He looked like a teenage boy: long hair, oversized sweatshirt, worn down Vans. The smell of churned dirt seeped through the room as he stepped through the window. Death walked up to my fishbowl. As he dipped his finger on the top of the water, the goldfish shimmied up to the surface in curiosity. The ripples slowed, and the air grew stagnant. A rattling breath filled my head, like the dull resonance at the bottom of a pool. Just like that, my beloved Bubbles went belly up. Then he softened into the sliver of light that stretched along the wall without picking up his eyes from the floor. I did not move.

The next morning I didn’t want to flush Bubbles down the toilet, but my mother insisted. She plucked Bubbles from the surface of the tank turning up her nose. He lay on his side, holding my gaze with his mouth hung open and his eyes clouded and wide. Hesitation caught in my throat but I listened to the receding footsteps and I held my tongue.
The second time I met Death, the cracked windshield was clouding from smoke. I pitched my head upward and gasped, lungs refusing to fill. I grasped for the seat belt. The air, quivering in the heat, stilled. Death sat slumped next to me, picking at a thread on the sleeve of his sweatshirt. I began clawing at the jammed door, my head throbbed painfully.
“Please, you can’t— I’m sixteen...” my voice cracked.
His lips, agape, trembled faintly. He closed his eyes.
Then he inhaled.
Darkness swelled around me and held my breath before plunging through the sewage pipes and the rags and the debris with a definitive flush.