Death Everlasting

A fantasy, with me passing beyond thee sphere of life or wherever I am now...

DEATH EVERLASTING

It was going to be a bleak mid winter. I knew that because I’d cast my summer shorts to one side and pulled on a pair of twill trousers, and I don’t do that very often.

And it was then that I met the one figure or man or somethingthat I’d been dreading bumping into all my life. I knew him as the Grim Reaper but you might choose to call him Satan or Old Father Time or anything you like.

Man… did I call him a man? If two eyes in a face make a man, perhaps, but a ,man also needs a heart, and this creature lacked one of those.

And he had the aforementioned eyes firmly set on me. Calling me by my name. Yes, I could actually hear him calling me in silent syllables. And, finally, I found the strength to rebel, a strength that came from somewhere, goodness alone knows where, because I’ve never been the rebellious sort..

“Go away,” I whispered, and to make sure he understood my meaning I added “right away, now!”

I could see that he didn’t like that. Probably nobody had tried to dismiss him in such a cavalier fashion before. I mean, to end an instruction with an exclamation mark! Wasn’t I brave?

“You are to walk or crawl or drift beside me,” he hissed, the sentence little more than one long sibilant.

“And why should I want to do that?” I asked so bravely that I thought I must have undergone an instant transformation into someone actually brave.

“Because,” he replied slowly, drawing the word out so that it threatened to absorb eternity into its every consonant, “because you are dead and the dead always come with me. I am the Reaper and the dead need to be reaped. Now don’t be a silly boy and come along, or I’ll get cross.”

“Not this winter,” I replied, “because I want to watch the sun rise on next spring. And besides that I have things to finish, people to love, stories to tell...”

“Now then: I’m getting cross…” spat out the Grim Reaper, and I could tell that he was irked by my uncharacteristic attitude by the fire in his eyes and the way I could feel it radiating out onto me. But I’ve always had an obstinate streak in me and it suddenly started coming to the fore.

“I just want to know where you might take me…” I asked, “I mean, when I was knee-high to a grasshopper my mother told me not to go anywhere with strangers…”

“But that was so long ago it doesn’t count any more,” he hissed, and then changed the expression on his face to one of gentle understanding.

“Anyway, I’m taking you to your mum,” he hissed, “that’s who we’re going to see, your pretty mummy, the woman whio nurtured you and gave you wise advice concerning strangers. Now. So come along while she’s still there…”

“Where? While she’s still where?” I demanded because didn’t I remember that terrible funeral several years ago? Hadn’t I seen her coffin lowered into the ground? And hadn’t I gone back in tears days later and seen how high the soil was piled above her?

“You’re tricky,” grumbled the Grim Reaper, “and you think you’ve got an answer for everything. So for the very last time come on! Come with me! I will guide you…”

“Where to?” I repeated.

“All right. I’ll tell you. To the end,” he grunted, “to where no lights shine. To the darkness that is all we have any right to see. So get out of that bedroom and come here now or your world will end this very instant…”

“I thought I was dead anyway,” I quipped, and I suddenly found myself stepping out of myself and, with absolutely no control of anything, moving towards him like a blur on the light of the coming dawn of a day that I’d never see.

“See, it’s not so difficult, is it?” he mocked.

And I don’t suppose it was. I had no control of the me lying collapsed on my bed, ridiculous in my shorts and tee shirt, as this other me, this blurring shapeless me, carefully stepped behind the Grim Reaper, matching him step by step. But I wasn’t finished yet. He hadn’t told me where we were going.

“Where?” I asked, but my voice rang out in silence as we passed through the walls of my home and into the skies awash with dawn clouds.

“You know where,” he gloated, “your new home.”

“In Heaven?” I asked, sort of hopefully though I’ve never believed for one moment in either Heaven ir Hell. But I suppose that I may have been wrong.

“Don’t be daft!” he cracked at me, “Heaven? That was where I collected you from! You’re coming to the pits with me!”

“Where?” I asked, my confusion totally complete.

“Just watch,” he glowered.

And I did. I saw the coffin with me in it, the other me in shorts, as if I was sleeping the sweetest of sleeps, my face adorned with a chemical mask.

Then I saw the coffin, sealed, as it slid along a ramp to where the furnace awaited me.

And finally I felt the flames licking at me, warming my cold flesh and colder spirit as the two of us merged into one for one last time and became a plume of smoke with the Grim Reaper applauding as I dissipated into the clear blue skies of November, and was carried a billion different ways, and none of them to paradise.

So this was what it was all about, was it? My birth, my childhood, my education, my blasted life?

“Why?” the last breath of what might have been me demanded of the universe.

“No reason,” echoed back from absolutely nowhere, “you lived and died, that’s all, nothing much…”

THE END

© Peter Rogerson, 06.11.24