Mr. Shinigami
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He wore a skeletal mask. Silver traced the gaps in his unlatched teeth, the outline of his eye sockets, and the ridge of his peeled nose. A scarlet cloak draped across his back and a black robe enveloped his body.
A face laid beneath the mask, I knew this. Sometimes, I would glance at the shadow of a pointy chin or a small ear under the moonlight and he would fiddle with the mask when it threatened to fall off. His long, white hair framed the mask and shimmered in my lamplit room.
“Why do you wear that on your face? Are you hiding a scar or something?” I asked him.
“Hiding? No, that’s not it,” his melodic voice echoed around the room.
The first time I met him, I’d expected a sputtering of gravelly words, not the sound of a lullaby singer. “This is how we are most appealing to humans.”
Before I could continue, I woke up to the screech of the vacuum buzzing around my room. My mother gripped onto its handle with one hand and dragged the blanket off me with the other.
At school, I counted the number of times Mr. Shinigami appeared in my dreams as Ms. Ackerman prattled on about the significance of a metaphor in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven.”
When I first saw him, Mr. Shinigami appeared as a silhouette hovering over me, bat-like wings stretched from his perch on the ceiling. The next time, he stood before me—silent, clasping a coiling staff. The ticking of the grandfather clock alerted me to how long he had been staring at me with his empty sockets.
“Why are you here?” I asked him.
“You invited me, Laena,” he replied.
“I don’t remember sending out any invitations to random skeletons.”
“Oh, but you did. 31st October, 2022, at 12:31 a.m., you bumped into me on Summercourt Street, and invited me to your house. Try to remember, please. I would hate to be an uninvited guest.” he set aside his staff and folded his gloved hands behind his back. “I am much like a vampire in that aspect.”
“You’re holding onto an invitation I may have extended when I was ten? I invited a bunch of people for trick or treating at my house, but I don’t see any witches and zombies invading my house,” I retorted.
“Well, witches and zombies are fictional. They do not have the permission to seek you in your dreams.”
“And you claim to be real?”
He pressed his finger against his chin. “ I’m closer to reality than them. I exist closer to the dead than the living, but I am an alive creative, I promise you that.”
His stilted, wooden-like movements suggested otherwise. “And what creature is that?”
“The Shinigami.”
He dissipated into white mist, and I woke up to the sun rays seeping through the gaps of my window. When I glanced around my room, it remained the same. The grandfather clock, the pink bedsheets, the drinking bird in an orange top hat swinging up and down, and the dresser’s mirror where his back did not reflect.
****
“So, why is a death god interested in me suddenly?” I questioned him during our third meeting.
He inched towards my bed. “I would not call myself a god. Consider me a guide beyond the borders of earthly life. And I am interested in you because I think you might be interested in hearing about some of my travelling companions.”
“What…” I hesitated, “what companions?”
He picked up the staff leaning against the window. “Just some people who got tired of staying within the border.”
He began with his most recent companions. My classmate’s grandmother. A frail, cataract-eyed, hunched lady, always feeding the cats wandering near the school gates. My great-aunt. A woman who only spoke in occasional stutters. My best friend’s aged labrador.
I searched his name that morning on the bus. A god of death, his Wikipedia results claimed. A creature that makes humans want to die. I continued scrolling on my phone and ignored the spectacled man sitting next to me shifting to another seat.
“That’s absolutely terrible,” I heard my mother in the living room and the muffled voice of her phone speaker, distracting me as I painted my nails later that day. “Of course, we can make it to the funeral. Aunt Florence wanted the whole family, didn’t she?”
I almost spilled the crimson polish on my bed as I opened my laptop. I had bookmarked Mr. Shinigami’s page and read each of its sections. I had managed to find a poorly translated file of a story carrying his title in a monogatari, and the low quality images accompanying it.
The very embodiment of malice of the deceased in a skeletal shroud.
He did not appear that night, and abandoned me to a dreamless sleep. I woke up unusually early the next day, stumbling in the dark towards the light switch. As I reached for it, I heard a loud crunch under my foot. The light radiated the scales of the torn, transparent wings. The rest of the day, my fingers punched the keyboard, my eyes fixated on the list of Japanese death gods, the accounts of its sightings in folklore during the Edo period, the wood-block paintings of its visits to humans while my Jane Austen readings rotted on the nightstand.
I finally decided to test it out. I remembered my classmate’s grandmother, who Mr. Shinigami claimed to be one of his recent companions. Out of curiosity, I texted my classmate with my condolences, despite not receiving any official news from anyone around me. She quickly responded: Thank you, that’s sweet of you. She was pretty much in comatose already but I am still taking a week off. See you soon.
I dashed to the living room and grabbed my mother’s arms, splattering the batter she was whisking on the kitchen counter. “What is wrong with you, Laena?”
“Mom, your friend, Cady or Katie, whatever her name is. Is she alright?” My fingers clutched her skin.
She removed them, grabbed a rag, and wiped the batter dripping from the edge of the counter. “Yes, she just went on vacation up north. Get a mop, will you?”
“Can you give her a call, please?”
“What? No, she’s busy.”
Before I could snatch her phone from the kitchen table, I heard a ping from it. I touched the screen. A message from Jesse in Summercourt Book Club Gals!: “Just wanted to let you guys know, Kady got in a terrible snowmobile accident and won’t be back in the club for at least a couple months.” Multiple pings followed the message, sending words of love and support.
I headed to my bedroom and switched between the tabs on Mr. Shinigami, but at midnight, he appeared again. He spoke first. “I have acquired more companions. Would you like to know about them?”
“Wasn’t this supposed to be just a dream? Do you possess them or lure them somehow? Out of these earthly borders?” I attempted to reach for his mask but found myself without hands, without even a shred of a body.
He sat on my bed and tapped his staff against the floor. “I think you would like the comfort of my boat and the brush of the freezing wind.”
I could only screech.
****
31st October, 2026, 10:03 a.m.
The boy held an orange basket, filled with white chocolate bars and mini Kinder Joys. He called for his friends who had moved on to other houses while he searched for his missing vampire fang.
His cramping legs could not hold anymore and he walked to the park bench, finding a cloaked man with a skeleton mask lying on his back. What a realistic costume. Better than the one-toothed vampire anyways.
“Mister, have you seen a group of boys running around here or around the houses?” The boy dropped down to sit on the grass.
The man sat up. “I’m afraid not,” he dusted off his robe. “But I can help you find them.”
“Really? Thank you! I owe you big time. Want some candy?” The boy lifted the bucket to him.
The man shook his head. “I need no incentive,” he traced the silver borders of his mask. “Anything for a new companion.”
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