HUNGER
The children of the street were children who lived alongside death, and the runt of the litter knew Her better than most.
Mikaela was born without a father, without a legacy, and without the strength to survive, but she was born with a hunger. It gnawed at her endlessly, and as years scratching for scraps and shivering in the cold passed, she built her entire being over its base. The world owed her little more than a small street corner, but she wanted temples built in her name.
The thieving was normal. Every street urchin nicked pockets for pennies. Mikaela had a unique talent for it that made her useful to the family finally, and she learnt much more, much quicker. Pennies grew to coin bags to jewellery peeled off warm skin and whispered secrets worth much more. She hid more than she gave, and still awe and encouragement rained down on her from the others. Nifty Mikaly and her nifty fingers. With her courage and her bravery stealing the most daring prizes. A regular knight in rotting rags. The praise slid past her like water through an empty stomach. She hadn’t earned them; she wasn’t any of those things. Bravery and courage were for people with choices, she had a need. It drove her further than courage ever would.
Slowly, she clawed a life for herself. A trunk of secrets and gold hidden under her bed in the small room she rented on the outskirts of London’s slums would be her ticket out forever. Fate had other plans, or maybe the machinations of the stars would always be against her. Her apartment burnt. Her ticket stolen. Too many orphans and street rats to suspect, to ever find out who’d done it.
Worst of all, she was of age now. Mikaela knew what the gazes of men meant; she’d spent long enough learning the language of wanting to know what those looks desired. She wasn’t a girl who would get reverence or love, but she needed to eat, to sleep.
She picked well, someone who could pay a high price. Dressed in rich livery with a coin bag always attached to him, passing from bar to bar to hotels at night. He’d have to do. Just before sunset, when he went on his usual prowl, she walked into him. Clung onto his arm and remained there until he snuck them into an alleyway and gave her a job. She remembered wanting temples once. Having them built in her name, with people devoted to her, and an older, more foolish dream of love. She had wanted to see divinity. With his dick in her mouth she looked up, past him, and past the sun, towards a merciful god that was not there. Renounced him as the salty taste coated her tongue. When night fell, she picked a better master to serve. If sex and violence were the only options for a woman like her to grow beyond her station, she would rather look for Deaths’ favour.
Her first time is messy. Her blood is still on the bedsheets when he slumps asleep, she drags the knife across his throat and makes him pay the debt back in double. Then slips away with his valuables. It is a dirty, filthy induction.
She gets better over time. Learning when to pick fights, and how to win them. Then learning how to make no messes, draw no attention in the shadows. Her violence earns her money, her cunning earns her a quickly rising station. Killing on behalf of the rich to line her pockets, then carefully inserting herself into their lives and homes with her new money. Sliding into the empty spaces in court left by the people she has murdered.
Three decades pass quickly and she finds herself a revered duchess with an elaborate story about her right to her station and a mansion that speaks for itself. But these are no temples. She remembers her old friend, and it has been a very long time since she has held a corpse or made one, but Death has been her only consistent companion. Her hunger is still there, and perhaps old friends will know where to put it.
There are circles of rich occult obsessives to join, and books written by comfortable old men to read, and none of them do anything because none of them understand. All of them are too afraid to make the one sacrifice that could get them what they want.
The warning she gets with the vial outlines a list of symptoms and a promise that she’ll rejoin the living in quarter an hour, but there are no guarantees when you play games with Death.
Mikaela goes home, slips into her silk sheets, slips the drink into her mouth, and slips into an endless dream.
Finally, she can put a face to the name. Death comes to her as a woman in a black man’s suit, with high cheekbones and slicked back hair. There is something uncanny about her face. It looks like an illusion of a person she knew long ago resting above the skin of a complete stranger. When she speaks her voice can only be described as cold.
“You won’t be here for long, will you? I’ll wait by your side until you’re done but please spare me the dramatics. You’re going back to living soon enough so no tears please.”
Death toes at the floor, looks around aimlessly. Mikaela has no idea what she is seeing. The two are standing in an empty and dark void, she can barely make Her out in the light. It’s weak silver glow has no origin, and it slides along the two of them like sharp moonlight.
“I want to ask you something,” Mikaela asks.
Death rolls her eyes. “Great, more questions. Go on then, ask.”
“Will I go to hell for what I’ve done?”
Death laughs. “No, you won’t. Your funny little human ideas have no bearing on the functions of the heavens and are somehow always dreadfully wrong. Why do you ask? Regretting all those murders, are you?”
“You know of them?”
“Of course I do. I’ve seen you many times, little Mikaly. Big fan of your work.”
Mikaela shivers at the old nickname. She hasn’t heard it in a long time, thought it was long gone by now. “You enjoy the killing, then?”
“No, of course not. I just don’t particularly care.”
“You don’t care. You have no opinion of it then, no care about violence or death or evil?”
“Of course not. The balance of the world is not my problem.”
“What is, then? What are you?”
Death shrugs, finds the words easily. “The world is full of cheques and balances, and I am the bill that always comes due. You forget what I am. You have begun to think of me as a new beginning, a comfortably familiar end, a merciful friend holding your hand in the final journey, some great democratic equaliser. There are many ways to theorise me, and you, with your endless thinking, have found them all. You are wrong. This is what I am, the first endless hunger. Spawning its mouth wide, learning to fit whole universes inside, tongue lashing for every last star and bug, ensuring nothing escapes its’ maw. Time has let you forget, time too will not outrun me, and then you will remember what I am, and then I will eat the memory too.”
There is no threat to the words, no malice. There doesn’t need to be. Death stands before her, and She speaks a truth so clear it shadows the light of the universe.
The words settle inside Mikaela’s bones, fear pooling in her stomach, but understanding too. The gnashing, clawing hunger in her is not so dissimilar from Death’s. She may hold a primeval hunger, but Mikaela’s is primeval too, in a way. It is the only thing she has known since she was born.
“Does my hunger not make me your daughter, then?”
Death pauses, looking at Mikaela properly now. No longer bored. “It is a primeval understanding, what we share. An old hunger. I have given you many gifts over time. May I ask for one in return?”
Death scoffs. “I know what it is that you ask for. The same thing everyone does. Tell me, immortality, riches, power, magic? Which will it be this time?”
“No, none of that.
“Then what?”
“Make me yours.”
Death laughs, “You’d rather I take you now? And then, what? Make you my lover, my charge, my companion?”
“However you’ll take me, but you understand me, understand what I want. Make me yours. Let me satiate my stomach on the same meal you do.”
At this Death cocks her head. Mikaela is adept at reading human emotion, but She is not human so for the first time since childhood Mikaela has to wait for an answer she doesn’t see coming. When Death smiles her teeth are rotted through with sugar and centuries of use.
She extends her hand, Mikaela takes it. She feeds Death one more meal. Then she joins Her at the table.
Mikaela, Duchess of Nivery dies quietly in the night from an unidentified poison. There are no temples built for her and history eats her name, her money, and her fame. In the depths of the nights a new shadow slinks through the night, satisfying an old hunger with an older friend.
Inayat Juno Mander, 19, Sydney - Australia ✯ IG: @love_.juno
“A writer and creative currently studying Literature and Film.”