ZUCCHINI SEASON, by Janet Harriett
I handed the passenger off to the transport crew, brushed the tears off my suit, tucked my now-bloody pocket square into a sloppy puff fold, and turned my attention to the driver. Unlike the passenger, she had enough of her blood left inside her—and enough skin left to tell where “inside” was—to be making a fuss.
“Am I dying?” the woman asked the EMT who was applying pressure to her brachial artery.
The EMT didn’t answer her, just gave her the look EMTs always give when I’m around. None of them see me, but I am only around when they don’t want to answer that question. Eyeballing the car and the pavement, I guessed the driver had about another pint and a half left before she lost consciousness and I could do my job.
“I can’t die,” she mumbled, her tongue slipping against gaps where teeth used to be. “It’s August, and I have laundry.”
I laughed. “It’s August? That’s a new one.”
Many have claimed to laugh in the face of death—more than actually did—but this woman was the first to have death laugh in her face. Mine is a largely humorless profession when one is not dealing with morticians, and I only laughed with them at a discreet distance.
She gave me what would have been a quizzical look if her cheekbones and brows had all been in the right places on her face. The EMT was managing to slow the flow of blood onto the pavement, but internal injuries were spewing blood into her abdominal cavity.
“Trekkies notwithstanding, suicides are the only people who, when push comes to shove, really think that today is a good day to die, and even most of them aren’t really in it for the dying.” I sat down on the bloody street next to her face. “After a couple millennia at this, you think you’ve heard every reason why someone can’t die, as if I have any say in the timing. That’s a decision above my pay grade, at least with mammals. I get it: death is a terrible inconvenience to everyone involved, and believe it or not, you aren’t the first to try to bargain for time to put in a load of delicates. But ‘it’s August’? Haven’t gotten that one before.”
“My grandfather died in August.”
“I remember.” I can’t forget. That is my job: to gather and hold everyone’s raw dying moments for eternity. Even the unseen do not die alone, and are never forgotten. I held her hand. Icy regret was seeping out of her.
“You’re warm.” Her facial muscles gave up the effort to form a confused expression against misplaced bones. “If you are who I think…”
“I am.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be cold?”
I pulled the dying regret chill out of her and held it barely inside my fingers. “Better?”
Next to my ear, the EMT yelled something to another paramedic. We each had our jobs here, and if they could see me doing mine, they would know they were only going to succeed at buying me time to do my work.
“Visitors brought food. Casseroles. Vegetables from their gardens. Everyone had a garden. Tomatoes. So much zucchini.”
Her breath was coming in strained gasps, fighting a splinter of rib in a lung. I pulled the pain out through her palms and tucked it into myself.
“I promised myself I’d never do that to my family, dying during zucchini season. My girls, they wouldn’t know…so much squash.”
Not the least-poetic dying words I’ve been privy to. I pulled the last cold bit of pain out and carried her unconscious soul to the transport crew. The paramedic and the EMT loaded their lost cause into the back of the ambulance.
Dying wishes have remarkably little variety to them, and most aren’t ones I can do anything about, anyway. The portfolio for death is limited. This woman had made me laugh, though, for the first time in very literal ages. That deserved at least a bit of an effort. I couldn’t do anything about her dying in August, but I could do something about zucchini season.
I summoned the sequestered millennia of death throes and regrets, and blasted their killing frost to every garden I could reach.
So much zucchini, but it was all dead.