The Woman Who Married Death in a Mushroom Garden

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The woman had been married to Death for eleven years, although she could never remember exactly when the wedding took place.

Death was terrible at remembering anniversaries.

He had no memory for birthdays either, which was particularly embarrassing considering his profession.

They lived in a garden where the mushrooms grew upside down at night and the flowers whispered things that had never happened.

Her name was Evelyn.

Death called her Darling.

She called him Bones.

They had a little boy named Wednesday who was born without any flesh, which had surprised the doctor but delighted the undertaker.

Wednesday was a perfectly ordinary child except that he couldn’t catch cold, couldn’t drown, and was forever losing his teeth without ever running out of them.

Every morning Evelyn brushed his skull with a soft toothbrush and told him to be careful.

“Careful of what?” Wednesday asked.

“Life,” she replied.

This seemed like a strange thing to say to someone who was already dead.

But mothers are like that.

One afternoon, beneath a mushroom the size of an umbrella, Evelyn asked her husband whether he had ever loved another woman.

Death scratched his ribs.

“Millions,” he said.

“Millions?”

“Perhaps billions. I’ve lost count.”

Evelyn looked away.

“They all loved me eventually,” Death continued, “but none of them stayed.”

“Why didn’t they stay?”

“Because I always arrived at the wrong time.”

Evelyn considered this.

She had met Death in a laundromat in Oregon in 1953. He was standing beside a broken washing machine, holding a pair of trousers that belonged to a man who had died the previous Tuesday.

He had looked so lonely that she offered him a cigarette.

He didn’t smoke.

He didn’t breathe.

But he accepted it anyway.

That was the beginning of everything.

Wednesday sat between them, examining a small black beetle crawling across his finger.

“Mother,” he asked, “where do people go when they die?”

“Ask your father.”

Death leaned forward.

“That’s a very complicated question.”

“Why?”

“Because nobody goes anywhere. They just stop being where everybody expects them to be.”

Wednesday thought about this for a while.

“Like when you lose a sock?”

“Exactly,” said Death.

Evelyn smiled.

She had never heard such a perfect explanation of eternity.

That evening the mushrooms began glowing softly, illuminating the garden like a collection of little hospitals for insects.

Death put his arm around Evelyn.

His bones were cold, but she had grown accustomed to that.

“Do you think we’ll be together forever?” she asked.

Death looked at the stars.

He had personally collected several of them, although he never mentioned it.

“I don’t know,” he said.

It was the first honest thing he had said in eleven years.

Wednesday fell asleep between them, dreaming of a bicycle with seventy-two wheels and a road that led nowhere.

Evelyn rested her head against Death’s shoulder.

Somewhere beyond the garden a train passed through the darkness, carrying people who believed they were going someplace important.

Death listened to it disappear.

He had an appointment with the engineer in seventeen years.

But there was no reason to spoil a beautiful evening.

And so they sat together beneath the enormous mushroom, a woman, her husband, and their little boy, waiting for nothing in particular.

Which is perhaps the closest thing to happiness that eternity has ever invented.