![The Angel of Death (1890) by Evelyn De Morgan](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2024/07/11/TELEMMGLPICT000384381130_17206939429640_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqniptxgkqcoqheGYwWv5XYzqm0gYDcu6VTA4mKR8maVE.jpeg?imwidth=680)
14 (very) short stories about death – and what comes after
Joy Williams, one of America’s great short story writers, considers how we – and the angel of death – dice with the Devil
![The Angel of Death (1890) by Evelyn De Morgan](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2024/07/11/TELEMMGLPICT000384381130_17206939429640_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqniptxgkqcoqheGYwWv5XYzqm0gYDcu6VTA4mKR8maVE.jpeg?imwidth=680)
In Lovely Blue
He had 4,000 wings. This was simply a fact. The feathers of each wing – innumerable. As they should be. The wings sheltered the souls so they could not be viewed in transit. This too was correct. He also had a thousand eyes but not, as has been rumoured, four heads. Azrael was spectacularly made and looked nothing like Jesus as was so tirelessly depicted though in truth the Nazarene was not at all as rendered either. Jesus and Azrael were not well acquainted. They travelled in different circles. Jesus was surprisingly unfamiliar with death other than his own.
The birds of the air were terrified of Azrael. His murmurs of assurance were incomprehensible to them. Their bones were hollow and filled with air. The sweetest air. Wasn’t that enough?
Plea
Pyrrhuloxias nest early among the thorns, building neatly of twigs, coarse grasses and fine fibres for lining. If you approach too near they voice a worried little purring “cheek cheek” full of plaintive friendliness. No one can hear that sound and remain unmoved.
The Devil’s Herd
When Azrael was an infant his sire would sing Ghost Riders in the Sky to him at bedtime. His sire had a beautiful singing voice and Azrael could thrillingly picture the Devil’s cattle with red and blazing eyes and hooves of steel stampeding across the heavens with the weary cowboys damned to pursue them for all eternity. These were cowboys who had lived an ungodly life and had never changed their ways when they’d been given multiple opportunities to do so. Azrael summoned up his courage and asked the Devil once if his stupendous and tireless herd were entirely red (as he had always imagined) and what did yippie i oh yippie i ay mean anyway? but the Devil was in one of his moods and just ignored him.
Uluru
One of the trips she’d always wanted to take – she didn’t understand why exactly – was to Australia. She intended to experience the interior, not the coast. She wanted to climb the red Uluru. She found the surround ghastly – the tour buses, the viewing areas, the crowds and suppers of barbecued emu and kangaroo, the dreadful wine. Still, she felt fortunate that she’d been able to climb Uluru because the aborigines – whom she found interesting though it was difficult to know much about them – had been considering closing the sacred prominence to visitors. This was for the usual reasons – the littering, defecating, and engaging in sex on the trail, as well as knocking off fragments of the half-billion-year-old stone for keepsakes. She was glad she had climbed the red Uluru and survived the savagely vertical descent because the Anangu people did close the climb. Tourists co-operated with this decision for the most part, some even returning the bits of rock they’d carried off. The Anangu received boxes and boxes of rocks from everywhere, some with notes enclosed. What the fate of these fragments would be was a good question – surely they could no longer be considered part of the aggregate of reverence considering where they’d been. As for her own memento, she’d misplaced it almost immediately.
Glad to be held
The number of souls are fixed. Each birth is not the creation of a soul but the completion of the transmigration from one body to another. There is no such thing as a new soul.
The souls made no sound as Azrael transported them. Never had one attempted to engage him in thought. The journey was made in perfect silence. They seemed wonderstruck.
![St Michael as the Angel of Death weighing souls, attributed to Juan de la Abadia the Elder (c1480)](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2024/07/11/TELEMMGLPICT000384381125_17206944763790_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqu-OikvdBRER69p9XrEwjPrltRLdN-9QuFpsRcGr5O8k.jpeg?imwidth=350)
The Strange Man’s Burial
She could picture him as one of those saints of legend, perishing in the desert, the animals he had so tenderly preached to digging his grave with their great claws.
Come Along
I have a request, she said.
OK.
I wish to be buried with my horse.
He was shocked. He’s not even dead, he said. He knew this sounded stupid because she wasn’t dead yet either. This was the near future they were talking about. He’s still fresh, he ain’t but three years old, he added. It just seems a little mean.
You have to promise me.
You don’t ride him that much, he said, troubled.
Because I can’t! I’ve been sick. I’m very sick.
All right, all right, don’t get excited.
She kept changing the horse’s name. He supposed that wasn’t bad. It’s boats you’re not supposed to change the name. It’s boats where that’s unlucky.
Did you have a dream or something?
It’s a vision. It comforts me. Why won’t you promise!
OK, OK, he said. Don’t worry about it then. One less thing to worry about.
One less thing, she said.
Tares
When he was in one of his blue periods, the Devil feared that he had lost his edge, that alien awareness that sees matters differently, that thinks differently. That it was gone. And what remained had been embraced, enthusiastically embraced by the predictably human, the tares that made up his unholy aggregate. They were perennially hungry and impatient, they were boring. He couldn’t stand most of his followers, they were bums. And there were so many of them, it would appear that he had won. But he didn’t want to win, he wanted to keep playing the game.
Disappointing
Washoe, chimp who learned sign language, dies at 42 without signing goodbye.
Matchless
She wanted her bib to be crisp and clean and she wished to be served with all the solemnity of communion after a rousing sermon on one of the bleaker lessons. The time, preferably twilight. A manhattan would be ideal of course but she understood the potion offered would not at all taste like a manhattan. She should prepare herself to find it bitter, even burning. Still she held out hope that she would experience it as something dignified and darkly fulsome. Classic. Legendary.
![Joy Williams](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2024/07/11/TELEMMGLPICT000281401521_17206945535170_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqMCA5miplultrfkObJKiiVjUArhp340FJVUObuOgqbQs.jpeg?imwidth=350)
God’s Vizar
When she was a child they drove in the spring over a mountain to visit her grandmother. It was called Bear Mountain and at its peak was a gas station and a bear in a cage. Once the mountain had all belonged to the bear and her family.
The bear wore a chain that she dragged back and forth across her allowance. Bits of oranges were scattered about her but they were not nice oranges. She had once had children, where were her children …
She had loved seeing the bear, aware that she was somehow misperceiving the situation. But she recognised a mystery and was greedy for it. It was the high point of the journey and the coming back too.
On these visits in the spring, her parents slept downstairs on a sofa in her grandmother’s house and she slept upstairs on a bed with her grandmother, an arrangement she did not like. At the bottom of the yard there was an outhouse. It was very clean, her grandmother kept it immaculate. She lived alone, she did everything herself.
At some point in college, the child grown, she had taken the time to write in her textbook on 17th century prose – The magical lines in Donne’s poetry are those which awake such conceptions as those of space time nothingness and eternity.
Now here she was, ill, aching, old, older than her grandmother had been when she died, older than her parents had been as well, wondering what she had ever wondered about.
The bear had always looked past her, not seeing her at all, not caring in the slightest that she would sometimes appear.
So there
What do the rich have to look forward to after death? Nothing!
Leopard
They’d been married for 50 years. No children, 11 cars, five houses, two DUIs, three infidelities, 10 dogs. Innumerable breakfasts and cocktails. The Christmas trees could be counted, the putting up and the taking down, and the ornaments, carefully removed from their nests then replaced. The summers too – those were the years when summers were a world apart.
“Oh my dear, my dear,” he said. He stood by her bedside in the hospital. Their friends didn’t think his being there was a good idea. He’d actually been brought over from another institution. He suffered dementia, it wasn’t Alzheimer’s, he’d been assured. He had thick hair still, beautiful hair and large forthright ears.
A nurse brought water in cone-shaped paper cups. One was to drink it quickly, then the cup was discarded. This was understood. One couldn’t linger, holding it, or place it aside with its small offer of refreshment to be appreciated at a later time.
“Oh my dear, my dear, I hate leaving you like this,” he said.
She knew what he meant. They smiled quite blindly at one another. She was going to die! Her body knew it. It was amazing. Yet she was unalarmed. The trick was not to think you’re yourself.
The Orphan
Now when the Devil saw Azrael or, as it were, entertained his presence, he worried that he was experiencing the last time he would share his company. This was a recent phenomenon and quite unbearable.
Surely there had been a time when the Devil was unaware of him but why try to determine when that was? It had been a time of darkness, puffy yet constricting darkness. There had certainly been nothing to look forward to.
The Devil liked him. He couldn’t recall liking anything so much. Such affection could cause nothing but worry of course. The whole apparatus that Azrael embodied, enabled actually, was rickety, not built to last. Deferred maintenance. Delay delay delay. Judgment stayed forever. Forever and ever. Amen.
Azrael was enlightened but it was through pure ignorance, equipoisal ignorance indistinguishable from depthless wisdom. He had the radiant intelligence of an orphaned octopus larva.
The Devil feared for him. Hadn’t he been gone rather longer than usual? Azrael and his duties, his heroic commitment, could drop from God’s attention like a stone down a well.
But then he appeared returned once more. Improbable glorious weary sorrowful. Still rejoicing, though the tiniest bit less.
This is an extract from Concerning the Future of Souls: 99 Stories of Azrael, by Joy Williams (Tuskar Rock, £12.99), out on August 15