The Last Lady

Below the tallest buildings we often find basements filled with darkness and bad smells. In such a basement an old man, in his dying age, was living alone trying to keep his basement as clean, but as empty as he could. He had things, and money, but he didn’t want any person around, for fear of… The Last Lady. His room was small, with half-sized windows, properly sealed so no water would come through when it rained, and clean so he could see the sun and trees. The street was almost as lonely as he was, as very few people ever passed that way.

One day, as his morning coffee pot was whistling on the stove, a shadow appeared in the window, following a loud scream that came from a young woman falling on the sidewalk. He walked to the window to see what happened, and noticed that the woman wasn’t moving. “Don’t panic”, he thought out loud but mostly to himself, because the woman was out cold. He opened his door frightfully, looking left and right for anyone that could have helped that woman and since no one was around, he dragged the woman inside and sat her on the bed. He pulled a chair by the bed and tried to wake her up with a wet towel…

The woman finally woke up, and when she didn’t recognize anything around, she just screamed, and then quickly ran to a corner of the room crouching there as scared as anyone could be. The old man was also scared, but he started to ask the young woman questions trying to calm her down. He found out she was poor, and fainted out of hunger. He could see her clothes were shabby but her face was clean. The scream was just an acknowledgement of the imminent fall. The other scream was just fear of the unknown. After making her a sandwich and offering coffee—her eyes were filling with tears, he started telling her that she was the first person ever to enter his home in at least five years. His reason was simple. When he was fighting in the war, he saw a woman, that appeared to be just another woman, but was in fact The Last Lady, the one often pictured with a scythe, Death. That woman smiled at a young boy—a fellow soldier, and caressed his cheek and the boy was dead; he just fell on the ground, and as he was looking at his face he could see the emptiness in that boy’s eyes. The woman disappeared into thin air. After seeing Death like that, the old man was afraid that she might be anyone, to trick him to go with her. He saw her as a monster trying to take his life away as she took that boy’s life with a simple touch.

Then, there was a knock on the door. The old man rushed to close the door, as he forgot to lock it when he brought the woman inside. But when he was almost there, with his hand on the doorknobs, the door fell, and a man came in bringing the door down, along with the old man. Regaining conscience, the old man stared at the man that brought down his door, and there was a lot of fear in his mind that after all the time spent running from people, that woman’s misfortunate faint was about to bring him to his last hour. The man saw the fear in his eyes, and apologized for bringing down the door. He told him he was a demolitions man and he was in charge of clearing the building. It(the building) was about to go down the next day, but since the old man rarely opened the door, he couldn’t have seen the poster from last week’s notice. The old man started crying and saying that the room was his home and he couldn’t leave just like that, so he asked the young woman to take him with her until he found another room. The young woman was just lying on the bed. The old man turned to the demolitions man, and he had like a big question mark on his face. The old man suddenly realized that the demolitions man couldn’t see the young woman, she wasn’t there. So he ran to a mirror and looked through it at the bed where she was supposed to be. He bowed his head, and covered his eyes as he started crying. The demolitions man left wondering what he had just saw—a crazy old man, but what was that man so afraid of and why was he so sad?

Death explained that she set up the elaborate trick to get him to trust her, so he could understand that death itself is nothing to be scared of. At first he was very angry, and shouted at her that it wasn’t fair, as she had tricked him. Only one argument convinced him. She said to him:

“Do you see the monster you thought that boy had seen? It was just his time to come with me. Do you feel different… now that you’ve met me? No, you don’t. Just take my hand and everything will be all right”.

The old man reluctantly hold out his hand with his eyes closed, and shaking as if something horrible was about to occur to him. But as the young woman touched him, and their hands were joined, the old man’s fear, his panic, his pains, his illnesses, his joys, his dreams, his memories, his money, his room, and last but not least, his hope… they all disappeared. And then she said to him:

“What you feared would come like a scream is like a whisper. Now that you are mine you can’t be worse than when you were afraid of me”

There was an old man who lived in a room and, like all of us at some point, was frightened of the dark. But who had discovered in the last minute of his life that there was nothing in the dark that wasn't there when the lights were on.