Death, a beautifully-limbed child, leaps over the walls and hedgerows. I watch It cross the valley. Through the morning fog, Its unwavering grin becomes clearer. It is magnificent, tracing a perfect parabola, momentarily black above a white-tipped field. The spindly tree branches reach for It, but never fast enough.
This Death is small, dipping in and out of my sight. If I have previously thought of Death at all, I have thought of It as big, but It is not. I remember now hearing that, often, Death begins as a small thought, and ends in a room that becomes empty. This Death is small enough to slip into a gap in a dry stone wall and momentarily disappear, like an intermediate stage of working within a logical text.
Look! Look now! Reappearing, rolling on the snow down the ridge, arms pressed tightly to Its side—It is Death! As Death rises to its feet, and approaches, I hear each of Its steps making a sucking sound, loud in the silent valley, as if the frozen dirt, extending deep beneath Its feet, is moistening. And I feel the dirt beneath my own feet, here where I stand alone, trembling in hunger.
As It draws close, I see the face of Death, still grinning, and recognise Its face immediately as mathematics, inevitable and clean, yet nonetheless stinking of its origins in the rotting human form. Epistemic logic or ontologic decay, either way, amounts to the same thing in the end. Death embraces me, within those beautiful small limbs, or, to be precise, embraces my left leg, and It and I sink together, into the proof of the theorem, into my rot, into the dirt.