This night is unfolding like a photo shoot coming together. For once, I’m not the subject. I’m the photographer, and everything is zooming into focus, like I’m switching out lenses until I land on the best one. The background is still a bit blurry, but if I adjust the aperture just enough, light enters and exposes the true model of this photo shoot. The boy with the constellation name. I’ve only seen some of his stars at work, but I understand the beauty. Orion is the focal point, so I stare at him and the sharpness of his hazel eyes and the hunched framing of his body, and once everything is aligned, just like stars in a constellation, everything becomes clear.

“You’re going to live,” I say.

“Until tomorrow, I guess.”

“You’re going to have much longer than you think.”

“So you got some psychic Death-Cast powers or something?”

“No, but I think destiny brought us together so I can change your future.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You don’t need the waitlist anymore, Orion. I’ll give you my heart.”

Orion

2:02 a.m.

Once upon a time, I wrote a fairy tale.

Since fairy tales are on the shorter side, it was an easier commitment than a novel. It’s wild what those stories get away with. You got pigs building houses and wolves impersonating grandmothers and a lost glass slipper helping you find your one true insta-love.

Then there’s mine. Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

It’s about a young man whose heart is dying.

Everyone always says to write what you know, right?

I named the protagonist Orionis, aka my name in Latin because I’m original as shit. When you’re constantly running against the clock, you don’t take forever choosing names.

Anyway, Orionis was always out and about doing his thing in this New York–esque kingdom when Death appeared out of the shadows and pressed his skeletal finger to Orionis’s heart, turning it from red and healthy to gray and crumbling.

“Am I going to die?” Orionis asked, not at all questioning Death’s physical existence or anything like that because when you’re in a fairy tale you just roll with shit like that.

“You may live if you dance with me,” Death said.

“Hell no,” Orionis replied, not about that life.

Until a piece of his heart disintegrated.