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Mistress Death
For as crazy as she is, Mary was right about one thing. Hate has a twisted blade. And while she didn’t have the fortitude to carry out what I, on pure instinct and no thinking, could have done myself, fate does have a way of working out. Love does too. Heeding warnings on whether or not to peek at a Christmas present or even peek at a cheating spouse’s browser history makes no difference at all. Semantics are overrated. It’s the big choices, the ones you can’t take back, that make the difference. The big emotions too.
I smile down on Hudson as he sits at the edge of the lake just outside Peak View. I won’t intervene. He will either release the emergency break for a final Escape—poetic that he came to his hometown to end it all—or he won’t. That’s where Mary and Ingrid had it all wrong. Yes, I, Mistress Death, am here to usher lives and even relationships to the grave. But the buck stops there. I’m not the believer in karma that Ingrid or Hudson are. I don’t care about happy or even sad endings; either are optional to me and the universe on a whole. I believe in the process. I’ve seen too many times beyond the veil.
Decay. That’s what fascinates me. Watching the transformation of souls, lives, and states of living and death are the very things that amuse me. I’m lucky in that way. I can see what mere mortals cannot see. The green a corpse turns as a cold body surrenders to finality is the most beautiful thing if you look hard enough. There will come a day, long after Mary and Kate decide they’ve surrendered to revenge and something not meant to be, that they’ll see this too. I will watch on, waiting for signs of decay and seeing the beauty in change.
For now, Hudson has it right. He, like the cliché, has the wisdom to know what he cannot change. He’s surrendered. Yet, as sweat collects on his brow, he forgets something: he possesses the power to slap fate in the ass and send it reeling in a whole new direction. Where he allowed himself to sit in a waiting room at a funeral parlor with his marriage, he does that now, too. They all do, in Escape, Colorado. Still, I believe in his last minute ability to turn things around. That’s what love is; the opposite of hate. It too, twists and turns. Now it is up to him alone which direction he will choose. Happy endings are always up for the taking. Mary knew that. Ingrid and Kate knows it too.
My job here, for now, is done. While I don’t yet have a funeral to attend, it’s coming soon. I turn away, lowering my black veil and flattening my pale hair, able to allow him the free will it will take to decide. I chuckle, thinking of Mary’s frantic lists turned fictional stories and Hudson’s frantic bouncing between the women in his life. Walking away: I can do that now, because I’ve come to realize that nothing is ever really final. An ending is a beginning and the preface always the first words a journey to the end. ‘Beyond the Veil.’ It’s the expression people use for life after death – the mysterious place they linger when they inevitably vacate the earthly world and float off into world next. It’s the beginning of something too.
