Fiction Fragment Friday
I’m going to be honest and say I am not happy with this story. I think it starts strong and ends strong, but the middle just doesn’t work. I agonized about what to do after the elevators opened. There were three different ideas around what direction to take and in the end I went with a watered down version of two of them. I also think I lost the tone.
This story is begging me for a rewrite and I think I might do so at some point.
“Really?” My trainee was standing in the hallway using two fingers to pull the shirt away from his chest. It was a black T-shirt with the words Grim Reaper in Training written in red across the front. The look on his face could only be described as incredulous.
“What? It’s true, isn’t it?” I asked him.
“We’re going to a hospital. The place with the single largest concentration of people who can actually see us. Don’t you think it’s pretty inappropriate for that setting?”
“Never let it be said that Gigi doesn’t have a sense of humor.” Gigi is my pet name for our boss. The entity that is the very representation of death. She comes to all of us in a form we can best accept and for me that is a goth girl I had a crush on in college. Get it? GiGi is a play on two letter Gs to represent Goth Girl.
I could tell Richard was about to ask once again why I called Death that, but the question never came. Instead, he pointed down the hallway and asked, “Are they reapers too?”
Before turning I felt out for reaper energy and was almost overwhelmed with how much of it surrounded us. When I turned, I saw a familiar face. “Steven?” There at the end of the hall was my former trainee with a new trainee of his own. He gave me a silent nod of recognition. If what I was feeling was correct there were no less than ten teams in the hospital.
“Why are there other reapers here?”
If my face could have turned paler, I’m sure it would have happened at that moment. Multiple reapers could only mean one thing. Whatever was about to happen in this hospital was going to be extremely bad with many deaths. It was going to be traumatic.
When most people die, they move on to whatever comes next on their own. Sometimes though a soul cannot accept their death and sticks around. This inevitably leads to them becoming angry and twisted. That is what happens when a reaper fails. Our job is to help souls accept death and let go of their lives so they can move on. We all take our jobs very seriously because each of us is a soul that stayed behind but somehow returned to a state of sanity. No one should have to go through what we did.
Traumatic death is the type that most often causes a soul to reject moving on. The unexpected leaves you without a sense of closure. There is still so much of life to have seen and done. If it is taken from you and that person lives it just feeds the bitterness. In all my time as a reaper I had never seen this many of us in one place before. It was going to be bad.
“Keep your eyes open kid. Whatever’s going to happen, we’ll get through it.”
“Stop calling me kid. I was forty-three when I died.”
“The day you graduate from being a trainee is the day I’ll stop calling you kid. If you make it there.”
A ding cut our conversation short as the elevator opened. When you have been doing this job long enough, you start to be able to read strong emotions from living people. The man who stepped from the elevator was radiating pain and anger.
“He’s got a gun.” My trainee was correct. I could see it under his arm through the front of his jacket. “We have to do something.”
“There’s nothing we can do. We’re here to help his victims move on. That’s our job, not interfering with the living.” I tried to sound strong, but deep down I dreaded what was about to occur. Some things I had seen since becoming a reaper haunted me. We couldn’t interact with the physical world, though, so there really was no other option.
The man exited the elevator, walking with a purpose towards the nurse’s station. Instead of waiting with me, my apprentice got in front of him, walking backwards. He tried to make eye contact, but the man could not see him.
“Come on man. You don’t want to do this. Whoever you lost wouldn’t want this.” The man raised his gun and took aim. “NO!!” As he pulled the trigger, my apprentice screamed and reached for the gun. Instead of my apprentice’s hand going through like it should have, his fingers wrapped around the barrel and pushed it up towards the ceiling.
The sound of the gunshot was deafening in the enclosed hallway. Screams soon joined, and panic spread. I stood unable to accept what I was seeing. There in front of me, the shooter was kneeling on the ground crying, and my apprentice was talking softly with one hand on his shoulder. The gun lay on the floor next to them, and I could see a glowing aura surrounding my apprentice. In front of my eyes, he faded from existence.
“Gigi, get down here now.” I yelled, knowing that she would hear me. For a moment I thought I had been ignored, but then I felt the telltale chill come through the hallway. Even the living amid panic could feel it as their breath started to freeze before them.
The elevator once again dinged, and as the doors opened, what looked to be an early twenties goth girl stepped out. Her hair was black, matching her lipstick and eyeshadow. On her t-shirt across the front in a dripping red font were the words ‘Got Blood?’ Spiked leather bracelets circled her wrists just above long black fingernails. Rounding out the look were a flared black skirt and striped thigh-high socks. Her boots were loud on the hard floor as she approached me.
She stopped chewing her gum long enough to ask, “What do you want, dipshit?”
I pointed to where my apprentice had just been. “Explain yourself.”
“Not how this works.”
“He moved on.” I tried to make it a statement, but there was a question in my tone.
“Duh. You should know what that looks like by now.”
“How? He got through to that man and saved lives. I thought we couldn’t influence the living.”
She reached up and knocked on my head. “Did I ever say that? Not my fault your apprentice was brighter than you.”
I thought back to all of my interactions, and no she had not ever said it outright. She certainly had implied it though. “He moved on though.”
“You think you’re so smart. Big man got it all worked out. You don’t even know the right questions.” She tapped on her own head. “Fix your damage and maybe you can move on too.”
“Working through his trauma let him move on?”
“Maybe.” She smiled at me, and it unnerved me right down to my core. “Don’t worry, you’re not bright or self-aware enough to leave me anytime soon.” She leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. Then she slapped me so hard I crumpled to the floor before walking away. She did pause for one moment to glance back. “Don’t ever try to summon me again.”