The God of Endings

by Jacqueline Holland

Death, to me, was tied inextricably to cherished things: to craftsmanship and poetry, to my father and to the beautiful things he made, and I couldn’t help but feel some tenderness for all of it.

Stories, after all, have boundaries, and fear needs nothing more desperately than boundaries.

Suddenly I couldn’t think what people were for, couldn’t think what their lives amounted to besides misery. Like a bird, I looked down from high treetops at all the wretched villages of men and felt only blank confusion. Those pitiful beasts, I would think if I were a bird, those poor, sad creatures dragging themselves along the ground, passing their days laboring and fearing and suffering until death. Too clever to live in peace, too stupid to live well. They’re better off in the dirt, finally quiet, finally peaceful.

“This world, my dear child, all of it, right to the very end if there is to be an end, is a gift. But it’s a gift few are strong enough to receive. I made a judgment that you might be among those strong few, that you might be better served on this side of things than the other. I thought you might find some use for the world, and it for you.” He looked up at the moon, patted my shoulder almost absently, and said, “But if not, my sincerest apologies for the miscalculation.”

How curious it is that in nature, the most vibrant colors are those that precede death. The delicate pinks and blues of spring are wan in comparison to the dramatic crimson of the hawthorn berries or the bloody gashes of the buckthorn leaves in late November. Stars blaze pale in their infancy, but in old age they melt and simmer in reds and oranges just as the oaks and maples do. Youth, it seems, is a state of diffuse abundance, while death’s approach concentrates.

Everything I’ve loved I’ve lost, and not generally with sweet goodbyes and tearful embraces—violently, horrifically, such that it seems that to love is to lose.

The most buzzingly alive a person will ever be they are at three, four, five years old. Preschool is a line drive, a Slip ’N Slide, a mad dash to something else. Enjoy, but do not get attached. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow it all slips away to puberty and acne and angst. Once it’s gone, forget it. New students are at the door, and we begin again.

Hand, nose, and forehead prints are stamped across the glass: evidence of the great fascination and perhaps inarticulable sympathy that the children feel for these tiny creatures, who are performing their brief, miraculous transformations at only a slightly more dramatic rate than the children themselves.

You fought against your tears in my presence because you have sensed intuitively that I am a man who revels in strength, who has little patience with weakness and self-pity. I am also, if you had not sensed it, a man who is invigorated by battle.”

Most people, I was learning, were cowards, and most laws had nothing to do with justice. Justice was a private matter that you didn’t expect anyone to execute for you. You did it yourself, or it didn’t get done.

I had hoped that these happy children would help me forget all the unhappiness I’ve seen, that their laughter would drown out all the wails that still echo in my head, but sometimes it only seems to make it worse, to make me feel more keenly, like a sixth sense, all the suffering that I know continues every minute of every day, just elsewhere, elsewhere. It seems, unfortunately, that nothing can protect you from your own mind, your knowledge, your memories. The harder you fight to keep thoughts out, the harder they pound the battering ram to get in.

Czernobog. The destroyer, the god of endings.

My whole life is a lie, and that is probably also somehow illegal.

I envy these people terribly, it’s true, but not for their children and families; I envy their brevity. I envy the low stakes of their choices. Whatever they lose, whatever they suffer, they don’t suffer long. They get just a little life. Birth, some joys, some sorrows, then death to wash it all clean. Their race is a sprint, and so they are free to tear furiously out of the gate, to give it their all, hold nothing back for a few quick laps before collapsing in exhaustion and glory, but mine is an unending marathon.

study the painting again, the face clenched in agony. “Why do you do this? Why blood?” “Because I’ll never have children.”

“Now Leo,” I say to him, “it isn’t altogether fair, but because you’re a kid, the people working here might worry that you are going to touch or break something, so when we walk through the galleries, we should fold our arms behind our backs, like this.” I turn to show him my arms crisscrossed behind my waist. He crosses his in imitation. “Then the gallery attendants will look at you and think, my goodness, what a very grown-up and well-behaved little boy, which, of course, you are.” And so we go, walking like strange birds through the galleries with our arms folded behind our backs.

“The biggest army,” I told them, “does not always win. When people are fighting for their freedom, for their families and their homes, for things they love and believe in, they fight harder than it makes sense to. They fight harder than anyone could predict or prepare for or defend against. The British wanted to win the war, and by all accounts they should have, but the revolutionaries had to win. Everything depended upon it. They simply had to, and so they did.”

“I just thank God Leo didn’t go in after him,” Dave continues almost at the same time that I have the thought myself. “I have dreams all the time about finding them both in there.”

I look out at the yard where light from the neighbor’s porch cuts their yard in two sections, one light, one dark. Extraordinary how close they can be to each other, light and dark. Extraordinary how you could stand in that light, everything visible, plain as day, and then take one step to the left and suddenly its darkness, blindness. Light and dark, truth and lies, love and hate, all just jammed up right next to each other. The choice between the two a matter of only millimeters.

The pale skin is splotched with large red fingerprints. In certain spots purple bruises and the deep red half-moons of fingernails are visible. I feel a strange mix of anger and sadness. This rebellious, unruly body, and this violent, despotic will to subdue it. How is it that one person can be, at once, within the same body, both incorrigible prisoner and sadistic prison warden? I’m so tired of this endless battle. I’m so tired.

do. For an instant, I recall the warnings of both Henry Emerson and Officer McCormick, advising me to keep an eye out for an unsavory character who may be hanging about the area, but then I remember, with a flush of embarrassment, that I am that unsavory character.

“Well, we children do not like emptying, clearing. We do not want Czernobog’s darkness, only Belobog’s light. Even us very old children. We forget that light, without shadow or variation, is blinding. We malign and fear and slander the Emptier, Czernobog, the Dark One, the god of endings. Perhaps we would do well to wait, like children learning patience, learning trust, and see what fills the space he clears, what light breaks into his darkness.”

He laughed with exhausted sadness. “You’re not a bad woman. You’re not a bad woman.” He reached up tenderly to touch my hair, but I turned my head away. “You don’t know anything about me,” I hissed wrathfully. “You like the way I look. You gaze into my blankness and imagine all sorts of wonders. They aren’t there. It’s your imagination, your poetry. It’s garbage. Let me save you the trouble of finding out the hard way.” He looked startled, shaken.

psyche. The young girls who stood in frightened clusters around the room and gathered around the couch, none of them wearing the hijab, some only in short tunics with their skinny bare legs exposed: they were not orphans, or they were not only orphans. This was not an orphanage. I could not speak the word for what this place was or what it had made of them. What it had made Halla.

There’s nothing subtle in the way my hole draws me.

It’s a suicide note.

Perhaps with him, as Agoston believed, the god of beginnings comes also, joined twins unsplit. For once, I’ll wait for them like a child learning patience, like a child learning trust. I’ll apologize for my foolishness in misunderstanding and dreading the Dark One for so long. It turns out that I did make a deal with him: the taking of anything sets into motion its eventual loss; nothing that is can resist becoming what was; to begin presumes the acceptance of an end.

guess I’ve just realized recently that I’ve been obsessed with this idea that you speak of—getting what one deserves, or not—it had made me bitter. But that’s because it just doesn’t make any sense to begin with. What you deserve and what you get: there’s no way to measure them. You get the world and the world gets you, who’s swindling whom?”

But then it’s true for adults too; after all, we’re just the warped remains of imperfectly loved children. None of us gets the perfect love we ought, but maybe that’s what life is for, to give us time to collect it in bits and pieces, a little here, a little there. Maybe we’re supposed to put it together ourselves slowly.”

How presumptuous is the gift of life? What arrogance is implicit in the act of love that calls another into existence? This world, my love, I give it to you. All of it. You’re welcome, and I’m sorry.