The Isle of Souls

“The funny thing about gods, is that they’re as forgetful as us. They’d probably forget they even were gods, if we weren’t here to remind them.”

He said this to me softly, barely heard over the humming of the machine he was attached to. And he laughed as he said it, though it was more like a cough. I remember begging for days, weeks, for anyone listening to let me take his place. At fourteen years old, I’d had more needles in my arm than he had by forty. I was convinced that death had to be kinder than the years I had spent lying in a paper thin gown waiting on doctors to come in their perfectly white coats and shamefully admit that their paperwork had told them nothing. I was sure that death was coming for the wrong one, that somehow fate had mixed up a girl who’s life was hospital admissions and a man who’s world was stories. But they kept coming, every day, and every day they took a piece of him with them.

I asked him once, why they wanted him instead of me. His voice was the first thing they took, but he pulled me closer, his frail hands combing gently through my hair, and he held me tighter than he had in months. I cried that day, curled up against his chest, my tears soaking through the blanket, and I told him my favorite stories.

One day his machine stopped humming. The wires stuck to his chest were abandoned, dangling to the ground like rope hanging from a tree. I knew that death had left with the final piece of my father; that despite how much I had begged, no one had heard me.

Along with humanity, the gods have forgotten themselves.