Such Soulful Wailings
written by: Sharon Murphy
“You’re telling me he’s almost dead! Well, you can’t have increments of dead! The boy is either alive or deceased! Now, which is it?”
Agnes, the inhuman resource manager, stands in front of Aisling and Niamh, the newest recruits to the Banshee agency, Harbingers of Death. Her long, bony fingers clutch a worn, splintered clipboard where she records the latest body count numbers on a weekly basis. As she continues her tirade, dank droplets of spittle escape through the gaps in her rotten teeth, fly through the air and land in foamy bubbles on the women’s hair and cheeks.
The young banshees are recent recruits to the agency, having answered ads in the job section of Wailing Woman’s Weekly. This is a popular supplement of the local paper, Dead to Me. They are currently on probation, and only one candidate will successfully be appointed to a full-time position.
Both have excellent qualifications. Aisling came top of her class at The Whispering Woods Institute, achieving distinctions in howling, wailing, and screeching and Niamh’s thesis on Lamenting Strategies to Warn Families of Imminent Violent Deaths, earned her Supernatural Student of the Year at The Echoing Hall Academy.
Their initial clients were relatively easy. There was John Kelly, who already suffered from depression and had attempted to take his own life twice. His mother recalled hearing sounds like a woman keening and sobbing as she hung out washing on the clothesline the evening before he died. When she’d discovered John dangling from his bedroom ceiling the next morning, she was distraught but not surprised.
Sally Kelly was next. She’d been born with a weak heart that revealed itself after her autopsy. Aisling had screeched for two hours in the Kelly’s back garden the evening before her death. Both Sally and her husband heard the racket but put it down to tomcats fighting by the bins in the alleyway. It was two months before her grief-stricken husband put two and two together.
And now they both stand here in front of Agnes, neck and neck on body counts, with the final score seemingly resting on three-year-old Tom Smith, who lies alive but critically ill with failing kidneys in the children’s hospital.
Aisling went up to the hospital last night to sob and weep in the remembrance garden just below Tom’s room, but when she’d spotted Tom’s distraught parents, her wail was held back by a force beyond her own understanding, and she just could not end a life that had barely begun. He’ll die soon without any intervention from me, she thinks sadly as Agnes drones on, spittle flying left and right.
“You each have one last chance,” Agnes snarls.
“The next death heralds the winner.”
That evening, as Aisling makes her way home, she contemplates her role as a harbinger of death. Death is such a strange thing, she thinks. It can’t be rushed. It can’t be sped up or slowed down to accommodate the timetables of human life. Some humans live their lives like death doesn’t exist. Others get so preoccupied with its advancement that they live their lives in purgatory long before death has announced its arrival. Most fear that it will take someone other than themselves, passing them by, leaving them alone and lonely. She realises it’s the survivors, the leftover grief-filled humans, that hit her hardest.
***
The following morning, Niamh makes her way to the local driving test centre. Bobby Larkin, the funeral director’s son, skips out of the building. Hopping into his car, he rips up his learner plates and sets off for home. As he fiddles with the radio dial, a piercing, skull-splitting noise comes across the airwaves. He doesn’t notice the Smith’s family saloon coming around the bend towards him. Lisa and John Smith die instantly.
Young Bobby Larkin’s kidney is a perfect match for little Tom Smith. As the surgeons perform delicate surgery on the child, the banshee’s wail, so often the herald of death, it softens to a mournful, quiet sigh and fades into silence.
As Niamh celebrates her appointment with a Bloody Mary, Aisling feels a peace she has never known before.
Some souls, no matter how small, are just too precious to be taken.
The End
- Such Soulful Wailings - December 29, 2025
