Let me set this straight for you. I am a normal boy. I don't want you to think that you have a reason to question that. And when I go visiting into hospital rooms, the last thing I want for is those doctors interrogating me about my normality as a boy. Quite frankly, there is absolutely no reason to NOT think I'm a normal boy.
My father allocates me to go into an exquisite few of moribund people. To spend time with them, have heart-to-heart conversations with them, scrutinize their souls, help them bare whatever long term unknown secrets they have, to decipher the good and the bad, and to ultimately adjudicate their fate of whether they live or parish.
My name is Malick Fortunato, Malick meaning kind, Fortunato meaning fortunate in Italian. Also the name Fortunato comes from a character who was murdered in The Case of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe. He was trapped inside a small crypt surrounded by corpses. After screaming, moaning and complaining about the condition of his heart falling ill because of the dampness in the bodies from the catacombs. He died sometime eventually. I'm not exactly sure when because after hearing too much of the story, I just can't listen to it anymore. I am not fond of death, nor will I ever be.  Because like I said a thousand times before and I will say a thousand times once more, I am a normal boy and there is no reason for you to question that. I am eighteen years old and I spend most of my time with my fathers assignments. I suppose my best feature is my compassion for others. I will always try my best to lend an ear and be the arms to fall into when you just can't hold yourself up anymore. My worst trait is getting so involved in having close relationships that I just can't function without them and I get over attached too easily. Which is a pain in the ass when the people you work for are, you know, dying all the time. When I'm not working for my father I like to play the piano, because well, I'm normal.
I suppose there is one thing that makes me less of a normal person, but I don't want you to take this information in the wrong way and think that over all, I am not a normal person. Because I am. A normal person.
I don't exactly have normal parents. I do not have a mother and my father is a very true to life constructed idea, but only just an idea until you truly experience him. My father is death. He does not have a face, he does not have arms to jump into at the end of bad days. He does not have hands to play baseball with me like I would see kids on the street playing with their fathers. No, having death as a dad is truly, anything but normal.
  Everything in my life is twisted, distorted. No real parents, no friends to go to school with. And the dying people who I serve I know truly care about me. I try my very best to make my last moments of each of the people I work for, the best moments. The moments where they feel like they matter. I love the job I was created into. I just want to feel connected to people, and here my dreams change into reality. But whenever somebody dies, I feel like I die a little too. And I hate it. The feeling pushes it's way inside of me, it's all I feel. It takes over me,nit eats away the inside of my body. And posses my emotions. Words can not tell you how sick of this feeling I am.
And I will sullenly and regretfully admit that I am...not a normal person. The only characteristic that makes me normal is my drastic, momentous longing to be a normal person. I am sixty present death so when I wonder around others they inevitably seem dispirited until struggle to elevate their feelings. I have to dexterously work to not smell bad. I get strange looks walking into a room. Not that I look extremely foreign but I look more of like those goth kids from your old high school hallway. Not that I try to, but I was born with it.
The stages of life are a thousand times harder when you're sixty percent death. All children have curiosity but I perceived that I freaked people out by wondering about shudder some topics with questions that just come natural to me.
"Excuse me, have you ever wondered what dead people smell like? Do you ever use the blood of children as nail polish? How about lipstick? Do you ever try to burn your significant other and use their ashes as toothpaste so you truly know what they taste like? "
I even remember asking a teenaged girl of she's ever tried to rip out her boyfriends armpit hair and use them as false eyelashes. I would just go on and on without even worrying about anyone thinking I'm crazy until I heard my father's booming voice shouting
"MALICK SHUT UP NOW!!"
And don't even get me started about the difficulties of male puberty when you're body is more than half death. Sometimes I just wanted to have a normal conversation and all of a sudden your voice cracks into the sound of death and it comes wailing out of your body and everyone gets the idea that you might actually not be a normal boy. Which is what I so desperately wanted. And then there's also the fear of having your armpit hair used as false eyelashes.
I deal with all this pain all the time and all I ever want is to be a normal human being with a normal human life, with normal human children. I just want to be normal. And all I can ever pray for is that one day that the sixty percent of death that fills my body will slowly disappear and it won't be a part of me anymore.