Welcome back, Miss Hathaway.
I jerked awake. I had fallen asleep in a small dark room—one of the rooms used to train new recruits—slouched on a desk, drooling.
I sat up and stretched, then yawned. I could never seem to get enough sleep. I rubbed my eyes, and realised my spectacles had fallen off. "Crap, crap, crap…" I slid on to the floor, carefully—my vision was pretty horrendous, plus I was in a pencil skirt—and started crawling around, feeling the floor for them.
In the darkness of the room and in my blindness, I didn't even notice that there was a figure silhouetted in the doorway, watching me.
The figure approached me, bent down, and handed me something. My glasses. "You should really be more careful with those." a masculine voice commented.
I picked them from his black-gloved hands with my own gloved one. "Thanks." I muttered, before sitting back down and wiping the smudges from the lenses with a handkerchief, holding them up to the doorway to see by the small amount of light that came in from the hallway.
"Might I ask what you're doing in here?" He inquired. I couldn't tell who he was in the room's lighting; he was tall, though, and dressed in a black suit—which, of course, described about eighty percent of all male shinigami. I put my spectacles back on.
"What does it look like? I was trying to sleep. The Retrieval Division's got too many incompetent fools—really, how did five of them get suspended at once?—and, because I am one of the few who actually takes this job seriously, Management's got me running almost non-stop cleaning up after them. This'll be my third bloody shift in a row with no more than a couple hours' break in between. To think; some of those bastards have the nerve to complain about a little overtime." I snapped back, angry that there was no way now that I would be able to fall back asleep.
"Well my apologies for bothering you. However, I have need of this room." He then proceeded to rummage through a supply cabinet in the back of the classroom, found and pulled out some matches, and began lighting the candles lining the walls. I wiped the bit of drool on the corner of my mouth off with the sleeve of my jacket, and stretched again. Never being able to sleep in my actual bed was giving me cramps. The man finished with the candles, and in the still-dim, but to my sleep-heavy eyes, painfully bright, light I recognised him instantly.
"Mr Spears!" I jumped up, straightening my jacket and skirt, and futilely attempting to flatten my hair to a presentable smoothness with my hand. "I am so sorry for speaking that way to you—I didn't realise, no, I was out of line no matter who you may be. My greatest apologies for my rudeness."
He uttered what sounded like a "heh," pushed up his glasses, and replied with "I empathise with your situation all too well. It's why I got out of soul retrieval as quickly as I could. It's Josette, right?"
"Yes, sir." I stared at his necktie. I could feel myself blushing. How could I snap at a member of Management like that? I had yet to majorly get onto any of the higher reapers' bad sides, and I didn't want this to be the night it finally happened.
"Aren't you supposed to be collecting someone in a little while?" I glanced at my watch. 6:42. A family's barn is to burn down around suppertime, with a neglected little boy trapped inside, to die of smoke inhalation at 7:13.
"Shit!" I grabbed my death scythe, which had been resting across the tops of the desk I had slept on and an adjacent one. It was a plain scythe, save that it was entirely made out of a shiny silver metal, with thorny silver vines climbing the handle, meeting the handle with a single blooming rose. "Sorry!" I yelled as I sprinted from the room.
That particular long night of work began an hour earlier than I anticipated.
7:13: Thomas Brown, died of smoke inhalation, nothing particular to note, soul collected with no problems.
8:38: John Adkins, heart failure, collected with no problems.
10:12: Mary Brent, childbirth, the child survived.
10:43: Amanda Fisher, septicemia, no problems.
1:02: John Grey, poison, jealous wife killed both him and his mistress, before later proceeding to commit suicide. Guess who now gets to deal with her? Yay.
3:00: Phillip Garnet, respiratory failure, soul collected without incident.
3:23: Emily Albert, also childbirth. Her child died as well. Cruel.
Four hours later and we arrive at my personal favourite of the night, Jane Hanley: time of death, 7:12. Death by poisoning; she mistook a bottle of rodent poison for vanilla extract while baking. Her death was deemed accidental, not suicide. The cake tasted horrible, even without the poison, just for the record.
My next collection wasn't to be until the afternoon. I slipped in through the window of the nearest run-down pub, which was long deserted, crept upstairs, and found a decently clean bed to finish my nap in. I kicked off my pumps at the bed's foot and fell face-first onto the mattress, falling asleep instantly.
I awoke to the late afternoon sunlight peering in from some unfamiliar white lace curtains. I glanced at my watch. 3:11. Sitting up, I pulled the to-die list from my jacket, and re-studied of the information on the soul to be collected at ten of four. Olivia Causer, born August eighth, 1820, to die April third, 1827, aged six. Cause of death to be failure of respiratory system, due to asthma. Looking at the image of the smiling, curly-haired and bright-eyed little girl, I wondered why this world has to be so cruel as to take those that had yet to really live. Yet any human, really, gets taken young, whether they live until eighteen, eighty, or even eight-hundred. Human lives are so fleeting, starting and ending in an instant in the eyes of eternity. Perhaps that's why I got over my own so quickly.
Incredible speed and stamina as we might have, running is still an incredibly slow method of transportation, so it took me the whole thirty-five minutes until the collection to arrive at the girl's cottage in the English countryside. I found the place easily enough; a woman wailing could be heard from quite a ways off, and a doctor's carriage sat at the edge of the property. There was a tree growing near enough the building for me to it in and observe the events unfolding within an upstairs bedroom. A woman, restrained by another and a man was screaming and sobbing hysterically, while two other men—the father, and the physician?—were standing over the child, whom was breathing shallowly. The doctor appeared to be measuring her pulse. My scythe in hand, I watched the second hand on my watch creep toward 3:50.
Five...
four...
three…
two…
one…
Zero. The doctor whispered something. The mother screamed louder and was dragged out of the room by the others. The doctor pulled the sheet over the small corpse's face and too left the room, escorting the father, whom was also crying. I jumped down from the tree to the window ledge, and climbed inside.
Her cinematic record was pretty typical, but her youth and innocence made it quite boring. I watched indifferently as the memories flew by. Indifference is a way of existence one such as I learns quickly. Emotions really have no role in our jobs, in our lives. We grim reapers serve the sole purpose of moving the universe forward; one day into another, one life into one death, watching, waiting, always fulfilling our duty. It's a very important job, and a job which will always need doing. I plan on doing that job, no questions asked, until the day fire and brimstone rain from the sky—and who knows, perhaps even after.
I stamped "completed" on the girl's records just as the sky began to turn orange. Soon the sun will set, ending another day of my eternal servitude.