Vetus Amicitia

An old friend has come to visit

“Thank you for that.”

Mrs. Kane smiled despondently, eyes not meeting his. The man sighed, dropping his head in his gloved hands and rubbing his face. There was silence between the two, not uncommon as the sudden reserves punctuated their conversation more often than words were spoken. When the man spoke, he spoke through the gaps of his fingers, his voice seeming more distant.

“You don’t mean that.”

Mrs. Kane scoffed, the aggressive sound piercing through the atmosphere and bringing a pained frown to the man’s face. He raised his head from the cradle of his hands to look at the woman. Immediately, the frown dissipated, and in its place came the tell-tale signs of distressed trepidation. Mrs. Kane’s face was contorted with grief, her eyebrows scrunched and eyes that seemed to look somewhere past him, through him even. Her eyes welled with tears, tottering on the precipice of her waterline. The man would never get used to seeing her this way.

“I try to mean it. Every time.”

Mrs. Kane’s voice was ragged and frayed around the edges as if the words she spoke had wounded her deeply. Mrs. Kane looked over to the man and surveyed the tension in his shoulder, before directing her gaze back to her hands that fiddled distractedly with a small yellow toy truck. She sniffed, her throat clogged with a ball of emotions that pushed against the column, threatening to break free. She swallowed down the urge to collapse against the brick wall and instead squeezed her eyes shut, gathering her bearings.

“You must hate me.”

Mrs. Kane let out a chuckle and looks softly at him. She stretches out her left palm to him, inviting him to clasp it. He quizzically stared at her outstretched hand but placed his hand on hers, albeit hesitantly. Mrs. Kane winced at the unusual coldness, her fingers twitching under his palm, but she quickly recovered and turned his hand to face up. She reached out her right hand and put the toy on his palm before closing his fingers around the object. She held his wintry hand that way for a while, cocooned in the warmth that her hands exuded.

“I wouldn’t get anything out of it.”

Mrs. Kane parted her hands slightly and traced over the veins of his hand gingerly. The hand was old, older than time itself, dry as a thirsty desert begging for rain, and black like he’d dipped it in the ink of an onyx night sky. It was a characteristic she had always noted about him every time he came for someone. She remembered asking him why his hands betrayed his age back when he came for her dear Ma. When she was new to grief and he was the only thing that solidified the reality of loss. He had replied, at the time, with a small shake of his head and the ghost of a smile flitting across his features. The next time he visited for Baba, much too soon, she’d insisted on getting the answer. The way his voice rang out was clear as day in her memories, the way it imitated the whispers of the breeze in the night, the flow of water over the soft edges of the sandy shore, the crackling of the flames on a lone candle, the smoothness of the freshly wet dirt under bare feet.

“Anguish and woe leave scars far too joyously, uncaring for the beholder and merciless to the bearer. Your scars remain encased within your heart, while mine seep into the very hands that carry the weight of agony. Hate me as I hate me, Aoife.”

This time Mrs. Kane did not restrain her sorrow, letting her tears roll rampant down her cheeks and soaking her shirt. Her head pounded with the force of her sobs, her chest heaving to stay afloat under the storm of her howls. The man reached out with his free hand to caress the quivering cheek of the bawling woman. She leaned into the touch.

“Go.”

The man lingered for a moment too long, before retracting his hands and pulling his hood over his head, expression shrouded. He wound his ebony coat tighter around his body. He looked at the toy truck that Mrs. Kane had thrust into his palm, pocketing it carefully, and walked away from the woman, just to return a heartbeat later carrying a petite slumbering boy in his arms. He paused in front of the woman, too far to touch yet too close to feel her raw and aching moans reverberate through his core.

“I promise I will come for you, Aoife, even if it’s the last thing I do.”

Mrs. Kane’s body racked with sobs. She reached into her back pocket and pulled out a knife that glinted ominously, her grip unpitying. The man sucked in a sharp breath, his body shuddering under the weight of the shock that rippled through him. As one single extraordinary tear fled from the confines of the man’s eye, Mrs. Kane’s resolute voice echoed through the hollow room, ringing in the man’s ear.
“And I will be ready, Mr. Reaper. I’ve got nothing left to lose.”