Scythe Does Matter

Dante strode toward the cafeteria at a good clip, his robe flaring out behind him as Professor Schotz’s had. I’d grown to love that look and couldn’t wait to get a robe of my own.

If I passed, of course.

I followed Dante. I’d been in Hell long enough that ectoplasm on a bun sounded good to me, too. As I walked, I shuffled through the papers Professor Schotz had given me instead of watching where I was going. I’d believed I was headed toward the cafeteria, but when I arrived at the door and pushed on the handle to walk through it, I stumbled down an unexpected step. I nearly turned my ankle as I hit hard-packed dirt instead of marble tiles. The door slammed shut behind me, the bolt clicking into place.

I’d landed in an unkempt courtyard. Now what? I did a quick reconnoiter of the space, which looked desolate and unused. All brick walls and no windows. I didn’t see another door and a couple of abortive attempts told me this one had locked behind me. What I did see was another person. Or, you know, being. Tall, dark and not exactly human, she leaned up against a wall watching me coolly, toying with a cigarette. She reminded me a bit of my former coworker Indira, only without the blond streaks. And with a few extra arms.

“There’s a trick to it, you know.” She smiled, teeth brilliantly white against her dusky skin.

I couldn’t help but smile back. “No, I didn’t know that. I’m new.” While I didn’t have to breathe anymore, I did need to force air over my voice box in order to speak. I took a deep breath to say more, but accidentally inhaled an unpleasant mouthful of cigarette smoke. You’d think I’d be used to smoke, what with all the fire down here, not to mention the brimstone and cusswords, but I hadn’t been exposed to tobacco smoke since Lord Roland Ecks and his pipe when I’d stumbled across the time machine. I started hacking up a lung, a little worried that might be more than just an expression down here.

“Sorry.” She dropped the butt on the ground amid a pile of others, grinding it beneath her boot. Then she pushed off from the wall and came toward me. “I know I shouldn’t smoke, but it gives me something to do with my hands.” To illustrate, she put her hands on her hips, crossed her arms over her chest and patted her long straight hair. That left one free hand to hold her textbooks. “I never know what to do with them.”

“Really?” I gasped, coughing fit mostly over. “I would’ve thought having three pairs would allow you to do all sorts of things simultaneously.”

“Too bad it doesn’t work like that. Three sets of arms, but only one brain. You should have seen me try to learn piano.” She rolled her eyes. She only had two of those. “On the other hand,” she said with a grin, “I can beat you in keyboarding with two hands tied behind my back. Hands down.”

I laughed. “You’re like a one-woman arm-y.”

“Good one. I gotta hand it to you, it’s not often someone comes up with a crack I haven’t heard before. I’m Kali, by the way.”

“I’m Kirsty.” I shook her extended hand, eyeing the other five. “So, what’s the trick for getting back out of here?” I gestured toward the locked exit.

“Oh, it’s easy. Stand back.” She waved her hand over the lock mechanism. The lock exploded, pieces flying all around us. “You just have to be a god.” She gestured for me to precede her through the doorway.

“Thanks. I’ll remember that for next time.” I walked through the door and she followed. “Doesn’t that piss off the maintenance staff? Having to constantly replace the lock?”

“Nah, they got some guy who fixes things the same way I destroy them.” She shrugged. “I’d prefer that, actually, but you get what you get in the way of god-like powers, right?”

I nodded. The last god I’d met hadn’t impressed me much, but Kali seemed pretty decent. “So what’s a nice god like you doing in a place like this?”

“I got bored with the whole deity thing so I’m studying to be a Reaper. How about you?”

“Me, too. Not the god thing. Just the Reaper thing.” I touched my chest. “Late enrollee.”

“Cool. Maybe we can be study partners. Listen, I gotta go see a man about a god, but I’ll see you in class.” She headed down the hallway while I reoriented myself and took a step toward the cafeteria. From halfway across the mezzanine, Kali called back to me, “Hey, Kirsty. You didn’t ask me what I was the god of.” She had a big goofy grin on her face.

“Hey, Kali,” I called. “What are you the god of?”

“Nothing special,” she yelled, continuing to stride backward as she spoke. “Just, you know, death, destruction, chaos and those earring backs that always go missing.”

I nodded once, trying to look knowing and blase. One of my earrings went plop at my feet, its little butterfly back suddenly gone. I’d had my ears repierced last month, but if I was going to hang out with Kali, maybe I shouldn’t have bothered.

I was so scoring her as my study partner! Being the god of death and destruction would give her a hell of a leg up on the rest of the class. Or an arm up. Whatever.

Kali had reached the edge of the mezzanine and was about to turn down the hallway when I shouted, “What about socks in the dryer? They always go missing, too.”

“Nah. That’s been assigned to Poseidon’s portfolio.” She waved all her right hands. I could hear her laughing as she moved down the hallway and out of sight.

I pushed my way through the cafeteria door, getting the right one this time. I found Dante with two yellow trays in front of him—the kind with little plastic partitions so that one mystery food doesn’t touch any other mystery food. Maybe the cafeteria staff feared a fatal food chain reaction.

“Hey. Where you been?”

“Took a wrong turn. Met a god. You know. No big deal.”

He nodded without really looking at me. He took a bite of his lunch and made a note on a napkin that was already covered with inky scrawls. Black ink this time. But I supposed it made sense to use actual ink in academia—if you tried to take notes in class with a blood-pen, you’d probably pass out before the lecture ended.

I chewed in silence as Dante scribbled away. Since I’m very much the patient type— not—as soon as I’d taken a couple of mouthfuls, I tried to read his chicken scratchings upside-down. No luck; it had to be in Latin or Italian or something. I had a couple more bites and then I asked, “muff fu iting?” He looked at me oddly but didn’t answer. I swallowed and asked again. “What’re you writing?”

“Nothing, really. I’m just toying around with the idea of updating something I wrote a long time ago.” The tips of his ears pinked. My Reaper was hiding something.

“And?” I prodded.

“And setting it to music.” He looked down at the paper again. “You’re from now, right?”

“Yeah, from now minus ten months or so, but I try to keep current.” I took another bite. “Au courant,” I added, thinking of Lord Seiko Kobe, the time engineer. We’d become friends once I apologized for tricking them. He seemed to understand I’d had no choice. I should call him to let him know our coffee date for next week was still on, although by now he’d have heard about my reanimation interruptus. Nothing moved faster than gossip, in this world or any other.

Shoving the food into one cheek with my tongue, I said, “Though it’s hard to know when now is, what with time being so weird.”

“What would you think if I redid my epic poem to music? Maybe the kids stuck studying it today wouldn’t hate me so much.”

He looked nervous. Along with my mouthful, I swallowed the flip answer I’d been ready to give. I considered what I knew of his poetry, which wasn’t much. I’ve never read any of it, but I figured I knew what it was about: death, misery, punishment and suffering. So I asked him, “You mean like a funeral dirge or a country-and-western song?”

“No!” He did that squinty thing with his eyebrows that he does when he’s not happy. “I mean rap. Hip- hop.”

Hip-hop? His fourteenth-century epic redone as rap? I found it difficult to get my head around that. “Are you telling me that in all these centuries it’s never been set to music?”

“Well, yeah, some guy in the sixteen hundreds wrote a symphony inspired by it. I met him once when he came through here. Nice guy. I think he’s an accountant now.” He moved his chair forward to yank his Reaper’s robe out from under one of the legs. Then he sat down again, brushing dust from the hem. “It didn’t catch on at the time, though.”

I grinned. “You know what they say. If it ain’t Baroque, don’t fix it.”