the sphere from the sky

It is twilight. I am sitting beside a pond. To some people the pond is just a pond. Some people notice the carp swimming in lazy circles till someone drops in a scrap of food.

This is not how I see the pond. I see it as many things. In spring I see a place of birth, a Garden of Eden as it were new born goslings, fluffy and yellow, parade after their vicious parents. Cut grass, cherry blossom and daffodils permeate the air with a glorious aroma.

When summer arrives, with its long warm evenings under a rose petal sky, the pond becomes a tropical paradise. Thousands of wanted and unwanted insects arrive on whirring wings to skim the surface and drink from its still waters. Another aspect of the nirvana of summer is the flowers. There is no adequate word to describe their beauty. Bougainvillea, lupins, foxglove and roses of all shades all blending into a teeming sea of colour and radiance. Until autumn that is.

With autumn comes the knowledge that hard times are ahead. Subtle changes at first like the flowers beginning to lose their colour and bee sightings becoming few and far between but by two months after summer ends there is nothing left of my former paradise. The flowers are dead some retreating back into their bulbs some being uprooted and tossed into the howling winds that October brings. Trees drop their seeds, sycamores send miniature helicopters whirling and soaring on the gales. Acorns, fallen one day, stolen by squirrels the next often never grow into the towering giants we want them too. Horse chestnuts, cracked and broken for the fun of small children, collected and preserved to be used again but never for the purpose that they were made for.

Winter brings dark times. Death and silence falls unto the pond. The animals hibernate or die from the sheer cold. The flora of the land is a jumble of deep red and dark green. Christmas colours. And snow on the ground, a brilliant white gleaming into the eyes of ecstatic children. The brave and foolish test the ice of the pond. Skating is usually not an option but some days the ice can be up to 4 inches thick and families have a glorious time getting very wet and very cold.

I can see this from my bench. It is not actually my bench but I sit there a lot and think and so in my mind it is the little corner of the world that I own. Just to sit and stare not to do very much but just sit. And I enjoy it. But you must know that the pond is a completely normal pond. Nothing special, nothing magical.

This is why it was so strange, so amazing, so draining when it fell.
What was it? What did it do? Why was it here? All these questions flew like wheeling birds through the confusion in my head darting in and out weaving one simple conclusion.
“I dreamt it.”
The splash I saw was probably just a carp leaping and the small thing falling from the sky was just an acorn or a conker. Case closed. No more thought. Nothing to do with me and I would not think any more about it. But I knew, in the back of my head that I would have to think soon and I would not enjoy it.

A little about myself. I have many names but the most common is - The Reaper. Yes I’m death, but not the hooded scythed figure in a baggy black dressing gown. No, I’m the shadow, A small pale shadow that is rarely seen and hardly noticed. A collection of souls, a mixing pot of emotions and feelings. You see whenever a person dies, I will be there even if it is for a millisecond. I will be there to loosen the soul of the deceased and leave with it in my heart. You may wonder how I can be in so many places so fast. Well, I can travel and do things 100 times faster than any person on earth. To show you how fast, I can tell you, that I wrote this whole story in 3 of your seconds. This speed comes in handy when I am more visible than usual and I don’t want to be noticed.

About souls. A soul is your being, all your emotions, feelings, desires and memories rolled up into a small ball of energy for me, the guardian of souls. You see when a person dies I am weakened a little and the soul of a human can replenish my energy. But now, on with the story.

So I left the pond and put the object out of my mind and I went out on my rounds as I was feeling a little tired. I did not return to the pond for a month as my last trip there had left me very busy what with the whole 1 death every 5 second statistic. So when I did return it was such a shock that I almost thought that I had come to the wrong place. I turned around and looked again. Death and a lot of it.

I am used to seeing death, as it is kind of in my job description, but I have never seen it on this scale before. Carp littered the surface of the still water, pale and life less, flowers floated near the banks, fallen from their stalks and drifting slowly. The great tree on the island, at the centre was withered and leafless. What had happened? Autumn wasn’t for 4 months yet and on the way here other gardens and such were blooming and full of life. Why had my pond been singled out as the one to die? Maybe it was me. All the death I trail behind me could be rubbing of on the surroundings. But that can’t be it because I have been coming here every now and then ever since humans existed or, should I say, since the first human died and nothing has happened in all that time.

Maybe it was what I saw, that small black sphere from the sky that fell right into the heart of the pond. Yes it must be that, some sort of alien machine that drains the life out of a place. But what if it didn’t end at that one place? Maybe, if it was allowed to, the machine would drain the entire planet and then what? Maybe it would go for the sun, causing the solar system to break apart. But the most worrying thing was that, with no humans, I had no food and slowly, I would die.

Now it is a strange thing to think of death dying but it can happen and if death dies then life no longer has meaning and slowly the entire universe will disintegrate leaving nothing but … well, nothing.

I had to stop that from happening. I could go into the pond and retrieve the sphere but what then? Where would I take it? I realised that maybe by taking the thing I could perhaps slow the draining and give myself more time to stop it. Yes. I would do that. If it didn’t work then it didn’t work and that was that. So I crept into the expanse of dull water and searching with my feet until I felt it, the smooth surface of the …… well, lets call it “The Drainer”. So I felt the drainer and lent down through the murky mist and grabbed it.
But as I lifted it out of the water it began to swell and the air around me began to smell like rotten flesh and, trust me, I know what that smells like. I thrust it back under the water and relaxed. The swelling had stopped and I had had an idea. What if the Drainer could not drain? Surely if I trapped it inside myself where there is no life the sphere would be safe from the world.
I tried it.
The sphere briefly expanded and then stopped as it reached my shadowy form but then with a shock of realisation I saw my chest begin to expand and my entire body followed it, swelling and inflating like a strangely shaped balloon. I knew what the Drainer was actually doing. Rather that draining the life of the planet, the small round object in my chest was pumping out death and me being a walking death holder, it was inflating me without hesitation. I was like a way of breathing out after so long holding in.
Then it stopped. The (as I now call it) “Death Pumper” was obviously out of death to pump so it fell still against my skin.

I do not dare remove it in case it starts again but I carry it still and thanks to its power I do not have to go to too many funerals and cremations anymore so I can take more time to relax and look at the pond which has grown back amazingly well. All apart from the tree in the centre which is as grey and lifeless as it was before I saved the planet.
I often wonder about that tree. Whether the pumper was meant to end the tree’s life, as it was a very old tree and quite buckled. Maybe the sphere was a good thing in the end and actually did more to save my pond than it did to destroy it.