Death is a Drag Queen

On your first date with Death, you are fifteen.

You wear your mother’s pearls,

swallow the doctor’s pills,

and chug your father’s whiskey.

She arrives in a cloud of perfume and setting spray, her cheeks contoured with glitter and ash. Sharp-eyed under winged lids and arched brows, she scrapes a manicured nail down your throat, holds back your hair as you gag. And then with soft smoke on her breath, she forgives you—for the vomit on her corset, for calling prematurely.

On your second date with Death, you are twenty-three.

You wear black eyes and bruised fists,

your brain punch-drunk and dizzy.

She waltzes into the emergency room with hair a foot high and dried flowers in hand, her platform heels gently clicking with each step on the linoleum tiles. She rebuffs your advances but flirts all the same, her laugh a bright black thunder crack on whitewashed walls. The pain, once sharp, is a low thudding thing—she shaves off its edges and brushes your hair, singing you to sleep. Her voice is rich and full and dark, the deep baritone of an underworld breathing. 

On your third date with Death, you are twenty-seven.

You wear water and blood.

She wraps your wounds in spandex and tulle, leaves a crimson stain on your damp cheek. You look up at her as she cradles you, as tears well up in her eyes and she says we cannot keep meeting this way, she cannot keep twisting time’s fabric to dance where your planes meet. You are alive and must live—even when it hurts, even when the world’s drum beats against you.

You do not call her again. 

But you see her:

perched in the last pew at your lover’s funeral,

holding a blazing candle on Trans Remembrance Day,

a soft shadow in the corner of every burial, cremation, wake.

On your last date with Death, you are eighty-two.

You wear crow’s feet and smile lines,

And your mother’s pearls too.

© 2025  Cailín Frankland

 Cailín Frankland (she/they) is a British-American writer and public health professional based in Baltimore, Maryland. A Best Microfiction nominee and Rhysling finalist, their cultural criticism, poetry, flash fiction, and short fiction have been featured in numerous print and online publications, exploring themes related to feminism, disability justice, queer liberation, and intergenerational trauma across a range of genres. They live with their spouse, two old lady cats, a rotating cast of foster animals, and a 70-pound pitbull affectionately known as Baby. You can find them on X as @cailin_sm.