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cake and right after she’s standing
small and alone next to a bed – a deathbed, I figure, of the same man, her
father who on a better day would've looked like a jolly, ruddy-cheeked Colonel
Sanders with plenty of love handles to go around. But this time he can't put on
a brave face for his daughter because there’s something irreversibly broken
inside him.
    She’s in ponytails and as thin as a reed but there’s no mistaking
whose younger version she is because even at such young age she’s already
stunning, with her light blue eyes as cool and sparkling as a flash of sea
spray and her dark brown hair bringing forth the wonderful contrast.
    Now each and every frame focuses on the girl, her eyes flashing a
maturity far beyond her years of age. All the videos have flawlessly synced
together to bring forth a larger-than-life, segmented recording of that precise
moment when a girl chooses to become a woman; the very first time she wills
herself never to cry again. For some reason, all the videos end here.
    “As a child she wasn't a stranger to death,” Sephtimus suddenly
starts narrating in my head yet also from somewhere inside the father’s
bedroom. The words themselves sound disembodied and the fact that the
personification of death is talking about himself again as a separate incident
isn’t lost on me.
    “There were many departures around her, as there are around each and every meat always.
First, Granny’s stroke. Next, Uncle Tony’s lung cancer. Then her mother was the
victim of a traffic accident. It was difficult enough watching the people who
make up your world leave one by one, the constant fear of being left all by
yourself, but it was even harder not to understand what was going on and not to
be able to talk about it with anyone. It was all the grownups' fault thinking
they could hide death by not mentioning it, when death was in every drop of
water they drank, every breath of air they took, every wisp of dream they
dreamt.
    “She watched her father as she had watched her uncle leave little
by little, day by day. Slowly and painfully learning to give up the fight. The
young girl could smell sickness inside the room, between the sheets and under
the leaves of the potted plants where no medicine or prayer could reach. She
knew the smell all too well; so well in fact that when it came time for me to
severe her comatose father's umballicus, out of the blue she raised her head
and whispered. By all appearances to an empty room, she spoke: ‘ Take me .’
    “She had just lifted her head from the fold of her arms. She had
been crying by her father's side and her eyes as she looked up to vacant space
were red and swollen but all wrung out of tears. Inside them were blue circles
of such awareness and concentration that they had me frozen to the spot. She
looked about a hundred years older in the bottomless pits of those irises. And
in spite of those silly ponytails and pink floral dress, she was ethereal.
Ethereal, I tell you, not beautiful or lovely or whatever it is you call those
who simply fall short. She was at that moment a glimpse, an apparition of the
exquisite creature she was to become. Death could do that to a mortal. Take
away everything from her. Eat her down to the bone, so to speak. Until there
was nothing left except sheer will and the most basic instinct to survive. Shining
like a diamond shaped by great forces under the earth.
    “I
was standing to her left and she was looking in the opposite direction, but for
some reason she had her head cocked slightly like a deer on the scent of a
predator. All this from a nine-year-old was enough to make me wonder if my
presence had indeed been felt, which would be quite the feat.
    “Humans
can never see us reapers except if we allow them to. We stand inches from your
faces, poke our finger in your food, in your eye, in your nose, but you never
once feel a breeze. We stalk behind cash registers at a store robbery, inside
ambulances on their way to the