Death's Obsession

Sitting next to Evan on a portable lawn chair is a girl around my age, with hair spun from pure obsidian and skin of dazzling sepia. She looks up at me with the most enchanting brown eyes and quickly turns away. When I look at Evan, he only frowns as if I’ve interrupted something important.

She wraps her baby blue cardigan tighter around herself and stares at the unkempt lawn, avoiding eye contact with me.

I’ve never met her before. Logic and reason tell me that she’s probably Tom’s girlfriend of the week. But reality tells me that Tom’s girlfriends don’t stick around long enough to share a joint with Evan on a Saturday morning.

After my dream of the Faceless Man, I thought I’d draw my eyebrows on and apply a black line along my lids so that maybe I might feel as beautiful as the man in my dreams thinks I am. But even with the obsidian-haired girl’s flimsy pajama shorts and her well-worn woolen cardigan, I feel so inferior. How could the Faceless Man leave letters claiming that I’m beautiful when people like her exist? I wonder what it’s like to wake up and know what being pretty feels like.

“What are you doing here?” Evan says, lowering the joint to the ashtray. Heavy bags beneath his eyes that tell a story of a sleepless night.

I pull my bag off my shoulder and start rummaging through it. “You said that you had a really bad headache.” I manage to find the painkillers that I dropped in there last night—before the dream—and hold out the packet to him. “So I brought you some medication.”

Evan looks at my outstretched hand, then back at me. He blinks like I’ve said something crazy, then something in his eyes shifts, and he softens. “Thanks. The headache is gone now. But I thought I told you not to come by today.”

The small cardboard box bends in my grip when I drop my hand to my side and swing my attention to the obsidian-haired girl and her blue cardigan like she has something to add. Still, she doesn’t look up at me.

“You told me that you were sick, so I thought I’d do something nice and—”

He yanks the box of painkillers out of my hand and huffs. “Thank you for your help, but I never asked for it.”

I grit my teeth. The girl gets up and goes back into the house without looking at either of us.

“Shouldn’t you be at work already?” he pushes, barely avoiding watching the girl walk away.

“Who is she?” I blurt. Just say those five words, Lili.

Evan hangs his head back on the deckchair and groans. “Don’t be like that. I didn’t ask for a jealous girlfriend. Just chill the fuck out, alright?”

Heat stings the back of my eyes, and we both tense when three ominous knocks sound from under the house. It sounds exactly as it did yesterday morning in my apartment. Evan rises to his feet, assessing the lawn, the unease clear in his wrinkling forehead. He turns back to look at me and his gaze drops to my chest.

“When did you get that?”

I follow his stare to the center of my chest where a silver pendant hangs from a chain: A triangle within a circle. The symbol that the Faceless Man marks my skin with. The same symbol I was standing on at the beach in my dream.

Blood rushes through my ears and I squeeze the pendant in my palm, not sure if I am trying to hide it or trying to pretend that last night's dream didn’t happen, and that I never tasted his skin.

The urge to tell Evan that this is the symbol that I was telling him about for the past year dies before it makes it to my tongue. He won’t believe me, he’ll just keep thinking that I’m completely insane.

When I look back up, I almost stumble back. The Faceless Man stands directly behind Evan, towering over him and shrouding him with shadows. With a blink, the Faceless Man is gone.

“Oh, uh, I just found it in my closet.”

Evan looks at me like he doesn’t believe me, but doesn’t push further. “As long as you didn’t waste money on it.”

I nod as the edges of my vision blur. The Faceless Man wasn’t behind Evan. The Faceless Man wasn’t here. He doesn’t follow me to Evan’s. He never follows me to Evan’s. I need to leave. I can’t keep standing here while Evan looks at me like I am crazy.

“I need to go to work,” I mumble under my breath and all but run back to the safety of my car to swallow the familiar white pill without water.

It’s just a hallucination. Just like when you see Dahlia. The Faceless Man did not follow you here. You’re just worked up from the dream.

I count to ten and open my eyes, instantly wishing that I didn’t, because the words that I just told myself make me a liar. The tears threaten to fall, but I don’t let them, not when I can see Nate standing in the kitchen, heating the side of my face with his pity-filled stare and a brown parchment on top of my console holding my gaze:

When death comes knocking, it will not wait for you to answer the door.

It’s midday by the time I have my break. The Saturday and Sunday rush are always the worst, but at least the tip jar doesn’t look as measly.

Like clockwork, I stand in front of my locker, wondering what might greet me. The Faceless Man already left one letter today, maybe he won’t leave another after what he said when I saw Evan yesterday? I know that the thought is just a delusion, because there’s no telling when he contacts me, especially now that he apparently has a phone.

As expected, a single lily greets me when I open the door. Evan told me to stop buying them because he’s sick of seeing them. I don’t even like flowers, let alone lilies. He should know I’m not the one buying them.

The resemblance to my name isn’t lost on me, it was an amusing gift at first. Now it feels like there’s something that I’m not getting.

Next to the lily is another rolled-up brown parchment. This time, before I unroll the note, I bring it closer and inhale deeply. It smells like a forest in the morning when dew still dots the leaves and the mist still swirls around your legs. But it also smells like the ocean breeze at night, freeing, yet cloying, from the unknown that lies within the darkness.

I unroll the paper and fresh tears gather but don’t fall as I read the note:

You will bloom, my sad flower. You already have the earth; I will bring you the sun.

I tuck the note close to my chest and lean my head against the aluminum locker and fist the necklace he gave me. The Faceless Man is the only one who sees me. Like I don’t need to utter a word and he’ll know everything there is to know about me. Sometimes I think that he might know me better than I know myself, but then I remember, I may just be as crazy as they say.

My shift ends in a whirlwind of trouble: spills, broken glasses, angry customers, threats of a lawsuit, and to top it off, someone stole all of the money out of the tip jar. Meaning that tonight’s gourmet meal will come in the form of antipsychotics made by Johnson and Johnson. But already my stomach aches for something substantial to eat, not just a kids’ sized packet of chips that one of my coworkers gave me and the chicken sandwich that I’m guessing the Faceless Man left in my locker, but I couldn’t stomach.

I almost have to stop and rest as I walk up the stairs to my apartment. Exhaustion weighs on my shoulders and my lower back hurts from being on my feet all day. A bath would be great, but we can’t always get what we want. Not when electricity is so expensive, and my patience would be far too thin to wait for the tub to fill.

When I finally make it to my floor, I have to angle the key just right to unlock it. I step into my place, blissfully ignorant with nothing but food and sleep on my mind. As soon as the smell of lasagna drifts through the air and makes my mouth water, I mutter, “God, I really am going insane.”