(Some reapers dance around the word death, preferring verbs like passing or ascending. Those are the times it’s easiest to believe my supervisor’s speeches about the pristine order of the universe and the cyclical shape of time and the necessity of death. A routine heroism, like covering a shift for your hungover friend or shooing a trapped bird out the window. There’s something satisfying about those reapings.
The first dozen or so deaths we’re assigned are generally people with one spiritual foot firmly in the grave: your stage-IV seventy-year-olds, your left behind spouses, your great-grandmothers who just overheard the term assisted living floating up the stairs. In case I cracked like an egg and had to retire early.Įvery new reaper is shielded, at least a little. I was starting to think somebody upstairs was looking out for me, shielding me in case one of the under-fives turned out to be a little boy with corn silk hair and dark eyes. This was my first, in my three years of reaping. These days, with the child mortality rate comfortably below 7 per 1,000 births, we don’t process too many of the under-fives-some of the older reapers like to bitch about how we’ve got it soft, reminiscing about the good old days before seatbelt laws and vaccinations and the EPA–but six-point-six out of a thousand is still six-point-six too many. They’re balanced right at the teetering edge of themselves, so full of potential it makes your eyes water just to be near them.Īlso, two-year-olds are contrarian bastards and it takes several hours and a family-size pack of M&Ms to coax them across the river. Their souls are still baby-soft and cottony, wholly innocent, but full of the subtleties and quirks that define their selfhood. Two is, by break room consensus, the worst age for reaping. Time: Sunday, July 14 th 2020, 2:08AM, ESTĬause: Cardiac arrest resulting from undiagnosed long QT syndrome
I read the typewritten card paper-clipped to the front with my stomach tensed, braced for the sucker punch.Īddress: 186 Grist Mill Road, Lisle NY, 13797 I know by the lightness of the manila folder in my hand, the preemptive pity in the courier’s face as she gives it to me. I’ve ferried two hundred and twenty-one souls across the river of death, and I can already tell my two-hundred-and-twenty-second is going to be a real shitkicker.
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