The Many Stages of Courting Death

by Gerard Bowlby, ed. by James Hanna

Oscar Bernardino

“GASP!”

Jill sprang forward from her seat, her chest heaving with a sudden panic. It was as though she had woken from a nightmare. A sense of confusion and fogginess surrounded her.

“Where am I?” She looked around and reclaimed her surroundings.

“That’s right, I’m on the train.” She placed her hand to her forehead, scolding herself for the lapse of memory.

“I-I must have dozed off. What a foolish thing to do on a train. I might have been mugged or worse….”

As she sat the silence commanded her attentions. The usual clatterings of a train in motion were quite strikingly absent. Instinctively, she looked out of the window only to find her faint reflection silhouetted against the inky darkness beyond.

“Are we in a tunnel?” she wondered. “Just how long we’ve been sitting here?”

Jill looked down through the light of the train car at her watch, a final gift from a now failed engagement. Its hands were as stationary as the train.

“Oh, of course it would be broken.”

Pulling the watch off her wrist she shook it, listening for a sign of life. But despite her fervent efforts, the timepiece remained silent. She inspected the watch, noticing the inscription written above its face, Time stands still for no one. The irony of the inscription and the timepiece’s malfunction caused Jill to yell out, “What a horrible joke!” She then threw the watch blindly down the aisle hearing it land with a metallic clink.

Jill quickly turned and looked back out the window frustrated with how upset she was getting. It was only now that she noticed, through the aisle track lights, that not only was there an absence of noise, but that the train car was seemingly empty.

She looked around the car. She slowly stood from her seat at the back of the car and began ambling toward the front of the darkened train. As she passed the half-way point, a lone ceiling light at the very front of the car came on. Jill watched as an outstretched arm descended back to its seat of origin. The white light casting a silhouette of a seated figure facing away from her.

Realizing she was not alone, Jill began to retreat to her seat, when a voice called out, “Madam.”

The voice, emanating from the seated figure, was a deep baritone, possessing an otherworldly cadence.

“I believe I have something you discarded.”

Jill turned to see the figure extend its arm into the aisle. As its hand opened, the watch, which she had carelessly thrown into the darkness, lay in its palm. A cage of skeletal fingers closed over the watch and the arm returned back to the seat. Though she should have felt a sense of unease, Jill instead felt a growing calmness as she slowly walked towards the figure.

Death was sitting patiently when he felt Jill’s presence next to him. He slowly turned his head. His dark, hollow eye sockets met the vibrant eyes of the curious woman. His mouth opened slightly, as if he were about to introduce himself, but stopped short, his breath taken away by something inexplicable about her.

“Sir? Are you all right?” Jill asked with a smile.

Death stared silently into her eyes. Before he could respond, the train once more began to move. The lights came back on and a glow began emanating through the windows. The voice of the conductor rang out:

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are now approaching our final stop. Please collect your belongings and prepare to disembark.”

Death gestured with his hand, inviting Jill to sit with him.

“Why thank you,” Jill said as she sat in the seat across from Death facing him. “Honestly I was feeling a bit lonely back there. It’s nice to have some company for a bit, isn’t it?”

Death nodded.

Jill told him about her grief over her fiancé, about how they had met on a train so long ago and how he had selfishly decided to end it on the very same train earlier that evening and left her to return to an empty house, alone.

“He chose his work over me. I just couldn’t believe it. He just up and left after giving me that blasted watch,” she said as her moment of anger subsided to grief and tears. “And of course it didn’t work! But I suppose it was a fitting gift since I never could make anything work in our relationship.”

Death comforted her, saying she could do better. She was captivated by his kindness and understanding nature. In the short time they had spoken, Jill felt as though a light had cut through the dark gloom. As the train came to a stop at Jill’s station, a bond had inexplicably formed between them.

“Thank you for listening to the problems of a total stranger, even though you did not have to. I think you’re a decent gentlemen and there’s a terrible shortage of them nowadays,” Jill said as she stood to leave. “This may be a touch forward but perhaps if you’re free, give me a call sometime. Perhaps we could even discuss you next time!” Jill handed Death her business card. He took the card and smiled as Jill turned and left the train.

Death sat there for what seemed like an eternity when he was suddenly brought back to reality by a sharp and persistent ticking. He looked down to see the golden watch Jill had cast away still in his hand. Death examined it. The hands were soon to strike midnight. He looked at the inscription upon the watch: Time stands still for no one.

Reflecting on the message momentarily, he chuckled at the quaint but familiar saying. Using his powers and with a significant effort, Death slowed the watch’s gears to a complete stop, a minute before midnight. He then placed the watch and the card in his pocket and promptly left the train.

***

Death and Jill’s first few dates were fairly mundane. Dinner at Louie’s Ristorante, cocktails at the Blue Oyster Lounge, and an in-the-park viewing of The Seventh Seal. The last one being Jill’s suggestion as she felt it would be nice if they shared in his culture. Jill did all the talking on their dates.

“Well, I work in advertising, nothing special, just a small firm in the lower east side. We mostly deal with small business accounts, a few larger corporations at times but not often. I enjoy it, but I’m hoping to reach management level within the next five years. Though in these economic times it’s a bit of a pipe dream, but I give a hundred and ten percent anyway.”

Jill went on to tell him about her family life.

“Well, I have two older brothers, a couple of knuckle heads, but they’re decent men. One younger sister who lives in London. I haven’t seen much of her lately, I’m afraid. And then there are my parents who live in rural Pennsylvania. My father runs a hardware shop and my mother is the typical housewife. She spends most of her free time roasting animals and making quilts for soldiers overseas. I guess you could say they’re salt of the earth.”

Death sat there as she talked, intently focused on her. Jill admired him immensely for being such a wonderful listener, a trait that was sorely lacking in the men she previously dated. He just seemed to be completely engaged with her every word.

“He’s so attentive to me.” Jill said to her friends, Libi and Tina.

“Even with his exhaustive work schedule, he always finds time for me. We’re perfect for each other. How does he feel about me, you ask? Well, we’ve only been dating for two weeks but I’m certain he loves me. How do I know? Well, why wouldn’t he, Libi? He’s a man, I’m a woman, it’s God’s will that we met. Besides, men like him need to be tamed. He’s been a bachelor for far too long. And even if he doesn’t love me, yet, which he does, he’ll learn soon enough that that’s what he feels. I’m certain of it, Tina.”

***

Dating a man capable of killing you with the slightest touch does pose some interesting challenges, especially when that man is constantly killing everyone around you as part of his job. However, Jill always tried to find the positive in it.

“We were out at the park yesterday evening watching the sunset,” Jill said to Tina. “I was thinking how lovely things were going when all of a sudden a plane crashed into the field in front of us and burst into flames. At first I was in shock, thinking that he would have to go into work and that our night was ruined. That is until he reached behind the tree we were sitting under and pulled out a basket with a pre-made dinner and a bottle of fine wine! I told him, that’s all well and good but what about the plane crash victims? He told me to close my eyes for a moment. So I did. And when I opened them, there in front of us was a production of Gone With the Wind, using the burning wreckage of the plane as a backdrop for the fall of Atlanta and acted out entirely by the plane passengers, resurrected by Death! That romantic devil, he planned the whole thing to preempt his work appointments. I asked if he had caused the plane to crash ahead of time to coincide with the sunset. He tilted his head looking coy and gave a pinching motion with his fingers and told me they were just going to hit a flock of pelicans when they got to the harbor and blow up anyway. And you know the play wasn’t half bad. Not Tony good, but still decent considering all the actors were facing oblivion after the play ended.”

***

Sex was a complicated matter the two discussed at length. While neither of them was a virgin, the intricacies and mysteries of a human and a possessed, fleshless, skeletal nether-being engaging in copulation were both exciting and enigmatic. On top of the obvious issue of Death lacking any kind of visible reproductive organs, there was the more pressing matter that simply having Death touch Jill without protection would result in her instant demise, though Jill would typically shrug this off as “pre-sex jitters” on his part. Jill felt his concerns had less to do with her safety and more to do with his possible fear of intimacy, shame over an undisclosed erectile disfunction, or even latent unfulfilled homosexual urges, as these were the prevailing opinions expressed from the myriad of daytime talk show personalities Jill played pulpit to on a daily basis.

“We’re both monogamous,” she told Libi over the phone. “Neither of us has a STD and I’m on the pill, I just don’t know where all this fear of intimacy is coming from. I watched an episode of Dr. Pill yesterday, and he said that most men who can’t get into sex with their female partners were likely abused in their youth. Of course, I don’t believe that’s Death’s problem. I think Dr. Joyce Sisters has it right, that most men are just little boys that need strong women to drag them into manhood, kicking and screaming if necessary, but that it’s for their own good! I think he just needs a firm hand on the rudder, as it were.”

Libi suggested that perhaps they should see a sex therapist. To which Jill replied:

“We actually tried that, but he got paged into work twenty minutes in and harvested Dr. Pinters’ soul right there in mid-session. Then he vanished into the mists of eternity, leaving me with having to go to lunch afterwards by myself. I’m still arguing with the insurance company over having to pay for the full hour.”

Jill puzzled for a moment then conceded: “I don’t know, Libi. Maybe I’m just too much woman for him. Perhaps he’s afraid that by sleeping with me I’ll somehow crush his manhood and throw his used withered husk aside in preparation of my next male conquest. I read about how some women experienced that in a TV Guide interview last month. Though I must admit, a part of me does find Death playing hard to get rather exhilarating. It’s really allowed me to get in touch with my naughty side!”

Jill entertained and suggested many ideas in an effort to warm Death up to sex, some mundane, others bordering on the bizarre, but Death dismissed each of Jill’s ideas more quickly than the last.

“He’s so picky,” she told Tina over lunch. “He constantly insists he’ll kill me if we touch. So I suggested he wear a full body leotard, like the ones people wear during stage productions to remain hidden in the background. You know what I’m talking about, right? Well, he shot it down, because he says he’s claustrophobic and having fabric over his eyes might cause a panic attack. Then one day he comes over to my house with what looks like a huge oversized rubber glove and a bottle of baby powder and tells me to try it on. He called it a latex body glove! It’s essentially a body condom!” A look of shock overcame Tina. “Yes, I know, Tina. I’m allergic to latex!”

Both Death and Jill ran down the gauntlet of ideas from various kinks, to blow-up dolls, even pantomime sex. Then Jill suggested that Death cover himself in clear coat paint. But alas, it worked too well and it took Death hours to sand his hands down to a point where he could kill anyone.

“I thought the paint worked just fine,” Jill said to Tina with a touch of bitterness. “Plus it made him dishwasher safe, so clean-up would have been a breeze. But I shouldn’t really be surprised. Men can’t even pee in the toilet half the time and they invented it. It seems simplicity just isn’t in their vocabulary.”

Then one day Death suggested something that got Jill’s attention. He stated he could simply possess a freshly-dead person. Jill, being the ever opportunistic businesswoman, thought about this, weighing the pros and cons as though she were taking on a new account.

“I suppose it’s not such a big deal,” she thought. “I mean after all if JFK, America’s most distinguished president, engaged in three-ways, it can’t be all that bad. I should remain open-minded to new experiences. If anything just to move this relationship forward already.”

Eventually, Jill gave in to Death’s suggestion, providing that the corpse be fresh, springy, and that she get to pick which body he used.

“It must be a man,” she said. “With a decent build, and he can’t stink.” She then added, “And no peg legs unless absolutely necessary.”

Death replied with an emphatic thumbs up.

After committing to Death’s idea, Jill took to spending her days poring over the obituaries, as one might search for a used car. This would lead to days out with Death, in his finest robes and strongest sunscreen, and Jill in her best black dress and sun hat as they went about window shopping at the local funeral homes and morgues. Their search for just the right scratch for Jill’s itch was like that of any man looking for the perfect piece of fine jewelry for his wife. And when they found something that looked to fit the bill, Jill wasn’t merely content with simply looking at the merchandise, she wanted to know it was quality goods. She would take to casually attending burials and chatting with the grieving family and friends to learn about any potential flaws in the recently deceased. Jill would work in her inquiries with the deft subtlety of an escort trying to pass off a bad case of genital herpes as razor burn.

“Oh, my dear, I’m so very sorry for your loss. Yes, I know Charles was such a wonderful man. And you say he was loyal to you all those years? Oh no, I’m not doubting you, darling, it just makes one wonder if Charles even had a hook large enough to catch any other fish in the sea.”

Jill’s inquires didn’t stop at mere anatomical inquests. Her probing became more and more particular. With each interrogation, another potential lover would be crossed off the list.

“Now, Martha, I find it hard to believe that Phillip was impotent. How could he have been? You two had twelve children. Hmm, what’s that? He got it caught in a weed whacker? Both of them? Well, that would answer my next question then.”

Eventually, after Jill had exhausted all the available opportunities in the region, she moved onto more exotic options.

“Yes, Doctor Bernard, I am aware that cloning is illegal in this country. I was simply asking if it were legal to clone a person, approximately how quickly before it would be of legal age? Mmm-Hmm. The full eighteen years then? And there’s no way of speeding that up? Well, then, is it possible to just make an older person younger? And why not? Well, if that’s the case, then why am I paying taxes? Look, if I had God’s phone number I would take that up with him!”

However, despite Jill’s wheeling and dealing, it was Death who pulled through in the end. Late one afternoon, Jill got a knock at her door. It was Death, with a large sack slung over his shoulder. Jill opened the door as Death entered and tossed the enormous bag onto the floor like a sack of potatoes. The bag was black, about six feet long, with a zipper from top to bottom and a large red bow tied onto it. On its front was printed “State Morgue.” Jill’s curiosity could take it no more.

“All right mister, what’s in the bag?”

Death motioned for her to open it.

Jill, with a mix of excitement and uncertainty, grasped the zipper and slowly began to pull it. About halfway down, the bag opened wide and fell to the side. There within lay the body of a man. But this was no ordinary man; his body was hard and chiseled like that of a Greek statue. His face was firm, with a strong jaw line and a flowing ocean of long blonde hair that fell to his shoulders. And a member that could have been used to tamp down rags in a cannon. Jill looked at Death and then spoke.

“Darling, at long last you finally found someone perfect. And here I thought we were going to have to settle for either the hospital janitor with the lazy eye or just gamble with the body condom and an epi-pen.” Then Jill noticed something familiar about this man, as though she had seen him somewhere before.

“Darling, I’m curious. Who is he?”

Death then produced a clipboard with a sheet of paper attached to it and handed it to Jill. She looked at the paper and saw it was a death certificate. Jill read on for a moment until a look of shock appeared on her face. Her eyes shot back to the man, then to the certificate, and then to Death.

“Wait. You killed Fabio?!”

Death extended his thin bony finger and tapped at the line below where she was reading.

“Ohhh. You killed a Fabio impersonator. Well, thank God for that. You gave me such a scare. Half of my book collection has him on the cover, and I was looking forward to his next book.”

Death rolled his eyes.

“Well, my dear, I think this will do just fine. I’m so excited! I’m just going to go get ready. I’ll let you do whatever it is you need to do,” Jill said with a wink.

Death stood there craning his neck as Jill turned up the hall and walked into the bedroom. As soon as she was gone, Death gave the all clear and the corpse opened his eyes. Death went over everything with him. The corpse, whose real name was Daryl, then spoke:

“You know, I’m not sure I wanna do this. It just doesn’t seem right. Maybe there’s another way you could…”

Death cut him off in mid-sentence by holding up the phony death certificate and pointed at the name as it slowly changed from Fabio Impersonator to Daryl.

“All right then. So I assume you want her walking funny in the morning?”

Death nodded.

***

After a while, Jill decided it was time to introduce Death to the family. She brought up the subject over breakfast in her kitchen.

“Darling, we’ve been dating for over six months now, and I think it’s high time that you meet my parents.”

Death looked up from his plate and stared at her silently.

“I know what you’re going to say, that it’s too soon. But my mother’s birthday is coming up, and I was thinking we could go down to my parent’s home and spend the weekend with them. What do you think?”

Death sighed as he nodded in agreement.

So the two of them got onto the train and made the six-hour trip down to rural Pennsylvania. It was a fairly small community, a quaint little place where everyone knew everyone. Jill sat looking out the window of the train car as they made their way into town. A flood of happy memories came to mind.

“It’s so good to be back. I have such fond memories of this place.”

Ten minutes after catching a cab at the train station, they had arrived at the home of Jill’s parents. It was a little ranch-style house, well cared for but showing its decades of age. As they climbed the front steps Death noticed a small box on the porch with the word “Stuffing” written on it. Within the box were at least a dozen live ducklings. Jill knocked on the front door, and a moment later they were greeted by Jill’s father. A gruff six-foot-tall bear of a man.

“So you’re the new boy in my daughter’s life, huh?” he said to Death as he extended the calloused hand of a steel worker to meet Death’s unsheathed skeletal hand. Death, realizing too late that his hand was ungloved, prepared himself for the fall out of unintentionally killing Jill’s father, but instead was dealt with the dislocation of most of his own fingers in her father’s iron grip. Death’s fingers dropped like Lincoln Logs onto the porch boards below.

“You city boys don’t have much of a grip, do ya?” Jill’s father said with a chuckle and look of dismissal as he returned back inside.

Death just stood in the doorway as he raised his arm before him and gawked in disbelief at his shattered, denuded wrist stump. He knelt down to pick up and reattach his fingers as Jill responded:

“Oh, don’t mind Daddy… he’ll warm up to you eventually.”

The pre-dinner banter and introductions were mixed at best, with Death and Jill’s father getting off to a cold start. Until, that is, they stumbled upon and bonded over a discussion of the proper way to gut a sheep. Meanwhile, Jill slipped into the kitchen to speak with her mother, a wiry, elderly looking woman, with a careworn face, whose long gray hair had been drawn into a bun. She wore a flower apron as she worked.

“Mother!” Jill exclaimed. “I’ve found him! I’ve found my future husband! It’s only a matter of time before he proposes and I’m so excited you and Father are finally able to meet him!”

Jill’s mother looked up from shoveling various animal innards out of an impressively sized turkey carcass onto a platter and uttered only a halfhearted “That’s nice, dear” before returning to the business of gutting the main course.

“Mother, just think. In a few months Father could be walking me down the aisle. And then I’ll bless us all with a child of my own. A bundle of joy that Father can bounce on his knee and that you can teach to roast live Cornish game hens too, just like you did with me!” Jill pressed her hands together in nostalgic delight.

“The squawking helps season the meat,” Jill’s mother replied while grabbing fistfuls of live ducklings from the cardboard box labeled “Stuffing” and cramming them into the empty turkey.

“Oh, Mother, I just hope things stay this perfect forever!” Jill gushed.

“Just give it time, dear. Sooner or later we all pay the piper for our pleasures,” Jill’s mother muttered as she began sewing the turkey’s gaping, quacking maw shut.

***

The train ride back home was chilly and awkward. Jill and Death were seated in the back of the empty train car. The train had just entered a long tunnel leaving the cabin almost pitch-black save for a lone light at the front of the cab. The two sat in biting silence. It didn’t take long for the silence to be broken, with Jill casting the first volley.

“You just had to kill my Great Aunt Mildred right as my Mother was serving dessert, didn’t you?”

Death tried to explain that it wasn’t his fault that Aunt Mildred was choking on a piece of food. But Jill interceded.

“My Mother cooked that meal! So I assume you’re blaming my Mother for killing her now, are you?”

Death avoided that obvious trap, and instead countered that he did attempt the Heimlich maneuver on her. To which Jill complained:

“Yes! But did you have to thrust your hands into the cake first? Mother spent all day preparing that for my homecoming, and in a second it was ruined. Oh, and the clean up afterwards, I was so embarrassed!”

Death reminded Jill that if he hadn’t done that Aunt Mildred would have died instantly upon being touched by his unsheathed hand.

“Well, a lot of good that did. She still died! And on top of everything, you just leaving on the spot like that to cart her spirit off to eternity without so much as even thanking my parents for the meal. Why are men so careless about their manners?”

Death attempted to respond, but Jill cut him off.

“And don’t give me that old ‘It’s my job’ line. You were off the clock. The old bag wasn’t going to get any deader. You could have helped with the dishes first, or taken out the trash. But no, apparently your work is more important than my happiness!”

Death rolled his eyes, a practice he was quickly mastering. A silence grew between them for what seemed like an eternity, then Jill spoke again.

“Darling, I’m sorry. I know it wasn’t your fault. I had just hoped for this all to have turned out differently.”

The train began to slow down as it approached the end of the tunnel, and light began trickling in through the windows.

“Perhaps it’s not too late,” Death said as he fumbled around in his pocket for a small object, pulled it out and presented it to Jill. In his palm lay the golden watch.

“My watch!” Jill gasped. “I always regretted throwing it away that day. You kept it all this time?”

Death nodded.

“Oh, thank you!”

Jill extended her hand to Death in anticipation. He placed the watch on her wrist, tapping its face with his finger as its gears once more began moving and a robust ticking began emanating from the timepiece. Death asked Jill the time, to which she replied:

“It’s about a minute to midnight.” She thought for a moment then added, “Wait, was this the time we first met? Here on this train?”

Death nodded.

“Oh, darling, you planned this all, didn’t you? So that’s why you killed Aunt Mildred, so we would have to take the late-night train! You put out all of this effort to do something special for me and I’ve made such a fool of myself.”

Death gestured her to forget about it. Jill stared at the watch then turned to Death with tears in her eyes.

“Darling, thank you for this. You turned a bitter reminder of pain into a symbol of hope. And on that day I never thought I’d find love again until this watch brought us together.”

Death smiled as Jill felt a sudden heaviness on her eyes. A sense of intense calm overcame her.

“All this excitement, I guess it’s taken more out of me than I thought. Perhaps I should rest my eyes a bit, darling.”

Jill laid her head on Death’s shoulder as he placed her hand in his. Moments later, the train flooded with white light as Jill’s watch stopped, its hands halting sharp at midnight, pointing to the inscription that simply read: Time stands still for no one.

---

Gerard Bowlby is an aspiring writer of comedy and satire. “The Many Stages of Courting Death” is his first published story. He is currently living in the sunny side of God’s waiting room, Bradenton, Florida. When not running his writers’ group, he devotes most of his free time to writing about the bizarre nature of people, society, and capitalism, as well as rubbing the nearly dead for money as an LMT. He shares his life with two cats, two birds, a blind and deaf elderly dog, and a small bathroom cactus. Visit his website at www.GerardBowlby.com.