Rendez-vous on Día de Muertos
She walks among them, basking in their celebrations. They sing and laugh and eat and drink, and all of them wear her face. Black on white, the eternal smile of death. Men and women, children and adults and the elderly.
All of them.
All of them smiling at her when they walk past each other.
And she smiles back.
And they never know.
In recent times they’ve added splashes of colour, but she doesn’t mind. In fact, she’s come to like it, she thinks, as a group of young girls giggle and make appreciative noises at her. She grins and greets them back, and she sees that one of the girls can, only for a split second, peek through her eyes.
But it’s just a fleeting moment, and as soon as it’s there, it’s gone, and of course, she has already moved on.
She picks a piece of bread here, an apple there, a sweet a bit later. After all, they’re hers. They’re giving it freely. They’re offerings for her, so she takes them, and thanks them silently. Otherwise, she’d be breaking the rules, rules older than the world. Rules that even she is subjected to. She cannot take what isn’t hers.
She never would.
The festivities go on throughout the night. She joins one group, dances and laughs with them, and leaves, looking for the next group. She stops at the altars where she marvels at the beauty they’ve put there for her. She enjoys tequila and and pulque and mezcal throughout the night, never feeling their effects.
Where others have withered and died, she has not just endured, she has thrived. She continues being loved, and honored, and given offerings, as she has been for centuries.
And then she feels it.
She feels him.
She spins. There’s only movement and laughter and music surrounding them, but there he stands. A face in the crowd, under a dark hood, staring directly at her.
Distinctly at her.
As if he could actually see her.
She drifts, and stays alert. He’s lost her… no. She knows it, he’s back on her trail.
Part of her is excited. Something like this hasn’t happened in centuries… no, it’s never happened!
She decides she wants to know. And she cannot go back to her realm, not tonight. Tonight it’s not possible. Tonight, she’s summoned here. She needs to know.
She stops.
She doesn’t need to wait for long.
He appears immediately. A large man, dressed in dark tones, wearing a hood. His skin is brown. He has his arms at his sides. Unarmed.
And then he actually surprises her by uncovering his head and kneeling down.
“My lady,” he says, not looking at her.
She stares, and says nothing.
“I know who you are,” he continues. “I can see you.”
His eyes are still fixed on the pavement.
“I hope you have noticed, my lady, but a war is brewing.”
A war? She looks up, and inside.
It’s true.
“You, my lady, are… like the last unicorn alive. Nobody else has access to your realm. All the others have gone.”
She looks down at him, and then she speaks.
“Look at me,” she says, and her voice is deep, and dark, and millennia spill from her lips.
He looks up.
“Who am I?” she asks, and her face is a skull, white on black. Eternal smile.
“You are Mictēcacihuātl, the Lady of the Dead. The last of the Gods of Death.”
So he does know.
“What are you doing here?” she asks.
“I came to serve as a guard, my lady. They will come for you. They will look for access to your realm. I will stop them for as long as I can.”
She gazes into his eyes, and she’s certain he tells the truth.
“Who are you?” she finally asks.
“My name, my lady, is Gilgamesh.”
This is my story for this week’s prompt from Wording Wednesday, a writing group on MeWe.
I thought I could somehow try to follow on my two previous stories (1, 2), and see if I could create a larger picture through individual small scenes. And so, when I saw the unicorn, I didn’t take it in the literal sense, and then pieces started clicking in place… And the result is up there.
It’s fun and challenging at the same time, since we don’t know what the next prompt will be.
