So I've had this little story kicking around in my brain for some time, and finally decided to give it a start. If you want to share your thoughts or give me a nudge to keep going, please leave a review! I hope you enjoy!
Every grave opens wide like a lover's arms, beckoning you to fall into its secure embrace. It looks so peaceful down there, right? So fall. That was what the silver-haired figure thought as he observed the achingly familiar scene before him. He had never stood on this particular train trestle before, but he could tell it was long abandoned by the thick weeds crowding in between the rusted tracks. A relic of earlier times, when people thought the world could be tied together by rails like a parcel bound up in string. Now that dream was finished, as dead as the young woman in front of him was about to be. He checked his pocketwatch out of habit; he had been standing on this ruin for exactly twenty-three minutes, awaiting the arrival of the latest soul on his collection list. She had shown up at the ten-minute mark, wrapped in a thin black overcoat with a hood that buried a mass of bushy hair. It was nighttime; she must have walked here from her home, or perhaps her workplace, and she had spent the last thirteen minutes leaning over the rickety railing, staring down into darkness. The marsh far below them was hidden in shadow and mist, a gaping maw into which she would soon let herself drop.
Tapping long nails against his pocketwatch, he checked the time again. Three minutes until her time of death. He was relieved that this one wouldn't take long. Sometimes the jumpers took forever to actually do it, cringing before the empty abyss, sobbing, dialing phone numbers that never picked up. It could drag on for hours. But this girl had walked all the way out here in this kind of weather, so she must be fairly determined. He paced closer to her, staring down at her shrouded figure. She couldn't sense him, of course, but she shivered as another gust of wind rattled through her thin coat. He wondered if she'd been here before in happier days. Why had she chosen this broken trestle to be the place where she took her final leap?
The reaper stepped back as the girl edged toward the nearest column, mentally chiding himself for being drawn in. He had long ago lost interest in charting out these mortals' fleeting lives. It didn't matter why she'd come here or who she was. He didn't even recall her name, having glanced over his collection list a few minutes before her arrival to make sure nothing had changed. Nothing ever changed. She was going to die in a minute and then nothing that she was or did or thought would ever matter again. He already knew what he was going to write on his collection list after her head cracked open like an egg on the faraway ground; Died of cranial trauma due to a fall. Additional remarks: None.
He watched passively as she braced against the mouldering column and pulled herself onto the edge of the railing. From there it was a straight drop down, and she extended a leg gracefully over the abyss, like a tightrope walker about to make her debut. Powerful winds rushed around her, nearly knocking her off the ledge without her volition involved. It occurred to him that she hadn't made a single sound over the entire time she'd been here. No prayers, no tears, and even now, no cry of existential terror. So, then, she was just going to vanish from this world without a sound. He watched her hands tremble on the drenched iron ridges and waited for the moment they would let go.
He waited. And waited. It seemed like it was taking longer than a minute, but he knew that time behaved differently around death. It wasn't a static force like the humans thought. Over the course of his long existence he'd felt it bend and stretch, compress and contort, much like the tall evergreens being tossed around on the other side of the marsh. It didn't always move the way one thought it would, but it always kept its scheduled end. That, and only that, was what kept the world turning in order.
The silver-haired reaper was startled from his reverie as the girl's body finally dropped from the railing. But something was wrong, he realized in the seconds following. She had stepped off the railing, yes, but she hadn't stepped forward. She'd stepped backward and now she was sprawling gracelessly at his feet on the floor of the trestle, wild-eyed and still very much alive.
He stared down at her in utter confusion, noticing for the first time her pale, narrow face and the tufts of reddish-brown hair poking out of her displaced hood. This….was not right. Not correct. He fumbled for his pocketwatch and clicked it open to see the time was 12:57 pm. She ought to have perished exactly one minute ago.
Then at last, as he stared into the glass pane of his timepiece, he finally heard a sound break from her lips. It was a long, low-pitched keening, somewhere between a wail and a hysterical laugh. His eyes were drawn from the watch to her face as she sat up, moving her hands over the scraped edges of her elbows and continuing to make that low, guttural noise. She scrubbed at her eyes even though she wasn't crying, and finally curled up into a ball inside her coat as the keening gave way to rapid, heaving breaths. The storm quieted just enough for him to hear them.
He wasn't sure how long he stood over this huddled impossibility of a human, trying to fish something out of the well of his newly blank mind. This had never happened before. No, this could not have happened at all. There was no protocol for what to do in this situation. It wasn't in the manual. All he could think about was the rather banal concern of what am I going to write on the list?
A moment later, he snapped to attention and dove into the deepest pocket of his robes, sifting through old inkwells and quills to find his collections list. It was a heavy tome, but he was so accustomed to the weight that he hardly felt it. He skimmed furiously through the pages, a month or so of souls, each one marked with a terse red stamp labeling them 'complete.' His fingernail bit into the page he had dog-eared today, scanning down a row of collected souls to the place her profile had been just half an hour ago. There was nothing there now. No picture, no name, no information. Most importantly, no date of birth or death. Just an empty spot amidst a sea of dead and those to die.
The wind picked up again and howled around him in a torrent of battered raindrops. He didn't know what to do. He supposed he ought to report this, but to whom? There was no agency that handled matters involving humans who continued to live past their death date. There was no form to fill out for this type of incident. Occasionally a careless young reaper would fail to correctly sever a deceased soul from its corpse, which could cause problems, and there were cases of paperwork being incorrectly filed that led to mix-ups regarding which humans had died where….but something like this….
The tall reaper glanced downward and actually gasped in surprise for the first time in a century. The space at his feet where the girl had fallen was empty. At first he thought she too had simply vanished – and wouldn't that be the icing on the cake of this abnormal night? – but then he spotted her at the end of the trestle's juncture, loping slowly back the way she'd come. She was going home, as though nothing extraordinary had happened on her midnight walk. He fought back the sudden urge to call out to her, demand she come back here and die properly so he could finalize the collection of her soul. It wasn't as though she could hear him. Still, just before she disappeared up the road that led into town, she turned around and gazed back at the marsh that should have been her grave. Her hood was down this time, rain soaking bronze bushels of hair and dripping from her nose. He could barely see her eyes through the mist, but the light reflected off them gave him a feeling he couldn't name. Like a rabbit in the brush senses the eyes of the hawk, feels the air shiver as it dives. The feeling of being seen.
