Gods of Death

When Vera came down to her car, the pollen across it was fine and white. It looked like frost. Weeks ago it had been yellow and splotchy. Before that, yellow, thick, and constant. And then rain would come and wash it away.

She’d gotten the car in college, when she’d gotten a part-time job off campus, when she still thought she’d get a job after graduation, when she still thought life would fall into place.

Today, she took the car to her allergy shots, which she got every Wednesday.

Her grandfather had died of cancer a few months ago and left her a few thousand dollars. She should’ve bought a couch, or a fancy chair. That would’ve been nice. It would’ve reminded her of her grandfather every day. Instead, she used it to pay for allergy shots, and she thought of her grandfather every week as her body learned to better survive the world.

Everywhere, people were saying, I’ve never had allergies before. People were saying, It’s a bad year. And It’s worse. And I didn’t have them in such-and-such location. But here!

The nurse moved the alcohol soaked cotton ball over the back of her arm. The nurse asked, “Is it bad right now?”

“Yes,” she told her.

“That’s grasses.” The nurse put in the needle just shy of the spot she’d wiped down. “Grasses are bad right now. You’re allergic to those?”

“I’m allergic to it all,” Vera said.

She had to wait thirty minutes at the allergist’s office to make sure that she didn’t explode into hives, that her airway didn’t close up, that they didn’t send her out into the world as a liability. To pass the time she watched an episode of Death Note, which she was rewatching from the beginning. She watched Ryuk eat his apples and watched Light write down names of people to kill and how to kill them.

When the show was over, she went to the nurses. They checked her arms, asked her if the shot sites always got red like that (they did), and she left.

She still had time before her first session so she went to a coffee shop. Her kind-of sort-of business was helping people with their computers, or helping them make websites. It started almost by accident, with a friend of her grandfather’s. And then word got around one retirement community and then another.

At the coffee shop, she wanted to flirt, to hit on someone. She wanted to ask someone out or to be asked out, to drinks, to a movie, anywhere. She checked out everyone sitting alone. People on laptops, or reading books, or with textbooks laid out, or a book of practice tests. She didn’t want to hit on a college student, but she didn’t want to hit on someone who knew what they were doing with their life either. So she just watched them as she drank her coffee.

And eventually it was time to go to Earl’s house, to help him set up Skype on his computer. He’d told her that he wanted to help kids speak English. He wanted to volunteer for calls.

“No problem,” she’d said, and wondered where her good will was.

When she got there, Earl looked a little disheveled. His shirt wasn’t buttoned up and she kept catching glances of his port for chemo, bandaged over with tape and gauze. She imagined Earl had a tattoo there instead. A skull with flowers in the eyes. A frog of geometric shapes. An old school anchor tattoo with Vera’s name across it.

“On Friday,” he said, “can you come to my place and feed my fish? My friend can’t do it.”

“Sure,” she said.

“Her family is taking her on a cruise.”

“That’s nice.”

“You ever been on a cruise, honey?”

“When I was young. My parents liked to go on cruises.”

“I’ve never been on one. Is it worth it?”

“No,” Vera said. “Not really. Just a big hotel.”

As she was leaving, Earl handed her his spare key.

Next, Vera had a follow-up appointment with her gynecologist about an ongoing odor she was having. She’d had a yeast infection. And then a bacterial vaginal infection. And then the antibiotics for the BV caused another yeast infection. And after all that, her vagina still smelled.

At the office, Vera undressed and put on the gown, opening forward. She sat on the table and unfolded the sheet and put it across her lap. She waited to put her feet in the stirrups.

The doctor came in and they talked about the odor, unchanging, not BV’s smell of fish, but something. The doctor said, “Why do you think it’s not a normal smell?”

“I think I know what I smell like,” Vera said.

“I don’t mean that it’s not different. But maybe it’s not bad.”

“It doesn’t smell good.”

“But it might be a normal smell. Maybe your new normal smell.”

“Forever?”

“Maybe something shifted. And maybe it will shift again.”

It had been months already. Maybe I could get used to it, she told herself. But then she thought, gross, so maybe not.

She put her feet up in the stirrups. The doctor lowered the bright light that made Vera feel like she’d peed herself. The doctor put in the speculum and took a few new swabs.

“I’ll call you with the results,” the doctor said.

Vera went for Chinese for dinner. She knew she could eat the leftovers for at least two more meals, so she let herself enjoy the lo mein, her table alone, and the staff bringing her refills of tea and cold pineapple for dessert.

On the way home she spotted graffiti on a pipe running down a wall. Someone had written TRASH down it. She stopped the car and got out to take a picture.

The next day started with her standing Thursday appointment with Ms. Tiller at the library. Vera was helping Ms. Tiller with her website, and Ms. Tiller didn’t want anyone at her house. Vera imagined her house was full of cats or dogs or rabbits or birds or street signs she’d stolen in her youth.

Ms. Tiller had bad eyes and brought a lamp of hers from home to the library. A tall one that had to sit diagonally across the back seat of her car. Vera had to carry it in for her. The librarians nodded at them as they made their way to a tutoring room. The cord clanked behind them on the stairs.

Vera set the lamp in the corner, plugged it in, and turned off the room’s fluorescent lights. The room glowed like a warm room you’d find at the end of a hallway in a fairy tale. But then the mundane work began.

Ms. Tiller got out her laptop and her reading glasses, opened up her website, and pushed it toward Vera, shaking her hands at it. Ms. Tiller didn’t like the Theme they’d picked anymore.

And Vera was patient. Vera was good at what she did.

What Vera wanted was to be a full time ceramics artist. If that was possible. She had a wheel and a small kiln in her apartment. For larger projects she drove to a community studio. She made their website for them, hosted and maintained it, in exchange for time there and space in their kiln.

She liked how pottery kept you from feeling too precious about your work. You could think something was the best thing you’d ever made. You could be sure of it. It was gonna make you famous and land you in art books. And then it breaks in the kiln. And the first time you cry about it, sure. But not after that.

After she finished switching over Ms. Tiller’s website, Vera went to the community studio. She undid the plastic bag around the giant slab of clay, pushed the plastic down low around its sides, took the wood handles of the clay cutter in her hands, and dragged the wire through.

She could have spent the day right there, cutting clay for whoever needed it.

But she pulled the bag back up, twisted the plastic loosely, and folded it toward the side. Then she took her chunk of clay to the table and worked it until it was soft. Maybe she’d taken too much.

She filled a plastic container with water and brought it to the wheel, with her clay and her tools and her sponges. She put the clay on the center of the wheel and let it spin. She soaked a sponge and then squeezed it out above the clay. She put her hands on it.

With this much clay, she could build up or out.

One summer she taught high schoolers how to throw. They each made a half dozen tiny bowls. They put on a small show for the parents to walk through at the end of the camp. It looked like a tiny city of shitty bowls. One mother asked if it was really safe to eat and drink out of them. Yes, Vera had told her. But she could tell the mother would never trust the glazes. They would have little bowls holding coins and thumbtacks all around their house.

Vera tried building the clay out first. It looked like it was going to be a platter of some kind. The base small. The rise low. The edge got delicate, and then it crumpled. It fell.

She got rid of any kind of edge and made the base wide. She looked down at the disc, spinning there. She didn’t need a wheel to make that. She took her wood knife to the side of it to make a detail. She took a wood comb and made another detail near the center of it. What nothing had she made this time? She took her bent knuckle and pressed softly into the clay, then another knuckle, then another. She redid the detail on the side, sharper and more defined.

When she got back to her apartment building that night, there was a pale cricket in the hall. It was so pale it looked like the larval state of another larger creature.

It didn’t move.

Inside, Vera put on Death Note. She’d made it to the second season. She reveled in the opening song that was unapologetically metal. She rewound it and watched it again. She screamed and head banged alone in her living room.

Falling asleep that night, she thought of the life she’d imagined in college, teaching at a small private school in Maine. Her own studio, and her in charge of all of the equipment and supplies. Her students, eager and entitled and thinking they were acting out when they came to class high. And her faculty housing, a converted old house where a few young teachers lived. Her having sex with someone she shouldn’t because she was a colleague. Her having sex with someone she shouldn’t because she’d learn later he’d slept with multiple students.

In the morning, the doctor called. Vera had another bacterial infection. Or the same one. Who knows.

What the fuck was she going to do next year when she couldn’t stay on her parents’ health care? Vaginas didn’t care if you were young and healthy in every other possible way.

The doctor called in a new script for her, an antibiotic, a cream this time, another insert. But with a new applicator for each night. And a treatment for yeast to follow right after the course of antibiotics. Because, one thing at a time.

She couldn’t believe all the moving parts. She couldn’t believe that if she had a hysterectomy one day, she could still get yeast infections. She couldn’t believe that her uterus was the size of a plum. It seemed smaller than that, hidden away inside her. And it felt, too, like it should be much bigger, the size of a liver at least.

It wasn’t that she hadn’t tried for her dream job. She’d interviewed for every ceramics opening there was, for three years. There weren’t many. And someone else always got the job. She liked to picture them, the successful teaching artists. She pictured them older. And maybe excited to also coach the girls volleyball team. Maybe someone who was a current faculty member’s wife. Maybe someone with a Masters degree. She could imagine endless more likely candidates than herself.

On Fridays she met Dennis at the library, first thing. She locked her apartment door behind her as she headed out, and there was the pale cricket in the hall again, in the same spot. Or it seemed like the same spot. She hadn’t been paying attention that closely. She would this time she told herself. She wanted to trace it on the wall. But then it might move, and then she’d definitely scream.

Dennis had a dog she was allergic to. They’d learned that the hard way. A few minutes into their first lesson she started rubbing her eyes and the next thing she knew they were swelling shut. They sat on his back patio the rest of their session, drinking lemonade and waiting for the Benadryl to kick in.

Since then she showed him how to navigate his email and YouTube on the library’s computers. Today they signed him up for Netflix.

“I know someone who could set this up on your television for you,” she said.

“I use my laptop,” he said. “I can always have it close and then I don’t need my glasses.”

“Smart,” she said.

He winked at her. He winked all the time.

Walking down to the library’s main entrance, she stumbled onto an animal show they were holding for kids. Adults were sitting all around the edge of the group so she joined the ring. She saw a baby kangaroo, a hedgehog, a snake, a tortoise, and an armadillo that never undid itself.

Seeing all those families there didn’t make her want to have a baby, but it did make her want to have children’s programming back in her life again. She had a sudden urge to play parachute and red light green light. Couldn’t adults do these things? And with music and drugs.

Maybe that was another career for her. Kids parties for adults. And she’d be the sober host. She could buy a goofy headset and rent out a warehouse space. She’d clap and all of the crowd would clap along with her.

It had rained while she was inside the library and the rain had washed the pollen from the car. But when she opened the door, she saw the pollen in streaks in an odd cavity of the car’s design. She wondered how her skin would react if she dragged her fingers through it. How swollen would they get?

She picked up her prescription at CVS and then she went back to the community studio and glazed her disc, now that it was dry. She didn’t like the rings she’d made. They looked like they’d been made with knuckles. Her knuckles.

She brought up pictures of graffiti from her neighborhood. Someone had written woof in cursive on a stone wall. She tried to replicate it on her disk. She felt like she was stealing but it was all she wanted to do. Her last three pieces featured local graffiti, and their titles were the addresses of where the graffiti could be found. And it wasn’t beautiful graffiti—it was just words, someone’s handwriting. But she thought, maybe she shouldn’t be allowed to recreate handwriting either.

She touched up the curve on the f.

She went to the farmers market as it was closing. There was a boy behind the counter who’d give her enough rotisserie chicken for the week for four dollars, if there was any left. And today there was.

Back at home, she ate a flattened half-a-chicken, leaning over her kitchen counter, picking every piece of meat off the bone, as she watched the series finale of Death Note.

Then she remembered she had to feed Earl’s fish.

At Earl’s house, she opened the door, flipped the light switch, and found a creature sitting at Earl’s kitchen table. He had thousands of wings and feet and every inch of his body was covered in eyes and tongues. And the eyes bulged forth, here and there, and here and there. He was bent over the table, writing in a book. She considered backing out of the room exactly the way she’d come in, but then he spoke.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m here to feed the fish,” Vera said.

“Then feed them.”

Vera moved around the edge of the room to the fish tank. The creature’s body looked like it could be stretched out to cover the entire world, but it was hard for her eyes to capture its exact shape as it was, squeezed into the kitchen chair.

Vera fed the fish.

As she went to leave, she asked, “Do you want this light on?”

“No,” it said. “Thank you.”

That night she got ready for bed carefully. She peed and then brushed her teeth and flossed and rinsed with ACT and then peed again. She put water by the bed. Vaseline. A trash can for the applicator. She was supposed to put the cream in lying down and not leave bed again, not even to wash her hands.

So she lay there, feeling like her hands were dirty, trying to fall asleep, but thinking about the creature.

She dreamt the pale cricket came to her with her own voice, only loud and angry.

“I’m a shinigami!” the cricket yelled.

“Bullshit,” Vera said.

“I am!” It looked like a little fire burned inside of it.

“Okay, okay.”

“What do you want to do?” the cricket said, still yelling.

“What? Like hang out?”

“Yeah!”

“Why are you yelling?” Vera said.

“This is just me,” he yelled. “This is how I talk! Take it or leave it!”

Her alarm woke her early because she had a shift at the food co-op. She locked her apartment door behind her and turned into the hall. In the place she could have sworn the cricket was, there was a moth. She didn’t know if it was more odd to think that one had changed into the other or that there was a specific spot in the hallway that was the only spot bugs could appear.

At the co-op, she spent the morning shelving and smiling at customers.

As soon as her shift was over, she called Earl. “How are you?” she asked.

“I’m just fine, honey,” he said. “Everything okay with the fish?”

“Yes. They’re great. I was wondering if you needed me to feed them again tonight?”

“I should be back by then,” he said.

“I noticed,” she tried to think of something. “I could help with your laundry if you need it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m great at folding.”

Earl laughed. “Okay. I’m not going to turn that down.”

“I’ll come by tonight?”

“Sure. If I’m asleep, there’s clean clothes in the basket and some in the dryer.”

“Got it,” she said.

It was hard to make it through the day, waiting to see the creature again. At the studio her disk was out of the kiln and it looked okay. The woof saved it. She didn’t know if she should try to make it again, now that she had a better sense of it, or if she should make something new. She went through the pictures on her phone.

Above a small tunnel someone had written HEAVEN in white, like they’d written it with a rock. The rocks she remembered looking for on the playground as a child. Scratching a dozen on the blacktop before one scratched white.

She started to build a long narrow platter. She imagined someone serving little pickles on it. Then the platter started to look like a rib, if a rib were made out of clay, if someone were to flatten out its depth but keep its arc.

She kept wetting the clay and wiping it with a small cloth until all marks of her fingers were gone and only soft lines from the cloth remained.

She labeled a piece of paper and left the platter on it to dry among other, more impressive, pieces of pottery.

Outside the day was perfect, high 70s with a breeze. She walked around the block before going back to her car. She passed a dead cicada being eaten by ants. She saw spiders’ strings drifting off of a fence and a mailbox, as if a million tiny babies had just hatched and blown away from their mother. Finches kept scattering from lawns as Vera approached them. She saw one hop from branch to branch inside of a bush while keeping its eyes on her.

When she got to her car, she sat on the hood. Her grandfather used to joke that an angel named Azrael had messed up her name in the Book of Life and made her parents only think that they’d wanted to name her that all along.

“Vera is a name for an old woman,” he’d said. “It’ll match you when you have a walker.”

“But you never had a walker.”

“Then you’re shit out of luck if you’re like me.”

“What about Vera Wang?” she’d said.

“I guess so. I guess it could be your name, if you’re an artist.”

She watched a worm come onto the sidewalk near her car. She thought about how she’d never let herself be buried.

She wondered if she could specify that she wanted her skeleton to be preserved for a high school science classroom in her will. She liked that idea. She didn’t even mind the thought of teenagers pretending to hump her or finger her. She wanted to hear the teacher yell, “That was a person! Have some respect!” And at the end of class, the teacher would ask two boys to help put her away, saying, “Could you please screw her gently in the closet?” And the teacher would turn red and everyone would laugh to the point of tears.

On the drive home, she couldn’t stop thinking about the creature. Would he even be there if Earl was home? She looked at the different pots and gnomes and things that people kept by their front doors. Maybe I could make those, she thought. The website could be called Front Door Store, with a tag line, like, personalizing and accessorizing the space that welcomes you home. She didn’t know if she should be impressed or sickened by her knack for marketing.

In her apartment, she ate a bowl of ramen and started rewatching Trigun.

When it was exactly the time she’d left the night before, she left again. She went into Earl’s place and listened before she turned on the light. She heard Earl snoring and heard the TV that he was probably asleep in front of. She also heard the scrawling of a pen.

She turned on the light and there it was at the table again.

“He fed the fish,” he said.

“I told him I would help with the laundry.”

“Ah.”

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Working,” he said.

“But why here?”

“I can leave if you like.”

“No,” she said quickly. “I want you to stay.”

He sighed. “Next you will ask me who I am.”

She shook her head. “Azrael,” she said.

Some of the eyes darted to look at her. “Yes.” Then they returned to staring off in different directions.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“Don’t you have laundry to do?”

“Yes,” she said. “But after that.”

“Ask me after that.”

Vera pulled up Trigun on her phone and rested it on the corner of the basket as she began to fold. She skipped ahead to episode 19, one of her favorites, where Vash the Stampede sings, I won’t leave a single man alive.

She made piles of shirts, pants, socks, and underwear on Earl’s bed as he slept on the couch. Then she stacked the undershirts, underwear, and socks, neatly back into the basket. The pants and the button-down shirts could be hung on hangers and forgotten about, but with Azrael watching, she wanted to do everything just right. She asked Azrael if he knew where the iron and ironing board was.

“The bedroom closet,” Azrael said.

She stuck her phone in her back pocket and put in headphones and listened to music as she ironed. She ironed the shirts first. Then she put a pleat down the front of each pair of pants.

As she was finishing a pair, Earl tapped her on the shoulder, and she jumped and screamed and quickly apologized.

Earl laughed. “You scared me!”

She laughed, too.

“Well, I was just heading to bed. You didn’t need to do all this.”

“Oh, I was happy to.”

“Well, I owe you something.”

Usually she would have insisted that he didn’t, but she needed to come back to see Azrael again. “You could buy me dinner.”

“Now you’re talking,” he said.

“Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow?” he said, surprised.

“Sure. You could order something and I could pick it up for us.”

“If you want…” he said.

“Great,” she said. “Great. See you tomorrow.”

Back in her building, there was a smudge of blood where the moth had been. And back inside, in her bathroom, she thought, Fuck it. She put in the antibiotic cream standing up and she held a kegel while she washed her hands. And then she got into bed.

Better, she thought.

That night she dreamt of the pale cricket again.

“I thought you were dead,” she said.

“Not dead! Death god!”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean the blood in the hallway.”

“What do you want, Vera!”

“What do you mean, what do I want? I want what everyone wants. I want to stop worrying about money and fall in love.”

And she woke up. She woke up thinking, Really? Is that all?

That morning Vera’s car didn’t look like it had pollen on it until she was inside of it. Then the windshield looked greasy with pollen. She washed it away with her wipers, and a spider crawled out from somewhere and started moving up the window. She watched its yellow-green body make its eight-legged climb. She imagined the spider annoyed at its own redundant legs.

Ms. Tiller had called Vera for a last minute session, but she wasn’t at the library when Vera arrived.

Vera went inside to the bathroom, and pulling down her pants, the odor rushed at her. “Ugh,” she said out loud. Maybe it’s not an infection, she thought. Maybe a little piece of death is inside me.

But by the time she was outside again, and Ms. Tiller had pulled up with her lamp, Vera had forgotten again about the terrible odor she was carrying.

In the small glowing room, Ms. Tiller revealed that she wanted to put more photos onto her site. A lot more photos. And all of them had to be resized. And Vera had to explain why some of them weren’t high enough resolution to put up on the web. And Ms. Tiller eventually accepted that it was true while also insisting that she didn’t understand why, and couldn’t millenials do anything nowadays? And Vera felt like the most boring person in the world.

Earl called in an order for Vietnamese food for her. When she got to his house, Azrael wasn’t there and her heart sank. But what had she imagined? Them all having dinner together? She sat where Azrael had sat. She tried to feel where his eyes and wings had pressed against the seat.

Earl got out a vanilla Ensure.

“You’re not eating?” Vera asked.

“It’s for you,” he said.

She ate summer rolls and honey short ribs, and they talked about cancer and her grandfather and their families.

“Do you have children?” she asked.

“I do—a son. His mother decided not to tell me about him or him about me until he was grown up. He lives far away but we have a relationship now.”

“Jesus,” she said.

“It’s okay,” he said.

“Have you told him about your treatment? Is he coming?”

“Do you think I’m so close to dying?” he said, chuckling.

 “No, it’s not that,” she said. “I would have liked to have been with my grandfather more.”

“Don’t worry about that too much.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you’re carrying that around. Forgive yourself for that.”

“I’m not,” she said. She finished off a short rib and licked her fingers. Then she shrugged. “Maybe I am.”

“Well, we should both get to bed, yeah?” Earl said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Thanks again for the food.”

“Thank you,” Earl said. He picked up the shoulder of his finely pressed shirt.

The drive home was slow, as if every light was timed to drag it out. She waited at light after light with no other cars there. She saw fireflies off in the grass. She saw a fox cross the street far up ahead. At a gas station, she saw someone leaning on their car as they waited for the pump to finish. She rolled down the windows and heard cicadas and crickets. The sky was covered in clouds, thickly, blankly. The summer was ending.

She went into her apartment and flipped on the light and there was Azrael, bent over her own table. The light shooting through his thousand wings landed on her windows. His thousand feet were on her floor.

She sighed in relief and dropped down against the wall where she could sit and watch him writing in his book. Everything was finally where it belonged. He was the necessary shape for the sense of ruin in the world, the acutely personal and the cataclysmic. From here, only from right here, could she move forward with her life.

Sarah Blake is the author of Mr. West, Let’s Not Live on Earth, and In Springtime, along with two novels, Naamah and Clean Air, which was recently optioned by Onyx Collective. “Gods of Death” takes place in the slightly off-kilter world that Clean Air arose from. Blake’s other work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Catapult, The Kenyon Review, and many other venues. Blake received a Literature Fellowship from the NEA and the National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction. She lives outside of London.

Published October 15 2023