Reaper

She was new to the job, the shadow of the lovely young woman that she had been in life. The wraith had no name yet, her old one being wrenched from her as her memories had been when she had consented to her Selection.

            But it didn’t matter now. Thinking of the void that filled her mind only filled her with immeasurable grief, tearing at her empty chest cavity and distracting her from her tasks- and oh, did she have an important one that night.

            The road was dark and gloomy, skeletal corpses of trees seeming to reach out for her, inviting her to join them in their slumbers. She shivered in spite of herself, in spite of the knowledge that she could never join them. For some reason the woods made her uneasy, with its secret whispers and shadows that pooled in places they shouldn’t. She knew, somehow, that it was from her past that she would never know, from the person that she would never meet.

The fear threatened to claw its way out of her throat, nagging and scratching with a sudden devilish ferocity. She quelled it with her mind as quickly as it came up, her wince visible to no one. She was an envoy of Death now, and she had to concentrate on following the screams of the trapped souls. They were growing desperate.

The final line of trees loomed up before her in what seemed like a mere instant- and indeed, for her new state of being, it was only an instant- and she burst out of it with much gusto, a sense of relief washing over her before she could swallow it. Concentrate, she reminded herself. Reapers do not show emotion.

The wreckage lay before her, the frame rising up like broken teeth, fire still lazily licking up its sides. A small crowd surrounded the body of what had been the country home, tense faces eerily illuminated in the dying flames. There were policemen, firefighters, a few commuters that had decided on a late-night ride though the country. An ambulance technician sat in the open back door of the vehicle, staring at the fire helplessly, knowing that the ambulance would be empty tonight. It was, as the chief of police reported to the paper the following morning, a total loss.

 None of it mattered. The inferno was dying, and she had come for the dead.

A wave of her hand killed the last of the flames, and with it, the last of the house. The timbers came down with a groan, and the audience let out a collective moan. A woman and her husband dissolved into tears, shoulders shaking silently before the outline of the wreckage. It was white noise to the reaper, a beautiful background against the red screams of the trapped souls.

Her feet guided her to the largest one, treading on instinct more than conscious thought. It lay trapped in its vessel, a small, charred thing, twisted and mangled, screeching a black disharmony of pain and confusion. Her fingers brushed it gently, comforting the thing as its wailing faded into small gasps. She examined it as she worked, dead  eyes flicking up and down the pathetic corpse. It had been a child, three years old, perhaps four. His fingers were bent in a devilish curve, tattered lips still arched in the ghost of a scream. It appeared that Death  had  met him as it had been scratching at the door. There was no shock, no emotion. The souls of children were usually the biggest, untainted by time and cruelty. It was no matter: death  made everyone equal.

It was calm now, its piercing voice no longer an instrument in the deadly orchestra surrounding her. She placed her palm on it gently, feeling its soul rise up to her hand, her arms, her chest. Her dead veins began to fill with an echo of life, of warm summer days and cool winter nights. Fun, games, family, friends. Picnics, summertime, the life juices of  ripe watermelons dripping down the child's chin. There was laughter and music and love and it was sliding by too quickly for her to comprehend. Her body ached, arms trembling with the intensity of life. For a split second, she longed for her soul, for the beat of her heart to ring through her again. And then the soul exploded through her fingers in a flurry of molten silver, dissipating into the chill night air that she couldn't quite feel.  And then it was gone as suddenly as it had come, leaving her oddly empty inside.

The others went by quickly. A flash of red, a few weak sparks of green. Their lives were insignificant, their souls stale and tainted. The child's had been the strongest, wild and hopeful and free. It had taken her as long as the others combined-three minutes, four, maybe. There were seven of them in all, but the child had stuck with her in her mind. It had been so pure, young, full of hope, full of curiousity about the things it would never know. Death's kiss had come too soon.

Yet she could not allow herself to be sad. Death came too soon for everyone, no matter the armor that they built against it, creeping through the cracks and closing its fingers around their throats, grinning all the while. It had done the same to her once, to people she must have loved, and millions and millions that she never would. It was merely part of life, coming to make man and his companions fade back into the gray circle of the living, forgotten and unloved soon enough.

She glanced at the gently swelling crowd sadly, watching them cry and talk in hushed voices. In the distance, more souls began screaming, faint sirens for her to follow. It was time to leave them, her job here was done. They were safe.

For now.