If You Never Leave?

Death was reading Wilma’s manuscript as she typed away another project. She didn’t mind them sitting in the armchair by the window of her office; she had long since gotten use to their quiet presence. Anxiety grows tedious with age, especially at one-hundred-and-forty.

Wilma, since the age of eighty-nine, five years more than her mother lived, and fifty more than her father, had decided to focus on the writing a new project while her friend Death reviewed her latest finished drafts. It usually took them a few sittings to read, and she’d distract herself with whatever idea had stuck around long enough as to warrant exploration. This was more productive than waiting to see if today was the day she would die.

She was still getting used to not pressing too hard on the keyboard of the new laptop her great-great-grandchild has bought her for her birthday last week. It meant a lot since it was one of the few gifts she received that came from a living relative and not from an adoring fan, world leader, or the Guinness World Record Committee. It was hard to tell which Wilma was more famous for; her illustrious career as a writer or her record as the world’s oldest living person.

Scientifically, she knew it was the latter. Somewhere around her one-hundred-and-tenth birthday, doctors and biologists wanted to study her to uncover the secret to her physical and mental longevity. Yes, she may have looked elderly; her eyes mournfully peeked out from under her drooping lids, her hair was so brittle she contained its wispy, white patches in a bun, and her finger typed with knobbly knuckles, heavily etched in callous wrinkles. Yet her sight sharply raced across the screen, her snowy crown sat upon a buzzing mind, and her fingers clattered the keys like the stamping hooves of a wild horse.

Artistically, however, it was the former. Wilma had been writing for over a century, publishing her debut novel at twenty-eight, shortly after a car accident which inspired the story, nearly claiming her own life. The novel was about a young woman who meets Death and pleads for another chance at life, lamenting that she never got to write her masterpiece, being a budding writer much like her creator. In one-hundred-and-twelve years since, after decades of producing novels, plays, scripts, poems, musicals, songs, memoirs, and journals, after however many awards of recognition sat, as patient as Death, around her office, after all the interviews, documentaries, and biographies detailing her long and fruitful life, she’s never confessed her first published novel wasn’t a work wholly of fiction.

Death is a fan of stories. They enjoy a good ending. Curious, they agreed to spare Wilma’s life, and grant her wish; she will not die until she has written her magnum opus. The only caveat was Death would stay with her, ready for the day she had finally done it. That day was today.

As soon as Wilma felt the hand softly rest upon her shoulder, stirring her gently awake from her flow state, she knew she had done it. She had finally written her masterpiece. For the last few seconds her neurons sparked, she quelled the spoilt thoughts that fabricated desperate pleads and offers in exchange for her life, like last time.

Perhaps they had made a mistake.

It wasn’t really that good.

Obviously she still needs to give it a final polish.

She’s just started a new project; it would be unprofessional to die now.

Maybe she had a second masterpiece in her.

No. She knew they were right. She had felt it as she reviewed the pages earlier that week. She felt it as she had printed out a copy. She felt it once she realised, unlike any other time, she hadn’t heard the scrawling scratching of a red pen suggesting changes for the rewrite. She knew it was today.

Death eased her burden, lifting her genially from her desk and lowered her into the armchair, now warm in the March sunshine, where Death had previous sat. As a blanket was folded over her lap, she took comfort, savouring her last, long, quenching breaths, that her assistant would be around later to collect the manuscript. They had a set of keys. They knew her laptop password. They would make the arrangements.

How fitting, she thought to herself, just before the world would grow dim, that the last words she ever wrote, in the new project she had started, now to forever be unfinished, should be rather fitting.

“What’s the point, David, of wanting to leave something behind if you never leave?”

Death, who held her hand until it relaxed, enjoys a good ending.

#HI