He stepped over the threshold, his soft slipper-like shoes making no sound on the parquet floor. “Yes, yes of course, come in.” Citra’s mother stepped aside to allow him entry-as if she were the visitor and not the other way around. Citra knew before she even saw him that it was a scythe. Resonant and inevitable, like the dull toll of an iron bell, confident in the ability of its peal to reach all those who needed reaching. The visitor’s tone of voice gave him away. As if, were she tipped over, she would fall to the floor and shatter. What she saw was how her mother stood there, suddenly immobile, as if her veins had solidified within her. Citra didn’t see the visitor, as he was, at first, hidden from her view by the door when it opened. They showed up, did their unpleasant business, and were gone. Perhaps the universe should have deigned to provide such warnings, but scythes were no more supernatural than tax collectors in the grand scheme of things. Guests were frequent at the Terranovas’ apartment, so when the doorbell rang, there was no sense of foreboding-no dimming of the sun, no foreshadowing of the arrival of death at their door.

Citra was at the dining room table, slaving over a particularly difficult algebra problem, shuffling variables, unable to solve for X or Y, when this new and far more pernicious variable entered her life’s equation. The scythe arrived late on a cold November afternoon.

Scythe novel