Gray clouds swirl, but never part, in the sky above Death’s land. Sunlight never touches the bones strewn across the countryside. Soft snow falls to blanket the gentle hills and valleys, copses and dales. Bitter wind creeps through walls and flesh just the same, sowing ice and salt as it goes. Despite the lack of sunlight, blighted stalks of arctic willow grow from shallow tundra soil, up through ribs and mandibles, up through eye sockets and collarbones, straining above the snow cover. After all, Death’s herd must eat.

The kerberoxen move in small groups, shaggy, gray-brown, and asymmetrical. They mar the bleached landscape: hot tears on blotter paper. Their hooves punch down through snow and bone, raking and scraping to reveal willow, or crowberries, or lichen that has managed to take hold on a half-buried cranial plane. When a kerberox finds food, its central head lowers to eat, while the head on each side either rises: to keep watch for competition if the patch is small, or to call out to neighbors in a low baritone if the food source is large enough for other members of the herd to eat.

Some of the kerberoxen are molting. On Sundays, Death walks the estate, inspecting the animals, checking to see which are ready for combing. Because there are no changes to the weather, there is no molting season. Each animal molts regularly, but not en masse. Death combs all the qiviut– the fine, downy woolen underhair– by hand, and works it with thin quick phalanges, keeping only the softest and finest fibers.

Each kerberox only molts once a year, but Death is nothing if not patient.

Death lives in an old wooden house in the center of the estate. The house is very warm. It’s connected to Death’s hothouse mulberry grove, where Death raises silkworms. Death knows the precise moment when each silkworm is ready to hatch, and is prepared. One eyedropper of warm water, squeezed onto the cocoon; nimble slender fingerbones, spinning the silk thread off in one single long strand; spindles, to collect the silk. The cocoon turns quickly in Death’s deft hands, until the last of the thread winds off, and the new moths– heritage Bombyx mandarina– fly off in little circles, dizzy but unharmed.

Death is a vegetarian.

The house creaks and moans in the wind, which Death finds to be a comfort. Sometimes late at night, lying in an old wooden bed, Death relaxes and allows the clouds to dissipate. Moonlight performs a slow dappled waltz across the walls and ceilings of Death’s home, diffused by empty trees and reflected by snow, and the sound of a steam train engine calls across the grange, though there is no outbound traffic. Death’s angora rabbits shiver in their sleep on the quilted bedspread, and Death knows peace.

Death combines the kerberox qiviut with the rabbit angora and fine silk to make thread. Death alone spins this thread, and then, in the evenings, Death knits. A single kerberox combing can be used to knit enough thread to make seven square feet of cabled cloth, but Death is nothing if not persistent.

Sometimes at night Death lies covered by the quilt in the moonlight, surrounded by small warm sleeping rabbits. Death remembers what it was like to have been alive. Remembers the fear of abandoning one’s body, the dreaded impending revelation of the mystery. If Death had eyebrows, they would raise in sympathy; if Death had lips, they would curl up in a small smile: recognition of shared experience; remembrance of crossing universal thresholds.

For Death knows: we are all ghosts temporarily thrust into living bodies. There is evidence in every coffin, every x-ray, every sugar skull, every Halloween night. When we go, everything that we are– every intention, every desire, every love, every hate– is woven into Death’s great darkness. Death gathers it all. Death remembers. And Death will knit until all of the knitting is done.

Art courtesy of the excellent Randy Ortiz.