Death at 11:15
The Grim Reaper holds a potluck on the second Saturday of every month, and I received my first invitation last week. Via email. We’ve only met twice. Once, a year ago, when my brother died of head trauma after a motorcycle accident. Grim waited in the corner of the hospital room like a hooded shadow, with a steel scythe that dared us to disturb human nature. The second time was less than a week later, for my cat, Charlie, after he ate three tulip bulbs during my brother’s funeral. His girlfriend asked to hold the reception at my apartment because of the central atrium. She said the glass ceiling panels provided a window to heaven, through which we could watch like nosy neighbors. She said, “Look at the way the sunlight refracts. Those rays are the tendrils of your brother and God.” Two nights later, Grim paid a visit while Charlie pulsed, his eyes clouded into expired Jell-O. Grim and I played two rounds of The Game of Life while I extended my right arm to Charlie, who laid beneath my chair, and stroked the orange fur between his ears. It shed off, sleeving my fingers, and kept them warm for the night. He passed at twelve minutes past one o’clock, with a final child’s cough, and Grim carried Charlie in their arms, offering me a single squeeze of my right shoulder as recompense.
When I opened the invite from Grim, I asked them who else to expect at the potluck, not that it would have affected my RSVP. They emailed back within five minutes, only telling me “The usual.” That didn’t answer my question because I had never been to one of their parties, but I didn’t ask them to clarify. What kind of dish does one prepare for the Personification of Death, the Keeper of All Mortal Souls? Definitely not the main course. That’s too presumptuous. That’s left for the host. Guests brought sides, and I settled on a Jalapeno-Pepper Jack Mac n’ Cheese. Neutral enough to fit any cuisine Grim might have planned, though spicy to rouse the dulled senses of a being senior to humanity. Jalapeno slices charred to seeds beneath my oven broiler. Bits of sweet pepper and habanero chiles confettied the melted cheese between pasta coils.
I arrived at Grim’s place ten minutes after seven o’clock, a fashionable hour. They lived in the bleached void perched outside of our space-time continuum, an absolute terror to navigate on my phone’s GPS. Sound and sense were left to abstractions until Grim unlocked a door from the vacuum. They ushered me inside and swiped the Pyrex baking dish from my arms and asked me if I preferred red or white wine.
Glancing around Grim’s living room, sipping from my long-stemmed glass of Chardonnay, I understood that I was the only human in attendance. Anansi and Grendel’s mother leaned against the china cabinet, stocked with sterling silver napkin rings and serving platters, discussing the state of modern technology and humanity’s inevitable collapse. How it wouldn’t affect them, but boy were they sympathetic, shrugging off extinction as though it were another Tuesday. Medusa sagged, laughing, into couch cushions as Shuten-dōji, already a few tumblers of shochu deep, donned one of Grim’s skeletal masks, whose sullen stature he gently parodied. The snake-haired gorgon picked goose feathers out of a blue velvet pillow and tossed them at the impish oni. On Grim’s balcony, a hardy structure with thick rails made of dark oak, Dracula and an Amorphous Globe of Unceasing Light shared a blunt, the two beings staring into the void that Grim had flecked with nebulae and constellations of deep-sea creatures.
At 7:30, Grim laid out all of our dishes on their oblong dining table, made from Pentelic marble of the Parthenon’s ruins. Grim served roasted duck with brussels sprouts sauteed in the leftover fat. Woven table mats of Rumpelstiltskin’s gold held other dishes: brie baked with figs and pistachios, rainbow quinoa salad, shrimp po’ boys on toasted brioche, profiteroles filled with chai pastry cream, and my mac & cheese. The Amorphous Globe of Unceasing Light brought a tray of ignited gluttony scooped over charred crostinis. On each of our plates was also a card labeled with a specific time. Grendel’s mother’s card read 7:45. Shuten-dōji, seated next to her, stroked the 8:15, stamped in black ink, on his card. Each number increased by thirty minutes until it ended with mine at 11:15. Grim sat between us all.
They said, “Don’t flip your cards over! Not yet, anyway. Though I know the temptation might be strong. You’ll get your turn.”
We all scooped our helpings from each other’s dishes. Dracula and Anansi complimented the crisped edges that bordered my noodles. Medusa, unfortunately, was unable to partake, being lactose intolerant. Once our plates were full, Grim asked Grendel’s mother to flip her card. My Favorite Memory. She displayed her card for all of us to witness, waving it around the table as though the words were a picture book, and we were her enraptured schoolchildren.
“You flip your card at your given time,” explained Grim, “and you have a half hour to lead a discussion about your topic.”
I wasn’t about to refuse my host’s desires.
Grendel’s mother told us that she still cherished, even twelve centuries later, the memory of slaying Beowulf. That, though literature analysts misinterpreted her poem’s ending, she displayed Beowulf’s head in her cave like one of Medusa’s stone statues. Each night before bed, she scratched his eyes and used the jelly as lubricant around her cuticles. A must for self-care and claw maintenance. She kept them sharp, revenge-ready, a response to her worst memory, though we didn’t ask—the murder of her son, whose arm still hung barbarically in Heorot.
She followed this with Grendel’s first steps being a close second favorite memory.
Shuten-dōji flipped his card at 8:15. Create a Story on the Spot. The oni jumped on the table, the dishes chiming in serenades, and spoke to us with subtle breaths so we’d have to lean in, engaged. He told a tale of scorn and supernatural strength and vindication against the self-righteous sober.
My glass of wine refilled itself whenever ruby stains painted the bottom of the bowl. Every half hour, the cards continued to flip. A Film that Changed My Life. What I Learned in College (and some improvisation from Anansi). How do you grieve? What is happiness? Medusa spoke of the relief that drowned her when she witnessed men’s eyes turn to gravel. That last bit of warmth rushed out in a lick of an ignited candle wick.
At 10:45, God. The Amorphous Globe of Unceasing Light didn’t, couldn’t(?), speak, but it filled each of us, Grim included, with a comfort, an attachment, a hushed tranquility so grand we wept. The blaze next to me burned like crisped cookie dough and the cinders left on a log after a fire. I wanted to die, then, sobbing so loud my eyes shriveled to pruney fingertips, because I recognized that I would never be as happy as I was in that moment, with that glorified, oversized lightbulb. Then, the Amorphous Globe of Unceasing Light lifted its spell on us, supplying each guest with a heaviness only felt in gray weather and cold showers. There could be no God compared to its Light.
My card was last, and I knew the topic ages back. These monsters would make me speak about Death like it wasn’t a subject in which they held doctoral degrees. What could I do but accuse them of murder and wrath and, at best, ambivalence towards (human) life? Me, who couldn’t stand hospitals for the sickly smell and the site of fading bodies. Me, who lost a brother and cat and accepted a dinner party invitation from the figure that walked away with them in silence, on the off chance I may feel close to my family once more. These immortal creatures couldn’t die, but I was compost.
Or, perhaps my Death card would be a sentence.
Grim gestured at me, flipping their fingers, the white nuggets somersaulting over their empty plate. I was raised to conform to civility, no matter the personal risk, so I turned my card.
My Favorite Poem.
Poetry? I didn’t know any poems. The other guests stared. I glanced at all of them, avoiding Medusa’s gaze, and landed on Grim at the opposite end of the table.
“I can accept my brother’s death,” I told them. “But the cat was overkill.”
Cara Lynn Albert is a writer originally from Florida, and she currently lives in Denver, Colorado. She received her MFA degree in creative writing from the University of Colorado Boulder, and her work has been published in Catapult, Hunger Mountain, Post Road, Baltimore Review, and elsewhere. She serves as the Director of Marketing at The Adroit Journal.
