The God of Endings

by Jacqueline Holland

The fact is that I was a child at a hideous time, when the terror of death suffused all of life and against it people had little recourse besides their own dark imaginations.

Stories, after all, have boundaries, and fear needs nothing more desperately than boundaries. Thus, a crop failure or injury might be construed as the work of demons, or the fruit of some unholy pact with the Devil, or punishment for one’s own unconfessed sin.

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.

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.

After all, can anything be more explicitly transient than early childhood? Preschool is the briefest imaginable thing. Two years overstuffed with energy, curiosity, momentum. The most buzzingly alive a person will ever be they are at three, four, five years old.

The world changed, expunged itself of mystery and divinity. Now people wear shoulder pads. They get perms. If they want to see wonders, they flip a switch, turn a dial. Their tea leaves rot in tea bags; they don’t intimate the future by their arrangements at the bottom of a cup. Gods don’t give chase, and seasons don’t bring predestined endings.

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.

Such souvenirs of the old pagan beliefs and practices were everywhere in these parts. Christianity had moved across the land, conquering all other religions, officially, but the beliefs and practices that had preceded it for hundreds of years were never eradicated completely; they merged with the conquering faith in strange ways or grew up, weedlike, about the edges and in the cracks.

In my experience—too much experience—the helpless horror of watching someone or something you care for suffer far eclipses the pain of suffering yourself.

The Count with his benign cloth fangs and his outlandish Transylvanian accent is counting “little batties,” one, two, three—a charming portrayal of blood drinkers, that little cloth puppet, and quite preferable to some others I’ve seen.

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.

It was my fate to lose everything, to watch everything eventually go up in flames. Czernobog, the god of endings, would be my only lifelong companion.

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.

What right had art to be so joyful, when everything real was trash?

That, I suppose, is how the brave do it, they just put it all together, the good and the bad, and they hold it tight to themselves, and walk on with it.

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.

This world, my love, I give it to you. All of it. You’re welcome, and I’m sorry.