A currently unpublished story from Beth Mayer's forthcoming collection from Black Lawrence Press, We Will Tell You Otherwise (August 2019).
Please Tell Us Your Beautiful Secret
The angel of death was running behind schedule. It had been an exhausting day, even for a celestial being.
Sister Josephine was playing Bach’s “Prelude in D Minor” on her upright piano when the angel of death found her, so he knew that she must be expecting him.
When he had tried to take his previous client, Chuck Hauser, from his bed at hospice, Chuck had been reluctant to leave his wife behind. The angel of death pointed out the way his wife was stroking Chuck’s hand, how she had loved him but would never be through loving him. The angel of death informed Chuck that his wife would remarry a good man, a widower with the children and grandchildren they had once wished for, that she would be happy again, in a different, less feverish way.
“Sorry I’m late,” the angel of death told Sister Josephine now, just for his own entertainment. Everyone knew that adults could not hear angels while they were still alive, unlike dogs and unattended children.
“Yes,” said Sister Josephine, “I am quite tired, actually.”
The angel of death was shocked because this had never happened to him personally. Had not, as far as he knew, happened to any of them for several hundred years.
The angel of death composed himself. He was in charge here. And pronounced: “Sister Josephine, your time has come.”
She smiled at him now (how lovely!) and stood up to reach for his hands.
“Is this alright?” she asked.
The angel of death honestly didn’t know.
Her good nature unnerved him. Most were like Chuck Hauser, so the angel of death was used to selling. Good news! He had told Chuck just hours before, in just over nine years (which would seem a very short time to Chuck now that he was dead!) his wife would die, too! And so, the very best parts of them would indeed meet again. Chuck said forget it, he didn’t believe in any of that crap. Eventually though, Chuck had ascended, spent but free.
But here, this Sister Josephine was surprising him again. The angel of death would win (he always did) and the end would be the same, so he took her hands in his own for the moment.
“Any questions?” he asked her, to be polite.
“Oh, yes!” Sister Josephine said, her feet already stepping out of her body, “I’ve been wondering for the longest time now, what is your name?”
In his entire service, the angel of death had never once been asked his name. He had to think about it, laughed when he remembered, and called it out to her as she rose up.
Beth Mayer’s short story collection We Will Tell You Otherwise won the 2017 Hudson Prize with Black Lawrence Press (forthcoming July 2019). Her fiction has appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Sun Magazine, and The Midway Review. She was a fiction finalist for The Missouri Review’s Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize (2016), her work recognized among “Other Distinguished Stories” by Best American Mystery Stories (2010), and her stories anthologized in both American Fiction (New Rivers) and New Stories from the Midwest (Ohio University). Beth was a Loft Mentor Series Winner in Fiction (2015-16) and holds an MFA in creative writing from Hamline University. She currently teaches English at Century College in the Minneapolis-St Paul area, where she lives with her family and impossibly faithful dog. (Photo credit: Mark Riddle, Riddle Photography Studio)
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