Four is an unlucky number, so let’s say there were three. The fourth was a breeze. The fourth was Death, and she fled. She can be found on other planets, astride her pale horse, given up on grief. Having abandoned her duty, she lets everything live forever, even the fleas that forest your dog’s groin, even the sea, crystalline beneath her horse’s feet. She gallops along the water’s glass spine and looks down at all the life in the dark, the bottom feeders with their toothpick teeth, the whales with their eternal memories. She lets them all live because she is exhausted. Death is exhausted. For nearly two centuries, she has not administered an end to anything. She traverses the galaxies, making saddles of other skies, seeing the world in proportion to her wonder. It is pitiful. She is Death, and life lags behind her.

Life cannot keep up with her innovations in darkness, her millions of mouths to consume pain, her list of preferred names. She has been the Gentleman Death, the Giving Death, the Sudden and Too Soon Death, the Grimly Humorous Death, the Invisible Death, and now she is the Idle Death. There are trees so old and tall that birds cannot flee from their branches, so muscular are their gravities. There are fish that are eaten and reborn inside human bellies, adapting to the acidity of their new climates. There is a girl so old that she has begun to resemble a stone, her face gathering stillness like a silk cocoon. A mother’s heart pauses when she looks down at her two-hundred-year-old daughter, her deathless daughter, swathed in a solitude she will undress for no one. In my generation, when there was Death, the mother says, a girl could not grow old. She could only become a woman, which I feared more than death. Now what is there for you to fear?

When it is time to end the world, Death is called home by the other three harbingers of doom. They whistle through their horses’ muzzles: We all promised this day would come. We are bound from birth to end this earth. Death, like the rest of us, must return to her birthplace and deliver herself to it.

Death sighs, returning from her swim in the sun, summoned by their tepid song. If the living are not allowed to be idle, she thinks to herself, then why did I think I could be?

The four gather once more, riding their steeds of white, red, black, and pale, cantering across a cloud above their hometown. They look down at the streets they used to wander together, back when they had to rely on their own brittle ankles, back when they fed each other fistfuls of grass from the school field and forced each other to swallow. The other three look at Death disapprovingly, shaking their heads at her laziness: days collect on her like dust, and everyone knows that Death has ridden past when they feel an aggressive need to sneeze. Though Death is decorated with phlegm, the other girls try not to criticize her slovenly appearance. After all, they were once girls together. Girls like thumbs wedged in the book of the dead, girls like burst eardrums. Their mothers often wondered why they pretended to be horses rather than pretending to ride them; but to the girls, it was obvious. It was far more likely for them to become horses than it was to ever own one. (Even in the depths of their fantasy, the girls could not escape reality. They were born with the concept of futility fully installed, provided in fresh supply by the umbilical cord.)

Though the love between four girls was destined to fluctuate, their loyalty swaying on weak legs, their love for a horse was forever. And who they loved most was the Queen. The Queen’s hide was a starless night draped over her frame. The Queen sweated sunlight. The Queen was bigger than the boys she beat. The Queen was preened by a flock of golden-beaked birds. The Queen was undefeated; she won nineteen out of nineteen races, and it seemed certain that the twentieth would be another triumph. In every race, the Queen clung to the back of the pack until the final bend, when she surged past all her opponents with the inevitability of a hemorrhage. The Queen danced for the stands before every race, pawing the ground to produce her own applause. The Queen’s portrait was printed on the cover of a woman’s athletic magazine. The Queen was named the woman of the year. If she were a girl and not a horse, her beauty and achievements would be contested; but animals could attain perfection. Animals could be innocent.

At the Queen’s twentieth race, the girls gathered around the TV. The night before, they’d stayed up late to make T-shirts, each emblazoned with a quarter of the Queen’s anatomy. One shirt pictured the horse’s head and neck, the second showed the shoulders and belly, then the glistening flanks and hind legs, then finally the rump and bedazzled tail. When the girls stood shoulder-to-shoulder, they put the Queen together like a puzzle. They would assemble her only for the most special of occasions, the Queen’s last race being the first of them.

The TV projected the odds in the corner of the screen, numbers dangling over the spectators’ heads like poisonous spiders. The commentators all claimed she would win today and retire undefeated. Number twenty, the commentators repeated, it’ll be easy. It’s her destiny. The race started with a gunshot. The girls never knew that the pistol was filled with blanks: they thought that the point of racing was to flee the bullet, to outrun the wound. At any time, it could catch up to you.

But as the horses rounded the final corner, as the Queen’s strides began to lengthen like light from the farthest star, she remained in second. Her front legs hooked into the mud and hauled the earth off its axis. Her hind legs gathered the past into pleats and tore the fabric of time. But still she remained suspended in space, jerking in place. Her muscles raged like water, breaking the surface of her skin, but still she gained nothing, her hooves digging into the dirt, gouging her own grave. Perhaps she would rather die than lose. Death wished the bullet would come through.

Too late, the horses swept across the line. When the race caller announced it at last—she lost! — the girls did not weep or scream or clutch each other in mourning. They did not move from the sofa for several days until their mothers were forced to chisel them apart with the blunt end of a spoon handle. They never spoke of that day, never mentioned defeat, not even when the Queen retired and became a brood mare. Horses always made more money braiding their bloodlines than winning races. Her foals died, one at a time. The girls considered this a soft form of revenge, her refusal to reproduce victory. It was better for the Queen to have no living offspring. Only the worthy deserve death as their legacy.

In private, the girls wept over thumbnail images of the Queen’s portrait, which hung in the Horse Hall of Fame. Their mothers tried to comfort them: she retired a legend. It is not victory that reveals us but defeat. We must show grace in the face of our failures. But the girls wept harder. They knew they were graceless, and they were excruciatingly aware of their position as witnesses. Somewhere in the ether, aliens were taking bets on their lives, pointing and laughing at their breakable legs. The girls doused their shirts in gasoline and burned them in the bathroom at school and decided that they would no longer pretend to be horses. They were no longer going to pretend anything. If the Queen had accepted retirement, so too would they try to take some pleasure in watching themselves die.

At the precipice of the cloud, they gather to ask each other: How shall we do this? How shall we end it?

Pestilence pets the tangled mane of her white horse and says, I will do it. I am the slowest suffering. I will kill them over many generations, mirroring their millennia of evolution. It took them so long to crawl out of the water and gain consciousness, to ripen human. It is only a fitting tribute that their death is symmetrically gradual. I am the only thing that will heal their agony and its centuries of lineage.

War shakes her head and says, I’ll do it. You know nothing of honorable victory, sparing nobody. My red horse is red like blood. Quick as a cut. My red horse is disrobed of skin, the most honest advertisement for violence. Wherever she stands is a shimmering slit, a steam-sodden wound. Like me, she will be brutal and merciful. She will stampede across the surface of this earth and crush its bashful skull.

Famine circles the cloud on her black horse, gnawing on beams of sunlight and spitting out their meager marrow, casting the shadow of a stallion on all the countries below her. No, she says, I will do it. Blood is a useless currency, and very messy. Emptiness reigns at the beginning and at the end. Emptiness is what the living try so desperately not to notice, but it flourishes inside them, undeniably dense. I will return emptiness to their bodies. With me, they will learn to love their nothingness. I will deprive them of their destiny.

Death says nothing. What she wants to say is this: Why is it that every time we speak of ending it all, we are talking only about humanity? Why are we the only ones who deserve punishment? Why are no other animals guilty? Death doesn’t know whether she has ever been human, or if she has been bound to earth by a cruel contract: look away, and you get to stay. You will never live anywhere but here. She looks down and is surprised to see a pale horse sprouting between her knees, a moonlit mane growing thick as pubic hair. As if she has waded into a muscular lake, and it’s too late now to pull herself out: she can only sink ever deeper into her saddle, until the day she is just a head bobbing on the back of a horse. A figurehead of the futureless.

She forgets sometimes that she straddles a beast, that she must ride it everywhere, that it has been a long time since she walked or ran or skipped down a sidewalk. She looks at the others and wonders if they remember, if they are equally startled by the horse that heaves beneath them, or if they have long ago fused with their steeds, their hearts relocated between their legs, their hurt outsourced to another animal’s hide. It is convenient to own a steed, to forget when they ever had feet. Now they can pretend it is impersonal, what they are born to do to this world. To themselves. They can avoid the responsibility of carrying their own bodies. They can canter across ruins, gallop through the canyon of a corpse, remain untouched. Horror absorbed by their horses, leaving them clean, consequence-free.

Death does not dare confide in the others. As the fourth horse girl of the apocalypse, she was born especially cursed. The four of them were born at the same hour of the same day, their mothers mushed into the same hospital room, where they became fast friends. They bonded over bowls of umbilical cords. They agreed that people have no ability to save one another, that pre-shelled nuts are useless because the joy of eating nuts is jailbreaking them out, and that an orgasm of any variety is worth living for. Their husbands were absent from gravity, flitting above the hospital like flies, unable to enter the chambers of their divine anger.

Every weekend, their mothers played cards and mahjong, occupying the four cardinal directions, gambling with sunflower seeds and discussing the kinds of husbands and mothers-in-law they hoped their daughters would have. They spoke of their daughters as probabilities: if she’s not pretty, what are the chances she will be treated kindly? If she’s like her father, what are the odds she will hurt others? If she’s like my mother, how likely is she to become a hoarder? If we introduce them to death early, will they be able to avoid it adequately? They spoke of their daughters as poker hands: it’s up to fate, they said, but if they fail, it’s our fault. We must dam up the bloodline that floods them with a hundred generations of shit and tragedy, and we must also water their ludicrous luck so that it may fruit inside their futures. We draw our cards, we make the best of our hands. It’s out of our control, but maybe we can rig the game in their favor, maybe we can overload them with data in the hopes of a different outcome.

I hope she marries an orphan, Pestilence’s mother said. I hope she doesn’t make the same mistakes as me. I hope she gets a job with full benefits and never needs to rely on a man. I hope she never gets diarrhea or feels guilty. I hope she know it’s okay if she doesn’t buy me a house or provide for me. She shouldn’t be weighed down by such things.

I hope she never gets married and never has children, War’s mother said. That’s the life I always imagined for myself, and maybe she was born to have the life I wanted. Because I have nothing else to give her, not even this gold necklace I love so much, which is actually made of tin, I will give her my wants. Every night, before bed, I will recite a list of girlhood dreams: to run away from home. To be a singer on TV. To eat cheese without shitting myself. To avoid abandonment. And I will say, take these and do with them as you will. Add or subtract however you want. And if you are ever empty, you can come to me. I have enough dreams for seven hundred children, approximately.

Famine’s mother said, I hope she will let me feed her until the day she dies. I know it is unlikely, but I saw on TV that people are freezing their eggs and other parts of their body, so that’s what I’ll do, I’ll live in her freezer, and any time she’s hungry, she can open the stainless steel door— she’ll have a stainless steel freezer, nothing cheap—and I’ll cook for her. I won’t mind at all. I like cold climates. That’s what I hated about the island, the heat and humidity, the way my clothes never dried. Then, when I’ve outlived my daughter, I’ll do what I want. I’ll leave the freezer and take a boat to the arctic, where the daylight in the summertime is immortal, and from the ice I’ll dig out all the extinct woolen beasts no one has ever dared to eat, and I’ll cook for all of you, all of you who listened to me and loved my daughter until her death, you who are my truest family.

Death’s mother was silent. In truth, she did not know what she wanted for her daughter, nor for herself, and in that blankness, her worries proliferated like bacteria, flowering in her gut. She wished desperately that she had some plan for her daughter’s happiness and safety, and yet she also knew that such a thing was futile, a spell sapped of any true power. What a terrible contradiction, she thought, that we are so knotted to others, that our happiness is so dependent on each other’s, and at the same time, we have no control over anyone else’s happiness, no way to secure their fate. All she wished for her daughter was this: that you shall owe me nothing, Death’s mother whispered, that you are as selfish as your namesake, destined to consume every form of incandescence.

The four girls of the apocalypse were split at recess. Pestilence and War played girl games—jump rope, hopscotch, house, clapping games. All of these games culminated in prophecy, every rhyme and song meant to predict the first letter of the first name of your future husband, your true love. Famine and Death played boy games, four-square and tetherball and soccer. They waited in line, surrounded by boys who laughed at them, who served the ball in slow-motion, making a performance of their inferiority, or who ignored them entirely, leaving them stranded at the sidelines. In the playground, Famine and Death were an instant anomaly. As a consequence, they were rarely invited to birthday parties or friends’ houses. It happened once that a boy in their fifth-grade class invited both of them over to his house, which was white and tall and frosted with moss. Famine and Death were thrilled by the novelty, promising to report back to Pestilence and War, who were secretly and deliciously jealous.

When they arrived at the boy’s house, Famine and Death were startled to see that it was empty. The boy was alone in the backyard, his parents absent. Famine and Death were accustomed to constant supervision, to endless warnings about the dangers of solitude, wandering, or curiosity. The boy had a trampoline with a net around it. For mosquitoes? Death inquired. Mosquitoes were deadly and carried diseases. She could list all the fatalities since the beginning of time. But the boy laughed and said no, it was a net for trampolines, not for mosquitoes, there were no mosquitoes here. Death was briefly embarrassed, but the prospect of the trampoline was so exciting that she soon forgot her shame. Climbing inside the net, she stepped onto the shimmering tar-like surface of the trampoline and was instantly launched into the air. Laughing hysterically, Death watched herself fly higher than the net, cresting over a cloud, touching her tongue to the wound where rain comes from.

By the time she came back down, Famine and the boy had joined her on the trampoline, and the boy said he had a trick: if he timed their landings properly, both of them planting their feet at the same time, it would double the force of her launch, ejecting her into deep space. Death immediately agreed to try this, and as she landed with bent knees, the boy boosted her. With a delirious shout, Death arrowed through the air, licking the mesh shaft of a sunbeam, puncturing the stratosphere. High above the earth, Death looked down and saw the playground, the boy’s house, her fellow harbingers of the apocalypse. She saw Famine waving at her and laughing with her tongue out, which the other girls teased her about. She saw the mahjong table where their mothers sat playing poker, getting the rules confused, deciding to eat the cards instead, munching the numbers like horses at a hay bale, giving up on the game entirely.

It was then that Death knew she was not born to end the world, nor to be the woman her mothers’ mothers’ mothers always wanted to be, nor to be any kind of woman at all. She could not bear the burden of ending anything. Was it so unforgivable to shirk her responsibility, to let neglect nourish her life? To abandon herself to other possibilities? She did not want the job of suffering, nor the job of ending suffering. She did not want to be the first generation to heal or find happiness. Death wanted crows to take over her career. Then she could live forever between flying and landing, fulfilling nothing, frolicking in her follies, her emptiness encompassing everything. Not an heir but an air.

When at last she hurtled back to earth, the nets of the trampoline knitted itself into a cradle and caught her, saving her from a twisted ankle. The next day, at school, all the girls spread a rumor that the boy had invited Famine and Death to his house because he was in love with both of them but could not choose between them, and at his house they had been forced to compete for his affection. The competition was cutthroat and cross-disciplinary, including the hundred-meter dash, who could eat the most fire ants, and who could produce the most fragrant panties. The class took bets on who won, and the boy did not contradict these rumors, which made him exceedingly popular.

In the meantime, the four girls of the apocalypse continued to clash over what games to play: Pestilence and War said there was no harm in playing girl games, even if they knew the prophecies were bogus, because at least there was no pressure to succeed at anything, to keep score. Are you really going to marry a boy whose name starts with the letters F, R, T, or L? taunted Famine and Death. Pestilence and War shook their heads. We know it’s just a formula, they said, we know not to follow. But in truth, they could not help but be enamored by the illusions they cast on the playground. They could not help but pay special attention every time the teacher took roll-call, listening carefully for names that began with F, R, T, or L. It was simply too intoxicating to live inside the game, too genuinely pleasurable to participate in the pattern, no matter how obviously satanic.

Famine and Death argued that it was better for them to play boy games, which took up more physical space, spanning the blacktop, ricocheting across the field—why would anyone want to confine themselves to little chalk-drawn squares in one corner of the playground?

But in the end, their debates were rendered obsolete, because at last their horses arrived. Horses were a noble language, printed on the covers of the books they stole, accompanying the dolls on the shelves they worshipped, sequinning the T-shirts they were not allowed to try on in the middle of the store. Horses were mythical, along with blondness, abundant rainfall, and trees with uninterrupted rings. The horizon was a horse: perpetually untouchable, yet glowing with irresistible possibility. The fact that the girls had never seen a horse in their entire lives only proved its divine status. After all, the girls thought, Gods don’t live in our world, either.

All four of them had been horse girls since kindergarten, having sworn their loyalty to the Queen, memorized entire encyclopedias of horse breeds, and watched every movie that featured cowboys. For a long time, actual horses were irrelevant to their obsession, which involved the imaginary care and feeding of their imaginary steeds, as well as games in which they pretended that the sweaters knotted around their waists were reins. The fantasy was not captivity. It was steering one another to safety.

A lack of real-life horses did not deter them, nor did the Queen’s defeat: they rode the banister of the library staircase, putting a wig on it and naming it Pony. They had their first orgasms riding those bannisters, but they had no name for such rampages of feeling. They learned that hymens break on the saddles of horses. The girls who rode them were not virginal. This did not dampen their passions, and on this day, their collective desire summoned a stampede on the horizon. Hooves bruised the sky, unleashing a herd of holes. At the edge of the playground, four steeds stood waiting for them, saddled with dew, manes streaming like rain: White, red, black, and pale. One horse for each of them.

The horses flared their nostrils and spoke: We are yours, they said, under this condition. You must accept the contract of your creation. You must end the world. Now mount us.

They were such glistening beasts, their sweat dark as blood. They were even more beautiful and buoyant than trampolines, capable of traversing air and water, their tails spraying the sky like spontaneous comets. The girls accepted the horses, all four of them, though Death was a little disappointed: Pale is not a color, she said. Why do you all get a horse of a real color, and my horse is merely pale? Do I not deserve specificity? Am I not Death, the culmination of all of you? You would not exist without me.

Pestilence, War, and Famine protested: It is you who would not exist without us, they said.

Lies, said Death. I am here like the sun. You are all forms of suffering, but I can exist joyfully. I come without category.

The other three were silent, though secretly they began to wonder if Death had defected from their affection, if Death would break the contract of their stallions. But they tried not to let Death dampen their joy, and together they decided to debut their horses at the annual school talent show, learning elaborate dressage patterns to trace on stage. But everyone in the audience fled in horror at the sight of them, four girls atop towers of colorful muscle, everyone except their mothers, who had their heads bent, playing cards in the aisle of the auditorium, gambling to ensure their daughters’ longevity and financial security. One of them said, I bet my job. I’ll quit to ensure there’s someone always watching her. Another said, I bet my life. I’ll sweep aside my death to make room for hers. Meanwhile, the four girls continued the show alone, performing just as they’d rehearsed, doing what they’d promised.

Years passed, and it was time to return to the needs of the present. The girls were tugged again and again to the horrors of here, no matter how hard they struggled to be free.

Today is the day of the apocalypse, Pestilence says, having always been the bossiest, the oldest. We must decide now how to bring about the end.

They turn to Death, the only one who has not spoken, the only one who has ever abandoned her responsibilities. She has trotted through galaxies, landing on planets where life does not exist, nor death. Nor daughters. Where there has never been water for anyone to crawl out of, where darkness is a species that breathes, inhaling everything, expelling nothing. She has balled up stars like cotton candy and dissolved them in her mouth. She has taught her horse to shit out soft meteors, to laugh when they splatter icy planets, thawing craters into ponds. Death has been truant, and she knows that she has exceeded her definition, that like her mother, who decided to gamble with nothing but sunflower seed shells, she has given up on the rules of the game.

But now the others are demanding an answer. Which will it be, they repeat. At least give us a place to start with, a single family, even just a flea-ridden stray dog. We will start with the small. But we must begin annihilation, for without us, there is nothing. Without us, nothing will end, and nothing will continue.

Death looks down, peering over a cliff of cloud. She can see the boy’s backyard, the circle of trampled grass where a trampoline once stood, its net made of glittering rain. She recalls the joy of jumping. She must remember to teach her steed, she thinks, to surrender that way. Soft at the knees, allowing your mass to be absorbed and then released. If multiple bodies land at the same time, the force of the launch will increase infinitely. She smiles at Pestilence and War and Famine, her fellow curses, her purpose. Reaching out, she gathers their reins in her fists and yanks, tugging them over the edge of the cloud. They tumble to earth together, baying from the mouths of their beasts, headed toward the trampoline. Death cannot anticipate the force of their rebound, but she knows it will fling them far from this world, far from any future. Suspended between probability and outcome, what will they be? Nothing, Death thinks, as the trampoline swallows them like a mouthful of water, opening to answer.