Прохор Озорнин - On the Wings of Hope - Prose

Death was entering the law. And no one could avoid her eternal embraces.

***

“By a granted to me right let a life be given to you!” gently whispered the blue-eyed woman in white, bluntly kissing a newborn baby.

“By a granted to me right you are fated to leave this place with me after several minutes,” the green-eyed guest in a black hood, which have come out of nowhere, whispered with a cold and aloof voice, having come near a baby and leaned with both hands on her scythe just like a guard, carefully protecting entrusted treasure.

Sights of two women crossed.

“What a surprise! What type of bad luck brought you here?” said a woman in a white dress, looking at the unexpectedly arrived black guest. “It’s written in my book, that this dear child has to be born in exactly two minutes and thirty-three seconds.”

“And it’s written in mine, that he has to die in four minutes and forty-six seconds. So please apologize me for that, but… I am afraid that you together with his parents have to behold how he slowly dies from a cerebral hemorrhage, which has occurred due to the hard birth procedure and patrimonial trauma of mother.”

“That’s strange…” the white guest sadly looked at the kid. “What’s the sense in it? Can you hold for just a minute, I will try to inquire of it?”

“I cannot delay, for I have instructions, and you know that well. It’s possible to delay only in exceptional cases – which is, unfortunately, not this one.”

The white-winged woman in a wedding dress closed her eyes and raised her head up as though listening attentively to the unknown secret music, which has been filling the entire universe since the beginning of creation and available only to its devoted listeners.

“Indeed, everything is as you said,” she replied after twenty seconds. “With such a swift death the soul of this child has to expiate an essential part of mistakes made during his previous lives, and for his parents this grief according to the plan will become a binding focal point, which will help them to overcome former mutual offenses in order to further become a strong and close-knit family, in which the soul of this kid can be born again, living happily this second time.”

“Well, now you see,” the guest in a dark attire nodded with satisfaction. “There are no current mistakes and no expected ones. His ways are inconceivable as we both know it.”

“Indeed so…” the white-winged woman smiled. “I was entrusted to accompany so many lovely and innocent kids to this world.”

“And I was forced to accompany so many sinners away from it,” hemmed her colleague. “Well, are you ready for the next trial of death? Please come closer to the parents, embrace them so they can at least feel your nearby presence, they will have hard moments coming to them.”

“How compassionate you have become as of lately, my friend, I can’t help but wonder!” either seriously or just for fun noticed Life.

“Blame it on the years…” Death answered philosophically. “What they can do to us, women!”

***

Two women – one in black and one in white attire – were sitting on a bench near a city pond, looking on floating nearby swans.

“And do you remember that young man, physicists, who have been always joking about the third karma law of Newton and the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, – and it turned out to be always equal to forty-two? Why did you take him away at such an early age? He had yet to live and live on.”

“Not why, my friend, but what for. He would leave his motherland several years afterward, be dragged into a military concern, started working for foreign intelligence services – and would have helped to create such a weapon that you, my colleague, would truly shudder. Therefore, I was given an order to take him away ahead of time to help both him and this world as well.”

“Well, let’s suppose so,” Life was going on with her inquiries. “And that little girl, Polina, who was raped by two thugs – why have you allowed them to kill her afterward? You were standing near them, keeping silence. I still can’t forget how hard it was to help her come to life and be born outside of maternity hospital when her drank pregnant mother began to give her a birth.”

“Exactly because she had such a family, in which she could not live for more than ten years. Everything would come to an end in a suicide, you understand? And this is such a sin that if you take one on a balance of your soul – you’ll be washing it off for a century. And she passed through sufferings now, became a martyr, it will be much easier for her now – it’s not Earth, there is an intended place in another civilization for her. And I played a nice joke with these two freaks, by the way, – for the first one I palmed off during a year such a fake vodka that his liver didn’t sustain it, and the second one fell into a manhole which was opened this day totally not casually. I was told in confidence afterward, that no more births are planned for these two guys – so you shouldn’t accept their childbirth any longer, don’t you worry.”

“Well, you know…” Life can’t help but be curious, “and why do you wage wars, then? You desire to harvest, enjoy sufferings of men?”

“It’s not me,” smiled Death. “It’s people. And what do I do? Do you even know, what longest lists they send me in each day like that? I can hardly manage to fully read them when it’s already necessary to put them to action!” she laughed. “I have already seen all kinds of deaths – both clever and silly, brave and unimportant, self-sacrifices even… however, their numbers keep falling as of recent decades. Humans grow thin in spirit, and their lives become common, and their deaths become unimportant,” philosophically noticed Death and raised her scythe as if edifying.

“Yes,” her colleague sadly agreed with her. “Humans are, unfortunately to me, mortal. And how do you think, my friend, whether there is something in this world that you cannot take away with you?”

“Ideas, probably,” answered Death after a minute of thinking.

“And dreams,” added Life. “Ones that are bigger than an individual is.”

“Indeed,” Death agreed with her. “Big ones.”

26.07.2017

Good health to all of ye, oh laymen!

Thus I have decided to address you in such a wonderful and marvelous way. For we, priests, you know, feel somewhat too boringly from time to time, that's it. You go here and there to us in the crowds on festivals and public prayers, bow us up to over legs and kiss our white hands, yet you have almost no desire even to speak with us a bit. Maybe during only a confession – but do you believe that we do thirst for yet another tiresome monologue of that repugnant acts of yours? And deeds these of yours are sometimes so horrific, that we desire to curtail ears of ours into a tubule and to furiously hush on you – yet one has to suffer, listening to all that shitty rubbish, and to sigh sadly at the end of it, having once again said that phrase intimate like a robot about the remission of sins of yours, for all has been prepaid according to the price list by you already. And thus we can do no other but to listen to all that bullshit, pretending that it interests us up to exhaustion, while feeling boredom there, in that booth confessionary, especially for that purpose being dark and concealed, so that you cannot see expressions on the faces of ours.

Or, say, to all these corpses, in iron boxes by us collected and as relics by us named, you go and worship, for we once have dared to call them as sacred… you almost kiss them in these yours attacks ecstatic, and some of you even decided to speak with them, as if the dead ones could talk… and of us, you didn't remember as if we were not live at all and they were more lively than us?