Chapter 1

The first time I encountered Death was the night my mother died.

I knew it was night because it was dark, and I knew it was Friday because I was drunk.

Not drunk in the fun way. I was not out, leaning over some sticky bar with someone else’s chapstick sticking my lips together. I was drunk, at home, passed out on my couch in the same clothes I had worn since the day before. Whatever app on my TV that was streaming some show I wasn’t paying attention to was asking if I was still watching. Somewhere in my periphery, my laptop screen was glaring with what felt like hundreds of blue-glowing helpdesk tickets, all marked with the same red “urgent” flag by people who couldn’t tell the difference between a candle and a wildfire.

At first I thought it was quiet, the way it tends to be in the hush before dawn. It took a while for enough of my brain to wake up to register that there was indeed sound, and the sound was sobbing. Small, soft, bitten-off sounds, the kind that make your chest hurt as you try to suppress the noises and the feelings until they build so much pressure they have to go somewhere. Usually out. This is important.

As my brain continued tuning back into reality, the sound was given more detail. It had to be one of my neighbours. A woman, probably. But who?

In a split second, the soft sobs turned into an awful wail, and my brain jerked itself completely awake and forced two realisations through me at once.

The first was that it was, indeed, not a woman. It was a man.

The second was that it was undeniably me who was wailing, though the sound was not coming from my mouth, but from the hallway outside.

Of course, it was not exactly me. It had the shape of my voice, yet none of the things that made it mine: the vibrations of my skull, the resonance in my chest, the small and well-known distortions of breath and tongue and teeth.

Have you ever heard a recording of yourself? It’s so undeniably you yet unbelievable at the same time.

The wrongness of it all wasn’t only the pitch or the perceived flatness of the vowels. My voice was making a sound I was very sure I had never made, yet one I clearly recognised: complete and utter grief, so deep and dark and breaking that it had nowhere to go but out.

I sat up so fast my head spun and with enough force that my phone, which I had probably dropped on my face at some point as I was falling asleep, slid off me and fell to the floor with a thick thud. My mouth was tacky with an aftertaste of cheap whiskey and cigarettes. I tried to rehydrate the corners of my mouth with my tongue. It did not help.

The wailing rose and fell as if whoever was making the sound was pacing down the hallway. When it began to recede, my phone also decided to let out a scream of unwelcome noise that blurred my vision.

It scared me more than the crying. The crying was impossible, and the soft stupidity of being drunk lets you reject impossible things. That warmth does not extend its welcome to a phone call at 3:13 in the morning.

I watched the phone dance in a small circle on the floor, screen-down, as I considered just not answering. After all, I knew what it was about.

That sounds dramatic. It wasn’t.

If you try to love someone like my mother, you spend years waiting for them to die in a way that somehow still feels premature and unfair, even if it isn’t.

Every unknown number is a hospital.

Every missed call or late knock at the door is the police.

Any distance between the sentences we spoke to one another was tension until it eventually became peace. Rinse and repeat.

We had just recently closed that distance again. Let’s try again, she had said. She always called it that, trying. As if our entire relationship was a knot that you could loosen with enough patience, and not twenty-nine years of us both pulling as hard as we could between the pauses in opposite directions.

She had sounded better the last time we spoke, and I had believed hard enough in the nuance of her words that I felt mostly anger. So far as my mother was concerned, that was the usual end to whatever hopeful cycle we had begun anew: a sliver of light dressed in irritation, already halfway out the door.

When the nurse asked if I was her son, the only surprise I felt was at the fact that she had, at some point, thought about me long enough to put me down as her emergency contact.

I felt sad, but maybe not in the way that people would think. I would rather call it disappointed in a way that was unavoidable and expected, but never wanted.

I picked up the box three days later. It was small and not very heavy. Also not a surprise. The more useless an object was, the better its chances of sticking around until its last threads frayed in the stale, shut-in air of my mother’s home… wherever that happened to be at the time.

The contents of the box had been chaotically thrown in there by whichever landlord she had annoyed last, namely some grumpy old man with a prickly, unkempt beard and cold eyes. I just opened the lid and gave a little shrug as a weak attempt to communicate something like, yup, that’s it, I guess. The landlord, who had done nothing but grunt the entire time, averted his eyes and squared his shoulders. He did manage to squeeze out a few perfunctory condolences before he gave a final grunt accompanied by a nod and walked away. His hard gaze had given away that he had already formed his opinion of me before we met, and that I was too much like my mother to deserve anything else.

Asshole.

Anyway. I left the box on my kitchen table and didn’t bother to look at or open it until its presence felt like it was burning a hole in my neck. Inside were the few remnants of my mother’s life that had survived the storms.

Below assorted (and expired) bus cards, broken charger cables, and folded receipts from corner shops was a small package. It was wrapped in what I assumed was a reused paper bag, held closed with yellowed nylon string. An envelope had been wedged below it, my name written in one corner in pink highlighter, barely legible.

It was not sealed, and this annoyed me enough that I had to take a break before continuing. I don’t know why. Maybe because even in the case of her death, I was an afterthought.

Inside was a single sheet of printer paper folded unevenly twice.

I’m sorry.

I snorted loudly. Yeah, sure you are. We both are. We both always were.

The words were written slowly and carefully with some kind of fine-liner, in what I could only imagine was an attempt to look sober. Not sure why that would matter to her.

Right as I was about to crumple the paper, I noticed there was more writing at the bottom of the paper in highlighter, yellow this time. The space between the initial line and the last three was large enough that the soft shadows almost made the text disappear completely.

I squinted my eyes.

I know you hate me.

I don’t blame you.

Read it anyway. It’s important.

I was frozen for a moment as every emotion it was possible to feel tried to wrap its tentacles around my heart.

I know you hate me.

I never hated her. I didn’t particularly like her, but it was never hate.

Hate would have required more heat than I had left for her. What remained was mostly exhaustion. Resentment, when energy allowed. The occasional stupid, embarrassing tenderness that hit me when she sounded sober enough to maybe be a mom.

Hate or not, something uncomfortably warm flashed by under my skin and collected itself like a clump in my belly. I couldn’t quite articulate what it was, but I knew where it came from. Even in death she tried to steer my emotions toward her interpretations of the world and our relationship. Even in death she made it about herself.

I know none of this excuses what I did after receiving the box, which has led to my predicament. But hopefully it helps shed some light on my mental state at the time anyway. Maybe that’s important. You would know better than me, I hope.

I left the package unopened the same way I had left the box. I don’t know for how long, only that I was four shots deep by the time I had finished reasoning with myself about whether the heartache and potential intellectual damage was worth it.

I tried. I really tried to give her some benefit of the doubt.

There had been enough therapy-ish between her first week-long disappearance and her latest apology that I had grown to know quite a bit about the behaviors of addicts. You have worth, and it’s up to you, but they can be more than the worst thing they did to you. There is good as well as bad because the world is not, and never has been, black and white, and there is some self-growth in realizing that all the colors of the world can exist side by side. All of it is true and lived, and neither diminishes the other.

I opened the package. Of course I did. I said therapy-ish.

What was inside was… nothing like the outside. If the outside looked like a neat package, the inside resembled what I imagined compressed trash blocks looked like.

Notes, photographs and assorted papers were layered and pressed around a well-thumbed notebook bound in brown leather, its surface worn into a completely smooth and shiny patina except for where it had cracked shallowly. The only reason I noticed the notebook was because, as soon as I peeled the paper, the trash block pretty much exploded and scattered its contents everywhere.

Some papers were old and yellowed, some were laminated, some were white printer paper. They depicted maps, documents, lists, photographs, letters — I could go on.

I remember seeing a few handwritten notes on some of them. Black ink, probably fine-liner. At some point, the word CURSE appeared for the first time, surrounded by random exclamation marks and arrows. Once I found the first remnant of a red string under a piece of tape, I stopped looking at them at all.

Instead, I gathered them all up.

I got myself a trash bag.

I crumpled and forced all of the loose papers inside.

Every. Single. One.

The warmth in my gut had transformed from someone else’s shower setting to fresh out-of-the-oven lasagna, so I broke my records for both how quickly I reached the garbage chute and how much force I used as I shoved the bag inside.

I heard it hit against the walls on its way down before landing with a soft whump.

My gut did not get any lighter.

The journal was on the table staring at me when I got back inside, and this time anger flashed by. I don’t know why.

I threw it back into the box. Then, I threw the box into my closet, closed the door harder than I needed to, and went to bed.

You’d think that was the end of it, but the morning after was when the feeling appeared.

I wouldn’t describe it as terror, at least not yet. At that point it was barely even fear; fear has some object, fear has to point at something.

My mouth tasted like I had spent the night chewing coins, and as I stood up, my heart gave one very hard and off-beat thud against my ribs that made me shudder, before going back to pretending everything was normal. That’s why I noticed it wasn’t.

It felt heavy and made it hard to breathe and think through the fog. As if whatever shroud covered the world had become hostile overnight, spitting out invisible and intangible spikes underneath the fabric of reality that were pointing directly at me.

I blamed the drinking, obviously. My hands felt unsteady as I reached for the glass of water on my bedside table, and someone was knocking down walls inside my skull.

So, hungover. Grieving. Slept badly. Too much whiskey and too little water.

I made coffee strong enough to qualify as a checkmark on some mental health self-evaluation checklist somewhere, and got ready for work.

Then I just did normal stuff. My work includes a lot of forgotten passwords and a surprisingly creative mix of “yes I *** turned it on and off you absolute dumb— oh” variants, so I’ll spare you the details.

Coincidentally, some lady in accounting had forgotten her password for the fourth time in a month. I was halfway through trying to compose a polite email when something tapped against the window.

I looked to the side.

There was a crow standing absolutely still on the outside sill. Its claws were folded neatly around the metal edge, and its glossy black eyes seemed fixated on me through the glass.

I live on the fourth floor. Birds land on windowsills all the time, and crows themselves are not unusual. I probably looked at it for a while, thought that it was neat, and tried to move on with my day.

The crow tapped again. The distinction here is important: it did not peck, it tapped. It wanted me to notice it. I knew this at the time, too, which made the hairs on my arms stand on end. A small shiver ran along my spine as I looked back to the bird, but this time it was different. It had not moved an inch. It was just… staring at me. Its gaze felt impossibly black and dark and dense, as if it was a black hole I could fall through and would fall through if I looked away.

We stared at each other for what felt like forever, or at least long enough for the staring contest to feel so normal that I jumped when the loud ping of a new “urgent” ticket brought me back to the room I was in and out of the impossible dark I had been falling into.

The crow turned its head, lining one of its eyes up with mine, and tapped the glass a third time.

This time, the sound was as impossible as the dark.

It was not small.

It went through the windowpane, through the desk, through my teeth. My coffee shivered in its mug.

I looked down at it because I had to look at something else. Because if I kept staring at the crow, I had the sudden and absolute certainty that I would stand up, open the window, and put my hand outside. The thought was so clear it felt less like a thought and more like an instruction.

Open the window.

Put your hand outside.

Let it take.

I pushed my chair back so hard it snagged on the floor and gave a terrible wobble. The crow did not move. It watched me stand, watched me back away from the desk, watched me create more distance between us.

It tapped one final time.

This time, it felt impossibly slow. Deliberate.

A small motion of its head, then the sound came from behind me before the beak touched the window.

I turned so quickly I lost my footing as my sock slipped, and for one horrific second I was completely sure that this was where I would die. There in my kitchen, cracking my skull open on unwashed laminate the color of washed-out vomit.

There was nothing behind me. Of course there wasn’t.

When I looked back, the sill was empty.

There was a small mark on the spot that the crow had tapped, the only thing that marked that any of it had just happened. Just a small hairline crack with the tiniest chip of the glass missing.

My eyes trailed downward to the floor, where the missing piece was resting. It was vaguely shaped almost like an arrow with its tip pointing straight between my feet.

The rational part of my brain was desperately grasping at straws while sounding every possible alarm and sending out emergency flares in all directions, which made my ears buzz dully.

Birds fuck with windows all the time. Glass usually breaks in sharp pieces that make strange shapes if you look at them hard enough. Humans are natural pattern-seekers. I was hungover, grieving, sleep deprived, and apparently one spooky bird away from being sent to the nuthouse.

Fine.

Great.

Perfect.

Good to know.

I bent down and picked up the piece of glass between two fingers, the point of the arrow pointing upward as to not cut myself. It felt cold. Pretty normal as far as glass goes, it’s one of its main characteristics.

I looked at it intently. Just a piece of glass.

Wasn’t it?

The piece felt colder, and colder, until it got so sharply cold it burned my skin. I dropped it before I had the chance to decide whether the sensation was real or not.

It landed in almost the exact same place, tip pointing between my feet.

My laptop pinged again and this time I flinched so hard I almost stepped on the shard of glass. For a moment, I hated that woman in accounting intensely. Instead of dissipating, the hatred mirrored the shard and turned itself inward, until its sharp edge cut deep in my heart and turned to a sense of loss.

I don’t remember what the email said. I just remember I wrote something awfully normal, which was the opposite to anything I was and had been feeling for a long time, and hit send. I do remember it felt satisfying, that something was behaving predictably. At the time, I so badly needed there to be one sliver of reality that still seemed fair. Maybe, if things just kept going the mundane would outpower the weird and potentially embarrass the world around me enough to shift everything back to the way it should be.

It didn’t, but you know that. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.

The feeling stayed in the odd space between my ribs and the air around me, an intense pressure that shifted and moved and increased until it became nigh unbearable. Like the piece of glass, everything seemed to suddenly mean something. I didn’t know what something was, but I knew it wasn’t good.

I couldn’t in good conscience leave the shard where it was, so naturally I squeezed it tight between a folded paper towel.

It didn’t burn through the paper. It did not try to escape, or whisper things in my ear, or any of the things that a decidedly cursed object would do if you were about to un-curse yourself by simply throwing it in the trash.

It just sat there, a cold arrowhead in a twist of recycled white paper.

I threw it in the bin under the sink. Then, I stood still for an embarrassing amount of time and waited for it to… do something.

It didn’t.

It remained silent, just the low groaning of my fridge and the creaky footsteps of someone above. Normal noises in the silence.

It wasn’t funny, but I had to stifle a laugh anyway. The relief hit me too suddenly and too hard, and the only response I could physically muster was a giggle. At myself, at my mother, at the world.

By lunchtime, both the hangover and the worry had eased enough that I had managed to convince myself it had been some kind of episode. I liked that. Episode. Clean, medical, perfectly vague. A nifty little box to hold anything between low blood sugar and sleep deprivation and intoxication without needing to think too hard about the details.

I made more coffee, I answered more tickets. I explained with a great amount of patience that no, deleting the shortcut to the payroll app would not delete the app itself.

That’s the worst part, I think. That the world continued around the feeling of wrong. Forgotten passwords, microwaved fish, crying and laughing and drinking and eating under a sun that continued to rise and set. Its light had just finished moving across the floor as a blurry rectangle and now begun to shrink while hovering over the fridge.

All the while, the feeling remained and kept spinning itself into something larger.

At some point, I got up to pee only to find myself in front of the closet instead. I don’t remember walking there.

Don’t get me wrong. I remember pushing my chair back. I remember my eyes still feeling achy. I remember thinking that if I didn’t get up, I’d probably get a kidney infection and die and that would not be a great way to go.

Then there I was, in the hallway, facing the closet, with my hand on the handle.

I let go of it so quickly my knuckle hit the wall.

The pain helped somewhat. It was small and immediate and entirely explainable, which felt holy enough to cast a shade over that other feeling for a short amount of time.

I stepped back and looked at the door. It was just that: a door. It looked the same as always, cheap and badly painted with the same gray scuff mark near its bottom from when I had accidentally bashed it with my vacuum cleaner and then promptly decided, like with most things in my life, that fixing it sounded exhausting.

I kept standing there until my bladder reminded me with burning urgency that I had, in fact, originally not set out to stare at a door, but for a completely different purpose.

I waddled to the bathroom, and it went exactly as expected, thank you very much.

The rest of the day didn’t have any answers or revelations, but it was filled with small and maybe stupid acts of resistance. Sipping coffee instead of opening the closet. Making toast instead of checking the bin. Finishing more tickets rather than looking at the window. Pretending, for the last times, that if I just chose the normal thing again and again and again everything would move on.

By evening, there were seven crows perched near the window: four on the roof of the opposite building, and three on the light post closest to my window.

When I noticed them, I went up to close the blinds. Pretending normal had almost worked.

Below, and beyond, were more. Many more. I do not know how many.

They sat in neat rows along the gutters, and they were all facing my building. I told myself it didn’t matter that it felt as if they were facing me specifically. Hard to tell which exact direction some nearby black fuzzballs are looking after all, and either way that would be absolutely insane. I was not special. My block was not special. There were probably thousands of them, and they just happened to be hanging here for some reason or another, exactly like the odd one that tapped my window.

Then, the middle bird on the light post turned its head, just ever so slightly. Every bird in my periphery followed suit.

I closed the blinds.

At some point, I must have fallen asleep on the couch. A hangover and… whatever else was going on does that to a man.

I woke with a stiff neck. My phone showed 03:13, because of course it did.

The apartment was dark except for my laptop screen, still open on the desk. For a second I figured a notification had woken me, and got annoyed at whichever asshole would be working at this hour in the morning.

Then I heard it again.

The crying.

It wasn’t pacing this time, but right outside my door.

It was soft at first, and stayed that way while I tried to make sense of it. Small, broken sounds passed through the thin wood of the door and seeped between the cracks.

I did not move because, again, I knew who it was, and that was impossible.

The person that was crying was, without a doubt, my mother.

I knew it with that same awful certainty I had known my own voice only days earlier, but did not have the comfort of drink to suppress the impossible.

And it was impossible, because my mother was dead and either way, it wasn’t… completely correct.

The crying carried the same frailty as my mother’s did, that same sense of small and apologetic. The little break of breath that only appeared when she was sad, or drunk, or usually both. It was the undertone of grief that was wrong, yet again.

My mother had been sad ,often and loudly, but it had never carried that specific emotion. She had never been able to send that sadness elsewhere because it had always been too occupied with whatever turmoil was spinning around inside her head and her heart.

Whatever was outside my door did not have that problem.

I wish I could tell you I did something smart, or useful. I didn’t.

I stayed put on the couch, very still and afraid to breathe.

Sometimes the crying would soften long enough for me to think it had stopped. Then it would hitch, or catch, or break into something so recognisable and instinctive that my body reacted before I had the chance to reason with myself. My throat would tighten, my eyes would burn. Then it would break into a horrific shriek that made me curl into a ball and shut my eyes tight, hands clasped over my ears.

It continued for over an hour.

I did not bravely resist some urge to open the door, because there was none.

I did not arm myself.

I did not call the police, or a priest, or a therapist, or anyone else whose job description might include standing between me and whatever was using my dead mother’s voice. I did consider calling for an ambulance for myself, but the terror kept me glued to that couch until it went quiet.

The crying didn’t fade gradually, and there was no final sob or soft retreat of footsteps down the corridor. No door opening. At some point it simply cut off.

I didn’t trust the silence, and stayed put until the sun began to light the corners of my blinds. It took four neighbours to leave for work, audibly, before I had gathered enough courage to go near my door.

On the floor were three black feathers, carefully pushed underneath the door and neatly lined up on the floorboards.

I did not touch them.

I know how this all sounds, by the way. I don’t think I am dumb or insane. I know what type of person would write this.

What do I want? I don’t know that either. This has all become very complicated and big, and I figured this is as good a place as any to post it. Maybe I need someone to believe me, because I do not think anyone will. Maybe I just need someone to read my story so that I am not so fully alone.

It just keeps getting worse. I don’t know what to do, and when I finally opened the journal it was an unhelpful mess. The only thing I know is that my family seemed to have been cursed with Death, and I think I may have thrown away the instructions on how to break it.

She’ll be back any minute. I have to go.