Death watched as the girl stood at the edge of the platform. Although she was in her late teens, she was a wisp of a girl, and all of the feeble flesh wrapped around her bones had been robbed by the darkness of near midnight. The sliver of moon suspended in the sky did nothing to fight against the clouds that seeped away its light and reduced it to nothingness. In the shadows that only an overcast night could bring, the girl’s figure was barely the silhouette of a skeleton.
Death hovered in the air in front of the girl, waiting… watching. Something in the girl’s pale and sunken face was familiar to Death, and Death recalled a certain day years past, when she had come to the bridge to collect another soul. Another soul led off the bridge by the impulsive actions of her siblings.
 

         Death watched as law enforcement hauled up the man’s corpse. She could see his separated soul struggling to shift out of its lifeless body. With an outstretched hand, Death tugged the soul away from its cage, as uniformed officers shouted commands and yards of yellow warning were stretched across the periphery of the scene. As soon as Death’s fingertips graced the edges of the soul, she could detect the recent handiwork of her sister, Fate, slathered across its limbs like wet paint. She also discerned the bold strokes of her brother, Love, and was surprised to find her own careful markings on its form. Then she remembered. Weeks ago, the man’s wife, whom he had loved dearly, had died in a car accident.
        Evidently, Fate and Love had decided that the man would no longer go on living. They had shoved him off the bridge without a second thought and dispatched Death to collect his soul. Not that Death was surprised by this. It was typical of her brother and sister to decide such things so quickly. Death folded the soul neatly in her hands and tucked it into place in a leather satchel under her cloak, where the other collected souls were contained. When she had filled her satchel, she would bring the souls to her younger siblings, the Feelings, who would cleanse the souls and wring out all the emotions from their bodies. The Feelings would sort through the leftover mixture of emotions and shape them into a form that Death, Fate, and Love could use. The empty souls would be given to Death’s youngest sister, Birth, who would distribute the cleaned souls to newborn babies.
 

        Death lingered for a few more moments after tucking the soul away. She watched officials inspect the body for any sort of damage. The investigators seemed to think that someone might have pushed the man off. Well, their search for evidence supporting such an idea would certainly be futile, Death thought to herself. The only people who had pushed him off the bridge were Love and Fate.
 

        A young girl and her mother walked by. The girl was small and sweet, clothed in a little pink dress that swayed with each bouncing step she took. Her chestnut hair was swept up into two short ponytails on each side of her head, and Death smiled to see that her right ponytail was just the tiniest bit lower than her left. One of her hands was cradled in her mother’s like it was the most priceless jewel in world. Death watched as the girl caught sight of the scene, and stopped in her tracks.
 

        “Mooomy! What’s that? What are they doing?” The girl pointed one chubby finger over the edge of yellow caution. The girl’s mother turned towards her daughter’s pointed finger. Her face morphed into an expression of pure horror when she realized that her young child had just seen the pale corpse lying on the ground, staining the sidewalk with the murkiness of the polluted lake water, corrupting the air with the stench of death and the inability to go on.
 

        “It’s nothing, honey. Let’s stay away from the policemen.” The mother tugged the girl toward her and began walking briskly away, though her daughter kept staring back curiously at the corpse as her mother tugged her along.
 

        “But why is he laying there? Why won’t he get up?” the little girl persisted in asking.
 

        The mother stopped and seemed to think for a moment before answering.
 

        “Honey, he’s dead,” her mother whispered, in the gentlest way possible. The little girl knit her eyebrows together at this new piece of information her mother had given her. This time, after one last look at the mess of a body that no longer held a soul, the little girl allowed herself to be dragged away.
 

        Death watched the pink frills on the girl’s dress sway back and forth until her mother led her around a corner. Then, Death disappeared, and reappeared moments later at the house of the dead man’s parents, where they were just receiving the news. She flipped open her satchel and inspected its contents. She pulled out a small crystal tube of a cerulean liquid that slipped about soundlessly in the container that held it. Sadness. Too much could drive a soul to its death, just as the Sadness that her siblings had sloshed over the soul she just collected drove the man to leap off the bridge. But just enough of it could evoke the crying needed at the first moments of a realized death.
 

        Dipping a fine-tipped brush into the Sadness, Death painted the souls with careful strokes. She inspected her work, deemed it satisfactory, and disappeared before she had to witness the rivers of tears she left in her wake.

        Death had hated that day. She always hated the suicides that her brother and sister dolled out for no reason at all. Besides their own amusement, of course. She supposed that was why she herself hadn’t been given the role of Love, or Fate. She was simply too merciful for mankind’s good. The Spirit of Life didn’t want a world where everyone could be happy; that would simply be too dull. The humans wouldn’t learn anything from their deeds; they wouldn’t learn that Life doesn’t always forgive and Life isn’t always fair. Life had wanted a more “interesting” world; a world that Death wouldn’t have been able to create. So Life had given the main roles to her two “imaginative” children: Love and Fate. Death had gotten the job of collecting souls, and dishing out all the Sadness and Anger that went with the task. And so Death was constantly surrounded by the chaos her siblings left her to sort through. She could do nothing about it.

        Death stared at the phantom of a girl that stood at the edge of the bridge, the innocent girl who didn’t quite understand what dying meant, years ago. Death stared at the features of the girl’s face that were almost ghostly in the near-midnight darkness, and she could still see a trace of the toddler that allowed herself to be whisked away by her mother.
Her mother wasn’t there to drag her away this time.

        Death hovered closer. She had seen something marring the bone white skin of the girl’s wrist, standing out jaggedly like a knife in the flesh. And there, situated in neat rows above the edge of the girl’s palm, were numerous scars. Some of the scars were nearly as pale as the skin that surrounded them. Some of them were covered with the crumbling leftovers of thin scabs. But some of them…some of them weren’t even scars, Death realized. Some of them had hardly had the time to stop dripping before the girl had walked to the bridge. They were fresh, recent cuts. So recent that Death watched as a trickle of deep, deep crimson, stained nearly black by shadows, made its way down the tributaries mapped along the girl’s hand.

        Death had seen too many souls like this. Death knew that Fate had given the girl’s soul so many doses of Pain, a special mixture of both Sadness and Anger, that the soul refused to go on. Fate had carelessly flooded the soul in Pain, immersed it in oceans of Pain, watched as the soul struggled to breathe, struggled to get away from every raging wave of Pain, Pain, Pain. The girl’s soul couldn’t stay afloat any longer. It surrendered itself to the Pain and drowned.       

        Death watched as the girl leaned forward and off the edge of the bridge.

        In that split second, Death felt herself fling out a hand to catch the girl, to toss her soul a life boat. She stared at her pale fingers in pure shock, wondering how they held themselves there with so much stability. Death had never dared to save a soul. She had never dared alter the paths that Fate and Love so rashly sketched out in permanent ink. It was not Death’s place to do that. Her mother, Life, had told her so countless times. Death was not allowed to try and stop anything Fate and Love had decided. Anything.

        But Death’s hand was outstretched. It offered a second hope, a second chance, to the soul that was drowning, suffocating in Pain. And Death could not seem to pull her hand away.

        But it was in vain. The girl’s figure passed though Death’s outstretched hand like it was nothing more than air. In seconds, it pierced through the still waters of the lake below and disappeared in the black ripples that engulfed it.

        Death still had her hand outstretched. She whipped it back, cursing at herself for being such a fool. Stupid, stupid. Why would she even be given the ability to move human bodies? Her mother was smart. The Spirit of Life would not have been so ignorant as to give her daughter, Death, that ability. Death could only pull and collect, pull and collect souls again and again from the bodies that were rendered useless by her siblings. Death could only watch: watch people die, watch souls drown…watch her siblings destroy human life in the blink of an eye. She could do nothing else.

        Death reached into the water and stretched out an arm. When she could feel the soul beneath her palm, she tugged, and it came free easily. As soon as her fingertips graced the edges of the soul, she could feel her sister’s rash markings, and the oceans of Pain the soul had finally drowned in.
She folded up the soul neatly and tucked it in her satchel.        

        Pulling her black hood closer around her face, Death let her ash colored wings lift her across the horizon towards the shard of white moon that hung in the sky. In the darkness of the near-midnight air, Death let perpetual duty carry her away.