Disclaimer. The events described in this story are the views of the writer only, and are not to be taken as a definitive set of rules.
"Woah woah woah!" I said, raising my hands as if pushing someone away. This was way too weird. The Grim Reaper was standing in front of me, holding a syringe in his left hand, whilst we both floated in mid-air about 20 feet above my newly dead corpse. Strangely, I wasn't too bothered about this.
"That's the morphine", Grim said to me, "and I prefer to be referred to as Death. It's cheerier." He waved the syringe at me.
"Cheerier", I said in a monotone. Death nodded at me. "Morphine", I continued in the same voice. He tilted his head to one side and sucked through his (I hope) teeth.
"Well, it's not actually morphine. In fact, I didn't actually inject you at all, but the explanation of how I'm stopping you from going crazy is really long and you probably won't understand it. Also, I'm very busy today. Can we walk and talk?"
With that, he turned and began to float along in the vaguely the same direction as the road. I told him that I would accept the morphine explanation, as I felt myself being pulled after him. Death sighed with relief.
"Good", he said. "The real reason contains a lot of stuff like; parallel dimensions, temporal physics, space-time. Scientific stuff."
"Oh", I replied, rather wishing I had asked the real reason. I let my mind drift for a while as we floated slowly through the atmosphere. Hitting upon a thought , I asked him, "Wait, can you read my mind?"
He nodded again. "What's left of it."
That didn't reassure me at all.
"O-K", I continued, "What's death like?"
"Depends on your religion really. If you're a ... Buddhist, for example, you get reincarnated. If you're a Christian you go to Christian Heaven." He snorted. "Christians are a total nuisance. Got to have 3 different Heavens: Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox, otherwise they all start to kill each other. Figure of speech", he added, seeing my confusion. Noticing that he was still holding the morphine syringe, he tucked it into a pocket in his robes.
"Right-oh."
"Then you have Norse Valhalla, Roman Underworld, Muslim Paradise ... There's a lot of them. But this will all get explained when you get to Limbo, which is pretty much a waiting area.. Oh, and if you've been a bad person, you get sent to Hell." He waved his scythe at me meaningfully. I ducked. "Pray to whatever God you believe in, Daniel Saltpan, that you do not get sent to Hell. Constantly freezing cold, full of lawyers." He shivered."Even scares me. And I'm a God."
This stunned me. "You're a God!?" I exclaimed.
"Sure," he said nonchalantly, "Me and Sol."
Yet even more astonishment from me. My jaw was so far down my face that it almost came off. The sun was a God? To give me time to take in all this information, I studied the ground below me. However, before I could take in the panoramic landscape from my spectacular viewpoint, I was reminded of my inability to see out of my left eye. I turned my gaze back to Death. No, I could see him fine for some reason. Reaching my hand up to my head, I felt a large protuberance sticking out of my eye.
"What the fuck!" I cried out. Death chuckled in his Californian accent.
"That's how you died. Remember when you wrote Skittles on your hand? You put the pen behind your ear. Then, when that Jiu-Jitsu master swept your feet out from underneath you after you shoved him, it became dislodged and hit the ground a second before you did. Unfortunately for you, it landed point up and hit your eye dead centre." He chuckled again, which annoyed me.
"Quite an original death if I'm any judge. And I've seen plenty of dead people. Why'd you shove a Jiu-Jitsu master anyway?"
"I didn't know that, did I!" I complained. Suddenly, a phone rang. Death stopped where he was and pulled out an I-Phone. I shook my head in disbelief at how weird this was, then also drifted to a halt.
"Hello?" Death said, making a cutting motion in the air with his scythe. A large rip appeared in the air before him, with the inside of it pulsing a bright orange. I was intrigued.
"Tonight?" Death asked whomever was on the other end of the call. He flicked back his sleeve and looked at his watch. It was a golden Paneiri, and contrasted weirdly with his skeletal wrist. "Shit man, I've got an earthquake at half nine and I'm expecting thirty people. How about tomorrow?"
He listened intently for a minute. "All right, speak to you soon. See ya!" He pocketed his phone.
"You can predict earthquakes?" I asked, incredulous at this bit of information. Death shook his head, which disappointed me a little.
"I can predict all natural disasters." And I was straight back to being awed. "Would be pretty irritating if I've put the kettle on and got my feet up, then a bloody tsunami hits half of Earth." He looked at his watch again, "Anyway, I've got a celebrity dying in a few minutes that I really want to meet, so one more question then I've got to go."
I though furiously for a few seconds, then my recent history project entered my mind.
"Who really killed JFK? And why, if I'm allowed to ask"
Death clapped. "Oh, very good question, no-one's asked me that for a while. Yes you can learn why, it was a Mafia hit man from the Railway Overpass that fired the killing shot, but there were 4 snipers in total. Oswald wasn't even one of them, he was just a patsy. And the reason the investigation was botched by the Government was because the CIA were pissed at the Bay of Pigs debacle. To cap it all off, the whole thing was orchestrated by Nixon, who wanted to be President."
Death tilted his head at me. "Time to go!"
"Wait!" I gabbled in desperation, "Who's the celebrity that's about to die?"
He paused for a second as if considering my query, then he tapped the part on his face where his nose would be.
"An actor", he said, as he pushed me into oblivion.
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