Rebirth17 min read
I Fell for the Black Ferryman and Kept Coming Back
ButterPicks9 views
I fell in love with a man who hated me.
"I love you," I said once, in a life when I still thought love could save a thing.
He laughed like ice breaking. "You make me tired," he said. "You make me remember things I do not want to remember."
That was Isaiah Faure. He wore the black around him like breath. He was the one who came to take my life every time, and every time he looked at me, the look on his face was a blade.
I remember being a pig first. "You're a pig again," someone said, like it was nothing. I remember the trough and the fat and the way the sun made my bristles hot. I remember men coming with ropes and knives and the smell of iron and steam.
Isaiah watched.
"I see," he said in the dark steam, voice soft as a bell. "You are fit."
I was dumb, pig dumb. "You like killing pig-soup?" I asked, because that was what I had learned to ask when I could not understand pain.
He did not answer for a long time. The fog around him curled. "Shut up," he said finally, and the chain in his hands grew frost.
Someone pinned me down. "This one's fatty," a man said, knife raised.
Isaiah's smile was a cold thing. "Good," he said. "Fat yields more."
They slit me open. I was there and not there. I watched my blood go into cauldrons. I watched my body cut and boiled. The men laughed. A child asked, "Will it be tender?"
Isaiah did not move from his corner. He watched like a guest at a feast. His shadow kept me company.
Days later I found myself walking a thin road, the same rope of chain around a neck I no longer had. White and black, the court of the dead gathered like flies at a light.
"Well, well," Francis Munoz said, smiling at Isaiah. "A pet choice."
Isaiah did not smile back. "It's my business," he said. "She owes me something."
"She is a pig," Francis said, like he had not spent a thousand years doing the same work. "Do you really insist on collecting every small thing?"
Roberto Gibson arrived like fire. "So theatrical," he said, fanning himself. "Is she worth the fuss?"
"She is mine," Isaiah said, and his voice was not the cool thing it had been before. There was heat there, like spilled coal.
People in the underworld whispered. They had time to whisper. The other dead leaned forward as if leaning could make the chain lighter.
I floated in the middle of that gossip, and—because I had been soft in the head for many lives—I said, "He's got a taste for pig-soup, what of it?"
The murmur broke into laughter. Isaiah's chain became a steel gloss. He dropped it like a gauntlet. "Shut up," he hissed.
They tied the chain around what used to be my neck. It fell and slipped because my body remembered being round. The chain slid and found fat. It chewed. I felt the cold crawl in.
"You asked for it," Isaiah said. "You asked me to show you the end."
"I asked?" I said, and I did not know that my mouth could hurt so much.
He tugged. The world snapped. Then somehow there was another life. I was a girl with soil under my nails, with five sisters and a father who had too little and a mother with small hands. I was Blake Bryan then.
"Blake!" my sister called from the field. "Don't kick the basket, you fool."
I laughed but it felt like a sound coming from the bottom of a well. I was a girl now. The world had color and ache and the sound of roosters. I grew like that: scraped knees, stolen bread, hands that learned to sow and pull and seed. I learned names for things that once had been dinner.
And every time there was thunder, every time a storm came, Isaiah came.
He did not appear exactly the same. Once he was the neat black of a winter coat; once he had frost in his lashes; once he had a smile like a broken coin. But always his eyes were the same: a fault line under a face that was not quite cruel and not quite kind.
"You again," I said the first time I saw him when I was a little girl. "Why me?"
He did not answer immediately. "You keep creating trouble," he said finally. "You keep being attractive to trouble."
When I was a pig, he had told me, "You are meant to feel." When I was a girl, he said, "You are meant to burn." The difference was only in the words. The thing beneath did not change.
People in the village said I was pretty. "A fox-child," the old women muttered with their teeth. My father grunted like a man ashamed of a prize he couldn't sell for soup. I learned to use my face as a tool. I also learned to laugh loudly when I was afraid.
Isaiah walked the edge of my life like a tide. "You know what you are doing," he said one dry night while rain hit the roof like the fingers of a thousand little clocks.
"What?" I asked, hands wrapped around a bowl. "Living?"
"Making me wanted where I do not want to be wanted," he said. "Making me remember."
"Remember what?" I asked. I wanted to ask everything at once. I wanted to ask why he always watched me eat, why he listened when I breathed, why he let me walk and then took me again.
He looked at me like a man thinking a dangerous thought. "You will forget," he said. "But I won't."
"I don't want you to," I said. "I hate you and I don't want you to leave."
He smiled, a small thing that did not reach his eyes. "You are annoying," he said, in a voice that somehow made my chest ache.
The underworld has rules, and so does he. He was a ferryman of small cruelty. He peered into my lives and plucked me at odd hours. He took me to the slaughterhouse when I was an animal, to the river when lightning struck, to the field in rain. Each time he watched the finish like an artist watching a painting burn.
"Why do you do this?" I asked him once, when the floor of the world was dirt and the smell of salt and copper.
Isaiah looked away. "Because I can," he said. "Because you are an exception."
"An exception to what?" I said, because I wanted him to choose anything at all.
"To my rules," he admitted. He rubbed his thumb along the chain. "I am not meant to have attachments."
"Too bad," I said. "I like attachments."
He laughed then, a brief, brittle sound. "You always did like the wrong things."
Over time I began to learn the pattern. He would come, he would take me, the underworld would whisper, and then the world would flip and I would be somewhere else. Here a pig, there a girl, sometimes a dog, once even a woman dressed in silk who died of a fever quicker than the boiling pot. The cycle shouldn't have let me keep memory, but flashes stuck like burrs.
"You keep remembering," Isaiah said one night when the moon was only a sliver, "and the memory is a poison."
"Maybe the poison is you," I said.
He dropped his face close to mine so that the scent of the underworld came off him, like iron and cold coal. "You are bold for someone who dies so often."
"I am bold because I am tired," I said. "And because I like you. There."
He showed a tautness. "You say that like a joke."
You cannot tell from the start that a man is a villain. Villains live in softer gowns. They pour tea, they fix your roof when it leaks, they say small consolations. Isaiah did none of those things. He watched. He punished. He kept my body for amusement.
"You are mean," I told him, many times.
"You are loud," he replied.
In the underworld the gossip grew. "Blake? Blake Bryan?" Pablo Graham asked once, brushing his hair back, curious like a cat. "How did you end up on Isaiah's notice?"
"Ask him," I said. "He has a cookbook."
Pablo snorted. "He collects unusual mouths, I think."
"You talk too much," Isaiah said to Pablo, but his eyes were on me. "Leave her alone."
"We will see who is left laughing," Pablo muttered, and the underworld changed the subject to which roast would be best for dinner.
Sometimes the gods or kings of the dead stepped in. Roberto Gibson liked drama. He enjoyed crowds and the sound of people falling into neat lines. "No favors," he said once, waving like a bored conductor. "Let the wheel turn."
"Let her suffer," Isaiah whispered into the air once, so that only I could hear. "Let her learn."
"Learn what?" I asked. "How to stop loving you?"
He looked at me like a man with a cabinet of knives. "You will learn, when the wheel bites into you."
Years of small deaths taught me small things. I learned to smile even when I felt my ribs cold. I learned what it meant to be watched. I learned that his anger was a weather that could clear if I stood close, and then come back like hail.
"I will not listen to you," I told him once, when a storm had split the sky and my hair stuck to my neck.
"Do not listen," he said. "I only watch."
There was a time I thought I could outwit him. The underworld had offices and clerks and petty rules. I went to their windows like a child asking for a coin. I asked for mercy, for a break, for anything a stubborn heart could name.
"You want to be human and safe?" Francis Munoz asked me, one night as he shuffled papers I could not read.
"Yes," I said.
"Then you must do something brave," Francis said. "You must face who took you each time."
"Isn't that what you are doing by taking me?" I asked.
"Not like this," Francis said.
That was the start of wanting more. I was tired of being a thing to be watched. I wanted to be someone who could make Isaiah answer for the hunger he had.
But here is the twist: when you try to force the underworld to punish one of its ferrymen, the court is delicate. Ferrymen are needed. Isaiah was needed. And he was cruel in a way that sometimes counts for nothing and sometimes for the law.
I found allies by accident. Small souls who had once been turned into dinner by Isaiah's casual cruelty came forward when I whispered his name. A duck that had been roasted testified that Isaiah had watched with interest as a child broke down. A soldier's ghost said Isaiah had delayed his crossing until his family had fallen apart. A dozen small witnesses hungered for a moment of justice. They lacked power, but they had stories.
"Do you want to accuse him?" Pablo Graham asked, one evening when the underworld's lamps were low.
"Yes," I said. "I want to stand in the middle and say, 'You hurt people for sport.'"
"You know what will happen," Pablo warned.
"They will laugh," I admitted. "But maybe they will not."
We prepared like thieves. We collected small things: a scrap of a child's hair, a pot that still smelled of certain spices, the memory of a man's last smile. Each thing was proof, in the underworld, in its quiet way.
The day of the hearing was a day like a thunderhead. The court hall smelled of rain. Robert—Roberto Gibson—sat in his seat, fingers steepled.
"You're the accused," he said, looking at Isaiah.
Isaiah sat like someone who had never been accused. "I serve," he said.
"You serve what?" Francis asked, voice steady.
"You serve the wheel," Isaiah said. "I do not decide the fates."
"You make them worse," I said, stepping forward. I had rehearsed nothing. My mouth moved by instinct. "You make them show pain because you like it."
Isaiah's face did something like surprise. "You're small," he said, and there was a bitter amusement in his tone.
"Small?" I said. "I died as a pig. I died as a girl. I came back and I gathered the pieces of you where you left them. You call me small, and you will see what small can do."
Roberto smiled as if at a good play. "Begin the testimonies," he said.
Voice after voice stepped forward. A woman like a fish who had been put out to dry remembered Isaiah's eyes. A farmer who had watched his child die because Isaiah had delayed took a breath and said, "He stood and watched us fall apart."
Isaiah leaned back like this was all a game. "Who are these to accuse me?" he said lightly. "A sausage, a fish, a farmer? You want the court to listen to the smell of stew?"
A laugh went up in the hall. But then Pablo took the stand. "I once watched him take a soldier's fate and then walk away while the soldier's home burned," Pablo said, speaking plainly. "He likes to watch people crumble."
Isaiah's smile thinned. "You tell stories."
"Not mine," Pablo said. "They were other people's lives."
The hall began to murmur in different tones. Some were gossip, some concern. Then a little duck voice floated up—small, terrible. "He tied my wings to the spit and laughed."
At that, someone in the crowd whistled, a sharp sound like a knife. Eyes turned from the small ones to Isaiah. His jaw tightened.
"Enough," Roberto said, slamming down his palm. "We will have order."
Isaiah's face was a mask. He looked at me like a man who had been caught holding something he had hidden in his sleeves. He did not deny, not yet. He only tilted his head.
"You are dramatic," he said softly. "You gather misfits and make a witch-hunt."
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe I will howl and wake some wolves."
Roberto's brow furrowed. "Those who take comfort in pain must be judged," he said finally. "But the law is old. The ferrymen are bound to a contract."
"You will not let him go," I said.
"We will let justice be heard," Roberto answered.
Then, slowly, the punishment began.
It was intended to be public and shaming and to fit the underworld's rules. The plan was not only to force Isaiah to recall the faces he had watched die, but to make him feel a loop of his own choosing.
"Isaiah Faure," Roberto announced, "you are to stand in the center. You will relive, in the sight of all, a sequence of moments you caused to be worse than they needed to be. Each witness will present their piece. You will watch them live it again. You will then plead, if you can."
Isaiah's mouth twitched. "You cannot order feeling," he said. "You can only order the stage."
"Then we will give you the stage," Roberto said.
The first replay was of a child, a small boy who had died on a raft because Isaiah had delayed the ferryman's boat with a game of dice. The child came forward, voice like a wind through straw. "He took his time," the child said. "He wanted to count the light on the water."
Isaiah's face flickered. He had grown used to being the watcher, the cold one. Now he watched himself watch. He could not place his hands on the scene. He could only witness and feel the slow, grinding spread of consequence.
"You don't get to say you were only doing your job," the child's voice went on. "You smiled as the boy's mother tried to row."
A hundred onlookers gasped. Some of them turned their faces away. Some of them recorded, because in the underworld people love to store things. Eyes in the crowd were the size of saucers.
Isaiah's breath hitched. For the first time, his posture showed strain.
The next replay showed a pig. The pig—my pig self—stood in the doorway of the slaughterhouse and saw the knife rise slowly. Isaiah was in the corner, considering. The replay was not merely memory; it was like a play that seeped into the air and made the watchers taste iron.
"This is a small thing," Isaiah said at first, voice empty. "What harm is there in watching? We do not make the cut."
"You watched for pleasure," the pig's voice said, small but hard. "You watched the way they laughed at my fat and you liked it."
Isaiah's face changed. It went from neutrality to alarm to something else he had not let himself feel: remorse, but tempered by pride. "I was doing my duty," he said, and for the first time he sounded small.
By the time the tenth testimony came—a soldier who lost a home, a mother who carried a pot that cooled because her husband's death was delayed, a child who swallowed salt and water to keep from crying—the crowd's mood had shifted. They had gone from curious to cold to furious.
"Why did you do it?" I asked, because I wanted the answer out in the open like a coin.
Isaiah looked at me as if seeing me through a fog. He opened his mouth to say something clever, and then his lips trembled. "I thought I could keep a ledger," he said. "A balance. If people felt a little more, they might learn. If they remembered their edges, they might not repeat."
"So you hurt them to teach them," I said. "You think pain is a teacher."
"I thought so," he whispered. "I thought watching could make them better."
"You ruined them," said the farmer, voice full of dirt. "You waited until they had nothing and then you took the rest."
At that, something broke in Isaiah. He had been arrogant, sure, until the hearing folded in like a paper fan. Now the layers split.
"You don't understand," he said, and his voice was cracking. "You collect and you tally—"
"A tally of bones," Pablo said, and his tone was not kind.
Isaiah's face shifted. First denial. "This is a witch hunt." Then indignation. "You are petty."
Then a dreadful crumbling began. He tried to speak with smooth words; they fell like brittle apples. "I saved them sometimes," he said, faltering. "I pulled them aside when the river took too quick—"
"You delayed others," the soldier said.
"Because you liked the look of them," the duck said.
Isaiah's fingers curled into fists. Tears came to his eyes—not often did tears fall for a ferryman. They were thin, quick like rain. "I never meant—"
"That's not a defense," Roberto said. "Intent is part, effect is the rest."
Crowd noise grew. People shifted their weight. Some spat at his feet. Some took out small mirrors and held them up to him; others filmed with little glass boxes that caught the light. It was early humiliation and later something sharper: contempt. "You who watched like a theater patron, now watch yourself as we do," someone chanted, light and dark.
Isaiah's composure cracked. He moved through phases rapidly, the iron mask sliding. First he laughed to cover it. "You are ridiculous," he said, but his laugh had no warmth.
"Not ridiculous," I said. "Real."
He blinked hard. "You—"
Then he went still, like a man who had fallen into water and discovered he could not swim.
The crowd's reaction was a theater in itself. Some people began to take off their hats and toss them into a heap, a gesture of repudiation. A few shouted, "Shame!" Some recorded the broken man and sent their recordings out like small birds of news across the underworld. The small witnesses clapped like they were at the end of a play. There was spit and there was silence.
Isaiah's face moved through shock to denial to bargaining. "Please," he said suddenly, voice small. "I can change. I can make it right."
"How?" an old woman asked. "By watching more? By finding more ways to hurt them gently?"
"I will stop," he said. "I will not delay. I will be fair."
The crowd laughed and no one laughed. "You cannot unmake the hurt," Pablo said. "You cannot pull back the nights they spent waiting."
Isaiah sank to his knees. If he had been a mortal man, he might have babbled and crawled. He did what some villains do: he begged. "Forgive me," he whispered. "Forgive me. Please. I am sorry."
A silence fell. Then the small duck flapped, furious. "You want forgiveness because you were seen," it said. "You wanted a show."
People in the crowd began to shout at him. They told the stories of their dead as if throwing stones: "My son's last sunset," "my wife's last bread," "I had to sell my roof."
Isaiah's face crumpled further. He tried the old ways: plausibility, explanation, shame. He did not find redemption easily. His movements were jerky. He looked aged thirty years in minutes.
At the end of the public shaming, Roberto stood up. "Penalties will be assigned," he said. "Not all punishment is spectacle. Some is repair."
"What do you mean?" Isaiah asked, the color leaching from him.
"You will serve in repair," Roberto said. "You will help those you delayed. You will carry burdens you can carry. You will stand in the places you made cold and warm them. We will not take your role, but we will make you see its weight."
Isaiah bowed his head. The crowd hissed and some clapped. The scene had ended but not the judgment. He begged and he pled and the witnesses were not merciful.
When it was over he was a different man. The smirk gone, he had the look of someone who had been watched without distance. He flinched at his reflection. He could not touch pride. He had lost his confident cruelty.
"Do you feel better now?" I asked him later, when the hearing concluded and the hall emptied like low tide.
"No," he said. "But I feel..." He searched for the word. "Seen."
"Seen is a dangerous thing," I said.
"I know," he said. "I know what I have done now."
He did what's left: he started to make amends. It was clumsy. He set up lamps by the river, pushed bodies into safe hands, leaned over those who had been left to wait and whisper apologies that sounded like machine gears. He kept his promises in small ways that were public enough.
The underworld murmured. Some said it was theater. Some said it was growth. I chose to watch him work. I watched him hold a small child's hand and guide it across a river without savoring the moment. I watched him cover a soldier's eyes as he was carried to his last shore. He hated doing those things and the hate made his hands heavy.
We had our own talk after the punishment. "Why did you come?" I asked.
"You asked once," he said. "You said you hated me and you could not forget. I came to see if that was true."
"And?"
"And I liked watching," he admitted, the shame like a stone in his mouth. "I liked how your life bent and how you kept coming. I thought if I kept taking you I could keep the memory of something that mattered."
"That is monstrous," I said.
"Yes," he said. "I know."
"Then why did you stop?" I asked.
He closed his eyes. "Because a court of small things can cut deeper than a sword. Because being seen by a thousand small wounds is worse than any iron." He opened his eyes. "And because you kept following me even when I made you a dish."
I laughed then, a short, surprised sound. "That hasn't changed."
He smirked faintly. "You always liked the wrong soups."
We stood in that space where two people looked at each other and the history between them sat like a pile of clothes. Neither of us could say if it was love or hate. Both of us had worn both.
After that, life rolled on, but slowly. Isaiah was forced into tasks that fit the penalty: he apprenticed under repairers, he sat through long nights with families checking small accounts, he slowed down and learned to listen. His face cleared in places and became lined in others.
"I watched him break," Pablo said one night. "It was satisfying."
"Don't be petty," I told him.
"Too late," Pablo said.
Sometimes he was kind. Sometimes he was awkward. Once he stood in the rain while I worked the field and offered me his cloak. "Take it," he said. "You're cold."
"I don't want it," I said, because old habits wind tight.
He shrugged and left it anyway. It smelled of coal and iron. "Keep it," he said, and then, as if against himself, "For the times I was wrong."
When the feast of the dead came around, Isaiah served, not as a spectator but as a hand. He carried plates to those who had been hungry and watched for the little things: a hand trembling at the steam, a child who could not eat too hot. He learned the small courtesies that patch a life.
"Are you forgiven?" I asked him, once, word by word.
"I don't know," he said. "Forgiveness is not mine to ask. It is yours to give."
I wanted to throw the question away like a rotten apple. I wanted to let it lay. I did not have a neat answer. Instead, I gave him back his chain one morning—broken, dulled, worn by work.
"You can keep it," I said. "But not to watch with."
"I won't," he promised. "I will use it to pull boats. I will pull."
"I am tired," I said. "Of being a thing to be entertained."
"I know," he said.
I could see the old shadow in him. It would never be gone, perhaps. People do not change fully. They alter like bone. But there was a line now. When he looked at me sometimes, there was a small thing like regret and a small thing like care. The two did not always belong together, but they sat on his face like two different medicines.
We did not get a fairy-tale ending. I did not marry him. I did not become his pet. I kept living: a life of seasons, soil, laughter, and tears. I married a man once—who is not named because he was no character in myth—and I had children who did not die of odd delays. Isaiah came sometimes, and sometimes he did not.
The last time I saw him in person, I was older and my hair had the first silver stripe. He was leaner, hands rougher from work. He handed me a bowl of something like sauerkraut soup and said, "For old times."
I laughed. "You still think food is the language?"
He looked at me like a man who had learned a few new words. "Maybe," he said. "Maybe it's apology."
I tasted the soup. It was warm and odd and honest. "It tastes like iron and smoke," I said.
"Like me," he replied.
When he left, he touched my shoulder with a hand that had once caused me to watch my own end. His fingers were gentle. He did not promise change. He only walked away, and that was something.
Years later, when my bones were old and the wheel wanted me home, Isaiah came as he always did, but different. He did not hold a chain to savor a death. He came to hold a hand and steady a night. He said, gently, "I am sorry."
So many things in the underworld are small and mean at the beginning and then become something else. Public shame had been the medicine the court chose. It tore him open and exposed the hollows. It left scars; it left him humbled. For the first time in many circles, when he watched, it was with a hand out to catch.
We were not neat. We were not forgiven in a neat line. I kept the memory of the pig-soup because memory is stubborn. I remembered the hot steam. I remembered the chain. I also remembered that in a hall full of ghosts, a hundred small witnesses can make even a ferryman tremble.
"I will not forget," I told him once, in the end.
"I know," he said. "Then do not make me forget."
We walked apart after that, two paths that crossed and uncrossed like furrows. I buried my dead small sisters and fed my children and planted rows of corn. I kept a bowl on my table with the smell of the underworld in it sometimes, a souvenir.
On the last night, when the house was quiet, I held the bowl Isaiah had given me years ago. The soup had gone wrong but the bowl lasted. I ran my thumb along its edge and the sound was like a small bell.
"I don't know if I loved you or cursed you," I told the air.
"You did both," Isaiah's voice answered from the doorway. "And this is better than either alone."
I smiled, soft as a cloth. "Maybe."
He left, and the door closed like a page. The bowl sat on the table, dull and warm. I set it into the cupboard and closed it, and the cupboard smelled faintly of sauerkraut and iron.
When the wheel finally brought me to the end, it was not dramatic. It was a quiet slipping like a thread leaving a woven cloth. He came to the bed, and his face was not smooth; it held the traces of public shame and work and long regret. He took my hand.
"I am here," he said.
"You are always late," I said.
He smiled then, a small thing that had teeth and truth. "I was learning," he said.
"Then keep learning," I said.
He squeezed my hand. "I will." The world dimmed and the last thing I smelled was the soup and the iron and the coal.
The underworld still had its gossip. People still chattered about the ferrymen and who liked what kind of meat. But in a corner, in the slow registry of souls, a ledger had notes that were not all black. There was gray. There was work. There was a bowl.
I do not say we lived happily ever after. I say we lasted long enough to teach each other how to be less cruel. I kept my bowl. He kept his chain, though it was less bright. And sometimes, late at night, if the world tilted right, I could hear him laugh—thin and human—and then he would apologize again, and that apology was its own small meal.
The End
— Thank you for reading —