Posted February 15, 2025 by West Ambrose
Death Loved Me First: a micro play
My First Encounter With the Gothic, by West Ambrose
A meadow, sunset.
YOU
(Reading aloud from a journal)
‘Slowly, slowly we find what haunts us. That is the way of the world…’
Enter DEATH, disguised as a beggar. He stands close to YOU, but their shadows don’t meet.
DEATH
For you?
YOU
For those who grow into it. They become as a small, white aster, unfurling to rot.
DEATH
Death finds them through wild words, fictitious conventions brimming with ghosts.
YOU
That’s the Gothic.
DEATH
The Brontës, The Shelleys, Stoker and Wilde.
YOU
Their fantasies or biographies?
DEATH
Their readers or lack-thereof?
YOU
Perhaps, stories are agreements between both. I was found. Once, long ago… In the place between sleep and light.
DEATH
Who found you?
YOU
A dark shadow that loomed over my whole life. A man in the shape of a scythe, the beam of a weird, gaunt moon descending upon my soft curls. He was taller than myself, a man before I was even born. He was centuries old, older than the century itself. He laid at the side of every speared doe and drank its blood. When he came over me, I knew I would not make it out alive. Still, I looked at him, in the spirits of winking candles, the dancing flames of the wind, the filaments burning through the gloam-hushed cosmos of nature; the passion of each sweeping rainstorm, foxgloves and belladonna, red-eyed wolves and razor-toothed whales, the smoke of tumultuous waves, crashing upwards, over and over… As he trembled.
DEATH
Don’t you mean you looked for him?
YOU
No. At him. I tilted my head back that night to receive a kiss from the most loving, universal father I ever could.
DEATH
You weren’t afraid?
YOU
He made me. I unmade him. There’s a difference— He trembled. As he stood over my cradle that night, he shook juniper pins from their boughs and the foam from each ebb. Every dark fairy has a blessing to bestow—
DEATH
Don’t you mean a curse? Don’t you blame him?
YOU
For cradling me as I lay dying? I was a child. I saw my death in all because it had already come. These years were a gift to me, a waking afterlife where I was no longer alone with false guides through infernal circles. Mothers and fathers may have rushed to that primordial cradle, sisters and brothers trying to affix any orientation to my untameable soul, but they failed. They weren’t first. (pause) Still, I am haunted by one thing.
DEATH
What is that?
YOU
Why he trembled. I was only a child then.
DEATH takes off his silly disguise. His shadow now makes a perfect crescent moon over the boy. In the deepening sunset, their shadows merge, heart-like.
DEATH
Because you were my whole world then. And you haunted me b-because you existed. You were sick and I was helpless to stop it. So I kept you as my own boy. I could not love you any less. I never could.
They kiss, and drift out into the evening as a pair of ghosts. FIN.
