Santa Muerte

I hate seeing happy couples, walking through the street holding hands-- they always remind me of the kind of close relationship I’ll never be able to have with another human being.

It is not as if I question the Powers’ judgment in my placement in this position. My job is hard; but if the Powers did not have faith in my abilities, they would not have given it to me. Of this I am certain.  

Still, some days it is hard—the days when the children come up to me. They ask me questions about my mask; why it does not look like the bright masks of the other adults or the plain ones of the untaught children. They want to touch my mask’s cold, white surface and run their innocent fingers over runes engraved on it. They want to ask me questions.

Soon their parents will whisk them away, and whisper dark words into their ears. In time the children will learn to fear me like their parents, and their parents’ parents, and on and on to the people who lived in times even the Record-Keepers have forgotten.

I cannot go to the big public places where the people throng and pulse like a beating heart for the city. When I go there they scatter, and the heart dies.

I kill enough.

The Powers will it, of course. It is my job—and we all have jobs—to dispose of those the Powers no longer see fit for life.

So I come for them. I come for the young and the old, the lovers and the liars, the brave and the afraid. I come for them in their homes and in filthy back-alleys, as both a welcome guest and an unexpected visitor. I come for them with my long, sharp teeth and I end their lives.

Once I had to take a baby—poor thing, only just introduced to the world—on a crowded street. The Powers willed me, they possessed me, and so I did. I raised the baby from its carriage, all the while feeling like marionette strings were pulling me, and I ravaged it with my teeth—biting and clawing into its neck so it would stop screaming. Oh, that screaming, it still haunts me. But I had no choice; the Powers willed it so it must be. So I bit into its young flesh and drank its warm, sticky blood until They released me from Their grasp. Then I ran away, my tears mingling with baby’s blood.

I do not willingly go back to that part of the city anymore.

I wonder if there are others like me, I know there must be, as I cannot kill all the people in the city. But I have never seen another person with a mask like mine. Maybe they are all hiding together and do not wish to be associated with me. I can understand that.

It is a lonely life.

Sometimes, when I am willed to take someone in their own home, I linger. There is no practical reason for my staying; it is the job of the boys and girls wearing the masks of the dark jackal-gods to dispose of the body. But I like to stay around. I look at the deceased’s pictures, of their family and friends, sometimes I recognize the faces. I look at the deceased’s personal objects, to see what they liked. I look at the deceased’s date-books and to-do lists, to see what they would have done tomorrow if I had not come.

Now that I think about it, I’ll have to retract my first statement about never having a close relationship with another human being.

There is no way to get closer to a person than ending their life.