The oddly human-looking Angel of Life was new to the job, a late addition to the heavenly bureaucracy. She couldn't stand to see people suffer. Almost immediately she began to have these run-ins with Death, who had the entire Establishment behind him and was, if not ubiquitous, then more or less everywhere. He had the scythe, he made the Rules. He couldn’t imagine why an angel of life was even needed — ‛After all, it's not as if you're a Guardian Angel!’ He had little respect for them anyway, preferring to swan around with Mars and other old Gods of War.
‛And you’re certainly no Metatron!’, he snorted as he as he rose into the air like a bad-tempered vampire bat. She assumed this was the name of some new angelic robot. Never mind— she had the magic of life up her sleeve.
Nevertheless, Zoe tried to avoid him, but like most people she found it impossible, as he always turned up in the end. One day, he assured her with a gargoyle's leer, ‛I’ll come for you too, Missy — you’re not a proper angel after all. Then you'll know what suffering's really like.'
She forbore the retort that no one ever came for him, perhaps because he had all the insouciance of a hand-grenade. Nothing, he had stated magisterially every night for millennia, would ever change.
The very next day, today in fact, the sun began to turn widdershins, all Hell broke loose, despair woke hope, Death’s position was made casual, and suddenly the ancient Rulebook was ripped up … but that’s what happens when you employ a neoclassical economist. Today robots do all the angelic (and human) work and the Angel of Life is everywhere, while Death languishes, still gobsmacked, on a quite tidy Universal Basic Income in a pleasant mausoleum on Macquarie Island.
He is not a happy vegemite.
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