Meet Death

I stopped, standing still, straining my senses, remaining motionless, and tried to understand the perception of wrongness. I expanded my senses out in all directions, but couldn’t narrow it down to more than the feeling that something felt wrong. No, I got a little bit more than that – something was going to happen. Something terrible.

The perception faded, and I stood still a few moments longer, wondering if it would return. I shook my head to clear my thoughts and shrugged, no matter.

What will be will be, I thought.

My journey continued, and I passed hundreds of dilapidated buildings with smashed windows and bars covering every opening. Soon I arrived at the doorstep of a crack house, gliding straight through the closed door. Invisible, I slid past a dozen oblivious drug addicts as they lay prone in different positions, scattered around what used to be a living room. Within a short time, I crossed into a bedroom where six more drug users were lying on the floor in assorted states of unconsciousness. My eyes focused on a young woman, Tina, seventeen years old, only seconds from death.

I watched as her body failed and her eyes glazed over. Silently, without intervening, I observed the process and waited for the exact right moment when the body died, and beyond the possibility of resuscitation.

A few more minutes passed. Tina’s heart stopped beating, and her brain died from lack of oxygen. At that moment, the time when the flesh died, I reached into her body, through the skin and muscle, and into the heart.

I frowned. It wasn’t there. No matter, she had to be here somewhere, inside her body. I continued searching, moving my hands around through the dying organs. Inside her liver? Nope. Spleen? No. Hmmm. Where was she hiding? Ah, yes, here, in the intestines.

Wrapping my hand around her, I pulled, and a small, dim ball of light flowed out of the body. Tina resisted, trying to move away. Whispering soothing sounds, I lifted her up body and held her in the air. Slowly Tina became calm and accepting of her fate.

“Who are you,” she asked.

“Who I am doesn’t matter,” I replied. “What I am doing is helping you on your way.”

“I want to die.”

“Your body has died, but you cannot. It is not possible. You move on to a new life.”

“But I there is so much pain…”

“You can’t feel pain.”

“Not physical pain. Life. Really, life is not fair.”

“I understand. What I can do is help you on your way to the next part of your journey.”

“Who are you?”

“Shhhhh,” I soothed. “Quiet. It is time for us to go. The wheel turns, and you will soon move into a new life. You’ll be a baby inside of a womb, and hopefully, in this new life, you can do better than you did before.”

Gently I stroked Tina and placed her inside of a small pouch hanging from my belt. She resisted for a moment, then gave in and flowed into the black bag.

Ah, I thought. I hope you do better the next time.

I frowned, again perceiving a vague sense of wrongness. I finished calming Tina, and stood perfectly still, expanding my perceptions in all directions. Even so, I couldn’t pinpoint the location or determine anything more the existence of a maliciousness.

I shrugged. It’s not like it matters. Nothing can hurt me. There is not a force in the entire multiverse, not even the creator, that could cause me harm.

Time to go. More spirits needed help on their journey. As always, my focus remained on locating every person close to death. Here a man laid in a hospital bed, the flat line on the monitor next to him indicating his heart had stopped. A few blocks away, a drug addict died from an overdose of methamphetamine, and in a nursing home across town, a ninety-two-year-old man slipped, fell, and the life drained from him.

I see these events occurring, all over the planet, for the millions of people dying each day. It is my mission to visit each of them, every single person without fail, to collect their souls, storing them all inside my pouch. Later, I will hand those spirits over to Fate, who spins her web, to guide them to wombs, where they will inhabit fetuses, to be born and live new lives with new identities.

Still, the wrongness persisted. It troubled me, and I felt something was about to occur, and I didn’t think it was going to be good.

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