Deep in the bowels of Manhattan's East Village, in the bosom of night, in the womb of a Tuesday, Death, or the next best thing, walks into a cafe. Space has been cleared against one wall, where a band is setting up. Spectators flock around the remaining tables, sipping beer or espresso, waiting for the show to begin. The next best thing to Death sits down at the counter, between a tipsy cosmetology student and a dental hygenist.

'I would like a coffee,' he intones, his voice hollow and leaden, oddly reverberant, like a malfunctioning television.

'How do you take it?'

'Black. As black as my heart.'

The cosmetologist shoots him a wobbly grin as the band begins tuning up. 'Hello, sailor.'

He sips his coffee, his obscenely high forehead furrowing up to the peak of his bald, bulbous head. His tiny eyes roll, sandwiched between the stretched, sickly lids above and the great puffy sacs that slosh beneath. Lined jowls loll beside his unnaturally wide, downturned mouth. His face dissolves chinlessly down into the neck of his poorly-tailored black suit, lumpy and shapeless, seeming overbalanced by his looming head. With plump, saggy hands he replaces his cup in its saucer.

'You here for the band?' she husks in her best contralto, attempting, before she recalls she is wearing jeans rather than a skirt, to show a bit of leg. In her defense, it is very dark in the cafe, and she is very drunk. Very, very drunk.

'One could say that.' He laughs twice, low and phlegmy, his colourless tongue writhing slug-like in his cavernous mouth lined with stalagtite and stalagmite teeth. 'One could say that indeed. I am here for the band.'

The cosmetologist laughs along, uncomprehending, taking another slug from her bottle of domestic beer. 'My name's Beryl,' she offers. He takes another sip of his coffee. 'What's your name?' she eventually continues.

'I have many names. Azrael, the Reaper, Nergal, infernal Orcus, all these and more have I answered to in my time.'

'I like a man of mystery,' the coquette purrs. 'What would you like me to call you?'

He thinks a moment, shoulders sagging it seems beneath the weight of his lumpen boulder of a head. 'Bastard,' he pronounces at last. 'Mr Bastard.'

The band begins to play, their warbling drowning out conversation for a time. Beryl has another beer, waving eagerly towards the square of floor where three brave souls are dancing, though Mr Bastard pays little heed to anything but his coffee, lapping it, slurping it, licking his drooping chops.

'Come on, people,' the lead guitarist urges during a break between songs. 'Get up here and dance! These poor people look so alone. Get funky. Nobody bites.'

'Do you bite?' Beryl, licking a cherry, winks.

Mr Bastard's massive jaws go snicker-snack as in a flash they crush coffee cup and saucer into shapeless shards. Beryl falls into drunken giggling, listing this way and that 'pon her stool like a storm-tossed ship at sea, as the band launches into another song. When next they pause, only two people remain dancing.

'People,' pleads the lead guitarist once more, 'if you have any soul at all you'll get up and dance to this next song.'

'Come on,' Beryl begs, tugging at Mr Bastard's sleeve. 'Let's dance.'

'I am a soulless automaton; I know nothing of your "dancing". To abuse and molest are all I know. Death is my calling, and Misery my stock in trade.'

'Don't be shy,' Beryl coaxes, dragging him by one limp arm out onto the dance floor, his rolling, pupilless eyes now level with her ample bosom. With one hand across his gelatinous shoulders and the other teasing at the crown of his head, she leads him, responsive as putty, through a few easy steps. 'See,' she screams over the musical din into one of his too-wrinkled ears. 'You're getting the hang of it.'

Mr Bastard throws back his head, opes wide his lipless mouth, and howls, the incoherent sound as random and meaningless as static.

'There you go, that's the spirit. Get into it!'

Mr Bastard slips from her grasp, loping in three bound up onto the stage, his clammy hands pulling the lead guitarist's face level with his own. Smoke billows from his gaping mouth, and fire dances in his tiny, half-shrouded eyes. 'Joseph Nevers, I am Death. Though you are guilty of no particular sin, nor have you transgressed the bounds set for mortal Man, nor offended the Powers I serve, you are doomed this night to die: the ways of Fate are cruel and mysterious. Make your peace with this world; you shall not see it again.'

'Wait a minute!' Joseph brandishes his guitar like a weapon. 'I can't just die. I have to die of something, right? What am I supposed to die of?'

'This.' His jaws snap forth, unhinging like a snake's, to clap shut an invisible instant later around Joseph Nevers's face. Mr Bastard swallows greedily, his face wet and glistening with reddest blood, as the corpse, half its head bitten away, falls. Mr Bastard mops away the mess with a linen handkerchief too large for any pocket to have concealed, and waddles towards the exit through the screaming crowd pushing and trampling in its flight. Beryl meets him at the door, too drunk to note the confusion and too busy vomiting a moment before from her last beer to have witnessed its cause. They walk silently down the street for a block as sirens draw near.

'Hey,' she exclaims, 'there's a really great Mexican takeaway around the next corner. Let's grab a bite.' Mr Bastard smiles a mouthful of crimson-stained teeth as she orders a burrito. 'Are you having anything?'

'Revenge,' he quips. 'It is a dish best served cold.'

'Funny man, she brays as they reach her apartment building. They pause. 'So. You want to come upstairs with me?'

'Since time immemorial I have walked the earth; behind me I leave only dust.'

'Oh, shut up already and kiss me.'

He did.

They lived happily ever after.

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©2001 Luke Gutzwiller. I really mean it. Violation may result in the unwanted collapse of your state vector. This is a work of fiction, and as such any resemblance to...well, anything...is purely coincidental.