Being Prepared

No one in her family had dated a psychopomp before. Her family was traditional, the way ritualistic fires and children being sent into mazes was traditional. She didn’t ask her mother for advice, not just because her mother had never dated a psychopomp. She couldn’t tell the difference between dating a psychopomp and anyone else, except that this one was more sensible than her last boyfriend and didn’t try to describe her mouth as a rosebud instead of just “ your mouth”.

He’d told her the moment they met why he was exciting. He was the first one to a party, he’d told her. I’m the first one there when the car veers off the road. I’m the first one there when the finger slips on the trigger. He seemed to enjoy being a first. She’d just assumed at the time it was his competitive streak placing him adjacent to the police or a coroner. He did not tell her that he disliked authority, but it was clear that he did. Any authority that wasn’t his own. She figured as well that the black leather jacket and the tattoo that shot down his spine were memorabilia from a phase. The eye on one vertebrae became the blossom on another became the screaming mouth on another. The entire thing clawed up the back of his neck and disappeared into his hair as well. When he got his hair buzzed, two months after they started dating, she saw that the claws were all different: talons, wolf claws, raptor claws. She’s mistaken the whole tattoo as a shadow at first. But most people did. Like they mistook him for a shadow.

The psychopomp part came a little later. She wasn’t surprised, then. She told him that if he had urgent business because someone died right before dinner, he had to text her before she left the house. He smiled.

She did not care about his odd habits, and he didn’t care about her idiosyncrisies. His habits were only odd for people. She didn’t know what they were for psychopomps. She could associate them with lonely humans or curious humans, or sometimes with animals. He had to touch something to fully understand it, sometimes. Mostly items that had something inside of them- he’d touched a cow’s heart in the grocery store once and bought it only to open it in the parking lot and show her the beetle living inside of it. He closed his eyes and lied horizontally for the night, but he didn’t sleep. He could eat packages and packages of candy without gaining weight. When she brought the beginning of a rowan tree home in a pot and put it in the middle of the living room, he turned around it clockwise. He smiled when she only walked counter clockwise around it. He was meticulous and slow about chores. When she salted the window sills and doorways, he vacuumed and dusted around them.

When he came home with sand in his shoes- black and chrome coloured sand, sand that had never seen light and smelled like a place that had never seen light, she told him about the dirt her parents put in her shoes when she was young and likely to wander off outside of their eye, so she could never wander too far. When he muttered in Latin, she responded. When she picked up the newspaper and looked at the obituaries, he listened until he tired of the game and told her who had died before she could read it. He cupped centipedes and spiders in his hands and brought them outside. He made a rack for her tiger’s eye necklaces because he had nothing to do for hours of the day. He rapped his knuckles on the horseshoe on the front door when he got home, just for the sound of it.

You might as well come home with me, she said. When she took him to meet her parents, he got to the front door first. There were terrible reactions inside while her parents scrambled for charms. Her father wielded a stang. She was shocked and pleased by this, because it was on of the most exciting things she had seen her father do in all the time she’d known him. She introduced her boyfriend and pretended not to notice when her mother tossed a handful of dirt into her shoes at the door. She was pleased he did not shoptalk at the dinner table. Her parents squinted at certain parts of him to determine that they were flesh and not shadow. He had to be looked at all over first, as though it made him solid.

The psychopomp was intrigued by their house, and by the herbs she had kept in lockets. He asked her why she didn’t wear them anymore. She hadn’t since she was young and believed in trinkets. She’d been wearing one the day they met. She had been trying to make a good first impression. She’d made a better one than him, because she’d spent the first five minutes she knew him making sure that all of him was there. He asked if she had a different name for creatures like him.

She made a cat’s cradle from a coloured ribbon strung with bells that hadn’t been put away two months after Christmas. She told him, I only have the name you gave me.

There were volunteering opportunities and job offers but the psychopomp never took anything longer than a week. Ordinary work baffled him. Papers and documentation of all kinds were arbitrary. A desk was in front of a chair specifically for putting his feet up. He disappeared often and without reason. She waited for him these days because there was something spooky but indulgent in hearing about the death of someone that didn’t affect you.

A month after the dinner, her mother called her. She’d sent over a jar of dirt. Hide it. Her father offered her the Christmas decoration. She pressed her finger to her tongue and then to the windowsill. She looked at the salt crystals and told her parents she could handle it. He filled the fridge with pomegranates from the farmer’s market. He filled her jewelry box with rings and bracelets of every material and beauty. He told her they were bargain finds or ditch finds. She pulled the receipts out of his wallet later.

She forgave him for killing her daffodils. He hadn’t meant to touch them.

She relocated the plants to the balcony. They thrived with a door between them. He told her of the flowers in his family’s old home. They were more beautiful, he said, with his intriguing mouth arrogant. He took her wrist in his fingers and tugged her until she was close enough to kiss. He offered her a pomegranate, then ate the inside of the fruit all at once when she declined.

One day he rolled over in bed, mouth red from pomegranates, and looked over her pink collar bone at her. He said, it’s been a year. She considered; he had been here in her room a year ago as well. She asked how his last girlfriend had survived. She didn’t, he told her. She said, neither did my boyfriend. He pulled her up and they dressed. He put her boots and coat at the door. The eye on his spine winked at her as he passed. He showered; she opened her jar of dirt and spread it on the inside of her boots.

The psychopomp met her at the door. There was a piece of pomegranate in his teeth. He tugged her forward. Rocks and loam rattled in her sole. “You might as well come home with me.”

Art by Anna Dittman

Text by Lucie MacAulay