandering through the frozen wilds of Midgard in Fimbulwinter with an ax for a boomerang after all. Prophecies avoided and different choices were made. Can he do the same with his Tarot reading or does he merely need to make its prediction palatable?
A scythe slices through the air in front of him and out steps Death from the open wound in consensus reality, oblivion and darkness behind them. The spirit is dressed — of course — in a black robe. In their right hand, they hold a scythe that looks to be made of obsidian. It sparkles darkly under the florescent lights above. In their left hand, Death holds the severed head of an arrogant man obsessed with feet for some reason, his face forever frozen in shock, his skin and lips a pale, grayish blue. Death holds the head out as if it is the guiding lantern from the Hermit, and the neck drains blood on the cement below. The man sitting in his chair gawks a bit at the entity that has appeared before him. He called, but he didn’t expect a response. He looks at the severed head and asks “This isn’t me, right? He doesn’t look like me. This better not be some Ebenezer Scrooge thing where I’m dealing with the ghost of Christmas future here.”
Death stares and offers him no answer. So much for not dealing with Dickens’s leftovers. The man stares back at Death. He expected a skull set back in the hood, but instead all he sees is blackness and the faintest glow of three eyes. The two continue to have a staring match simply because the man doesn’t know what to do or what to say.
“Can I buy you some tea?” he finally says. Death continues to stare. “I suppose I’ll take that as a no.” The man notices that where he traced the scythe on the ground is cracked with blackness. “Let’s take a walk,” he offers instead.
The man and Death begin to walk through the parking lot to the sidewalk. The bubble tea shop is on a busy street, and cars blaze by under crooked street lamps. The two walk in silence, a trail of blood from the severed head painting the sidewalk behind them. Death drags the scythe along the ground so that its tip scratches at the pavement. The man is still unsure of exactly what the fuck to do now that he has Death’s company, and he knows how utterly absurd and surreal the situation is. They pass unlit storefronts, more parking lots, gas stations, and billboards un-ironically advertising emergency rooms and personal injury lawyers. He wonders if the spirit can read them and appreciate the situation.
For the man, the silence hangs awkwardly in the air. He can hear the drops of blood hitting the ground between breaks in traffic. It’s a sickly sound, all thick and coated. How much blood is in that head? he thinks to himself. He turns to Death and asks “How much blood is in that head?” He can’t see Death’s face, but the man almost senses a smirk. Again, no response.
“I suppose it’s fitting that you don’t speak back,” the man says. “If you did, that could change the future, and I don’t think that’s your game or even your duty. I’d like answers, but I suppose so does every single person who’s ever met you. And I guess we all get to meet you one day or another.” They continue walking again in silence.
"Maybe I’m more just filled with questions, and maybe that’s just it,” he says some time later. “I can’t expect Death to hold my answers. You’re just a question yourself. The question. You’re subject to the rules of this weird universe just like the rest of us. You were birthed into existence when life was born, and you’ll have to die when life is gone. You’re only as eternal as life is. Who will be there for you when it’s your time?” The man thinks some more. “But maybe I’m giving too narrow a definition to life here. Earth’s a person, and stars change and die. I’d like to think that you’re there for them when their lives finally end, too.” He pauses for a moment. “I wonder what you look like to them.”
He returns to a thought from a moment ago. “Still, though. Who will be there to guide you after it’s all gone? When it’s finally your time? If you need someone, I’d like to be the one. Even if I have to exist through the end of the universe, it feels like a kind thing to offer. You’ve guided so many to their next steps,” he says. “Do you have anyone?”
Of course, Death does not respond, and the two begin to walk back to the tea shop. A voice sings in the man’s his head: “What does it mean if it all means nothing?” He never took his headphones out. A question for a prayer, he thinks. A fitting synchronicity: a song about Death as the soundtrack to his grim invocation and their walk together. Time counts down, and he knows that he won’t have Death’s missing ear forever. He feels a little sad knowing that he had this time with Death and will be walking back to his car with only more questions. Jupiter and Venus are both gone, and the sky is now black emptiness despite the fact that it’s filled with billions of galaxies and planets and dying stars he just can’t see.
Did he accomplish anything? Did he even need to?