Lead By Example

The light shining through the Christian Academy windows, looked blue through my eyes. It was like some bad, made for TV recreation of what was about to happen but I was not cogniscent enough to really care either way.

The TV drama of this moment might paint me out to be some sort of malevolent, maniacal mastermind but in that moment there was nothing. There was no joy or glee for the feeling of killing.  There was no pain in my heart that caused me to shoot everyone. I felt no sexual rise from the murder or feeling of superiority or even any feeling of regained control in my life; all I felt was the machine at my fingertips that mowed down those who were being judged by their god.

I remember walking into the cafeteria and sliding a bar and chains on all of the exits. From there, it was simply a dance of blood and slaughter. At first the gunfire was loud and unnerving but after a while, the slaughter became like drums and the screams like horns as I danced to the music of death. The song would even rise and fall in climax until it dwindled down to the last few shuffling of children and teachers and voluptuous lunch ladies that puked the words, "hunny chile..." to the fat faced megalomaniacs who roamed the earth at this disaster on earth.

"RATATATATATAT!"

Such quick work of a school run on routine.  It was good it worked this way too because the crowd was concentrated and I killed every last one. Not a few people in the cafeteria and a few missed in the library. Not 7 dead and 6 wounded, all 158 students, 29 teachers and 5 neurotic lunch people. All dead. I counted and I used my knife to poke holes in their heads to make sure.

Death came slow and painful to them but there was a reckoning that day. At the end, I climbed the fire escape and burned down the building from within and from outside, with a cadaver that had my teeth in its mouth. A nice set of pebbles carved to replica in played my own mouth but the body lay with the others in the building as it burned to the ground.

If I had the power of a higher being, I would have simply taken them without all that pain but as a human being, this was to be a cautionary tale of woe for all those who thought that they were safe.

Sleep well princes and princess. Tell your story in the afterlife and to the people still living by your example. Bon voyage.

Story Stopper

Part X: Death Lives Always

What a strange life this Michael had that he would choose such rash action.  I remember none of living that life save the pictures and images that are held in the records of time.

Deviel was happy to have me back but I was displeased with my experiment.  Even when I had the memory of my current self erased to live life as a human, was it really all gone to eternity when all was said and done? Had god cursed the angels by giving them eternity to watch humans meander a world we could never experience or even truly understand?

I had lived mortal lives where I was only a walking shadow because inside I was still the Grim Reaper. I had now lived a life as a human who seemed to experience only misery but none that I could remember as me.

It wasn't me anyway; it was Michael that experienced the misery and from the hall of records and the stories and manifestos he'd left behind, there were always remnants of me that plagued him until his death.

Yes! I had cursed this poor soul to be me but not know it and it had driven him mad.  Perhaps the experiment was not all a loss for now I knew for sure that no human could live with the weight of responsibility for which my job entailed.

What powers do I hold as the angel of death? Can I call myself that when the title clearly belongs to Samael? It's interesting how time works in the afterlife. To humans, their little minds can only perceive that Satan was cast out of heaven a long time ago but for us, it could have been yesterday, it could have been tomorrow. For all I know, Satan is in heaven still and in hell at the same time.

Only god is omnipotent and omnipresent and all the "omnis" but existing outside in the vortex between the worlds, we reapers have extrodinary grasp on powers that would seem to be only his. Obviously, we do not have his mighty strength but we do have a presence throughout all eras of recorded time. We can not be at every one simultaneously and we can not know everything that goes on at every point in time but we can go to anywhere we desire in time.

Are we not then gods of death?  The Japanese seem to call us Shinegami or death "gods" I am the chief of the death "gods" so in my own way, I am a god supreme.

Hearing my thoughts, Deviel shushed them.

"No Dolphael! Do not think such things.  To question the limits of your position in the grand order is what causes one to fall."

"Yes but are we not free as humans are to question our existence?" I replied.

"No, you are not," a voice came down through the void and there before me, I saw him shining with the pure light of god himself.

"Gabriel!" I gasped.

"Deviel, you are right to caution your Grim to such foolhardy thoughts. I come as a warning and to fulfil my duty as the messenger archangel, Dolphael. To question the supremecy of god is herecy and if you do not heed this warning, second to me is Michael.

The irony that the human I had "made in my image" would be my destroyer should I not end my quest.

"Do not misunderstand me, Dolphael. I do not seek to have you end your quest at all.  God seeks for all his creation, including the angels to marvel at the beauty of what he has made. The Seraphs are so ecstatic about it that they fly around his head and sing 'holy holy holy' forever."

"What a life..." I mumbled.

"It may not occur to you, brother but being a man who has ascended to the rank of angel is a big deal. You have a unique perspective which is why the burden of man's mortality was placed on you. Samael knows only how to destroy but you are well versed in love, poetry (in more ways than one), sex and have the ability to even go back and forth and to live as one, if you so choose, provided your primary function is preformed. You have been given the pardon and indeed encouragement to have reapers who preform your tasks for you on service of you which is only allowed because they serve god first. You are a lucky creature Dolphael. Do not ask for more blessings than god can allow."

With this speech, he ascended back into heaven. It occurred to me that I could follow him but my reapers would always remain here or on earth; not as humans, mind you, but as shadows of human beings, remnants and in a world out of phase with the one that mattered.

Time cannot dictate how long I sat and thought about what he said but do not children always question their parents? Don't they always want more as is the nature of growing up? Most importantly: aren't parents always scolding their kids?

Michael of Princeton, NJ

Trying to compact one's life into a long story is easy but growing up a poet, it will have to be a short story as I am taught to never waste a word on pointless details.  Maybe I should have considering where I am now but it's too late for conversation so I'll start with the best of times and the worst of times and we'll go from there.

My parents divorced when I was young and perhaps this separation sparked my own separation from reality, maybe not.  Since I was little, I've felt out of place. I spent my life chasing women and thinking on a larger scale that seemed to see a life as pointless to the eternity of mankind.

Often times, throughout my life, I have felt different. I've been able to see into people's souls and read their actions accordingly. Some call it future sight or clairvoyance but I simply call it placing the demeanor of a man up against the norm for him and reading critically.

There's nothing there but sometimes when I get to thinking really hard, I can feel phantom wings on my back that plague my physiology with thoughts of flying in my dreams.  When this happens, I feel an emptiness inside of me that becomes prevalent when I truly think about forever.

In eternity, nothing matters besides love but when one lives for this kind of purity, they often find themselves meandering the extremes which is why I find myself where I am now.

Growing up, I bounced through relationships. I chased women around the world. From all around the country to the shores of Japan and Africa. The hunt for immortal romance was always on my mind and I'd always find one thing that fit, only to find out later that there was a million things that didn't. Even now, at 30 years of age, I find myself facing death because life never mattered at all.

You see for all my romance, there was an equal amount of sex, and one of those times, I happened to bring a child into this world. The girl loves me and I loved her but it felt out of place and I knew it. I did right, however, and married her and now my child is two years old and I work a shit job for shit pay to support both my wife and the baby.

for the longest time, what kept me from doing evil was the hope for the future but as hope diminished at this dead end job, my reservations grew less and less and here I find myself with an empty can of gasoline in my hands and retribution in my heart.

She sits inside her empty room on her computer filled with more work for her underpaid workers.  Her mean spirit has crushed their souls more than once and although she is only a middle man, a scandal can ruin the integrity of any company.  With her door shut and her curtains on her only window to the inside of the building down and closed, she hardly noticed as I began to douse her door in gasoline.  Lighting the match, I trust in my lord and savoir that I might shed light on this operation and change the nature of the people who live in ignorance of the injustice.

Throwing the match on the floor, I watch as the office goes up in flames.  Her curtains peal back lapped up by the flames tongue like aging wallpaper over time and I see her face through the tiny window next to the door as she can go nowhere due to my dousing the door in gasoline and burning it as a barrier.

In solemn resolve, I see her clawing at the window and screaming in agony. All I can offer her are the words, "vivres in infernum perpetuam, nefandus"

I prayed to god in this moment and offered as retribution, my life and my soul for taking hers.  I accepted that my lord and savoir was the only way to heaven as the flames grew higher and the light around me flashed and sparkled.  I watched her burn to death in front of me and stood amidst the flames.

The light dimmed and I found myself in the swirling Vortex between the worlds.  My wings stretched the gap and I was no longer Michael of Princeton New Jersey.

Story Stopper

Part IX: Dead to the world

"What is the point?" Said Deviel looking at me indignantly through the gaseous cloud of the great vortex.

"How am I to truly know if I never worry about the consequence of death?" I told her.

"...but if you are to hit the reset button and to truly live a human life, what happens if you meet true death as a human? What happens if this personality... no! Who you truly are, doesn't come back?"

"Then we will test god, his angels and his grand plan on whether this was truly meant to be my position or not."

"Why must you do it though? Are you so egotistical that you can not be content with merely seeing death at work every day on the lives of these humans whose souls seem to be constantly in the mortal draft?"

"I am immortal so I will never know, would I?"

"And what is any one of us supposed to do without you? You are the angel whilst we are mere pawns as reapers."

"This is why, while I am gone, you will be the Grim. You are more than well trained enough and you are more than qualified to run this department and if it so happens that at the end of this, I am dead to the world, I trust you will know what to do."

"This is foolish and I will never submit," she said; but by that time, I was already gone. I was waking up as a human and seeing the world through the eyes of a baby. 

My human eyes still knew I was the Grim but after two instances or two years in human time, I had learned to talk and had become someone new. I no longer remembered Dolphiel but only Michael who is the man my parents raised into a fine young man.

Story Stopper

Part VIII: Dying: what comes naturally

Death is part of gods plan. Whether it be the guy who dies old and feeble in his bed, the person who suffers through debilitating cancer or simply: the man who was in the "wrong" place at the "wrong" time and got his chead guillotined off by a serpentine garage door, God intends to carry these souls to the afterlife.

In the latter case, God wants the soul and gives the order but it's not exactly their time yet. That's where I come in. Most simply, I could make souls like this have a heart attack: a lot of places around the world don't have access to adequate healthcare so there's rarely any question when someone dies of a heart attack. In the United States, it's surprising not everyone dies of a heart attack.

In any case, the heart attack is the way I'd usually go because it's easy, it does not cause much pain and it doesn't stand out from any other person's death. After seeing the artwork of the archangel Samael, however, I was dying (pun intended) to make some gruesome art of my own.

As stated before, I do not revel in the death. Death is painful beyond the immediate people who die. It affects the living more than the dead even, but God is the Alpha and Omega and he does have a plan, however screwed up it may be sometimes. In this way, Samael and I have a job to do that is morose, vicious and sometimes straight cruel but we are ultimately still here to pass the will of god on in the form of death. For him it's mass death and he sets those things in motion like a child would play with dominoes and for me, and consequently my reapers, it's individual death plan that in certain cases, I get to make up.

In all fairness to the man whose head I all but cut off with the garage door, he should have lived for another 20-30 years had his death been natural, but the order form said his name to be ferried unto god's domain in heaven.  Therefore, it is my duty to cause his death.

Mind you, I'm not allowed to kill him in the way a hitman would or even the heroic and clandestine Nordsman. For me, the death has to come as a result of natural events that lead to his death.

Many people think I can just touch something and it dies but contrary to the Hollywood view of death: I am not a skeleton, the death touch exists and causes cardiac arrest but it's an ability which is actively summoned not something that happens to everything living that I touch.  I picked up the cat, I brought him to the front of the garage. I put that "something in the air" that disoriented and caused this man paranoia and delusions of grandeur but he was the one who followed every step I laid out for him.

When the garage door snapped and gravity (a natural force) pulled it crashing down on his neck, I was merely there to collect the soul. The beauty of it was in how natural it really was: this man was a writer and he was paranoid in general. He gorged himself on Stephen King and E.A. Poe as many American's do. He was obsessed with the cynical and morose view of other American writers and charmed with the possibility of a naturally occurring, gruesome death.  The irony that his life would end this way was poetic. Not to mention the fact that death by garage door was unique and bizarre. The newspapers would have to report on this even if he hasn't been a well known writer in the human realm. 

The way he was laid out left him with a look of shock on his face that reminded me of a child on Christmas realizing that he'd finally gotten that shiny toy train that he wanted so badly, or whatever kids get excited about these days. He was indeed dead but the way the body was sprawled out exuded such life in an innocuous, to humans a least, vibrancy. This man died fighting with the last few signals his brain could send through his spinal column and was stopped, quite literally, only because he was pinned down by forces too great to overcome. When you're the Grim Reaper or even someone with an eye for the beauty of a well planned machine, this is art.

When he looked at me with that stupid face of shock, awe and fear, he had already realized he was dead. In this way, this was also beautiful because death did not come as a questionable thing for him. When that garage door slammed down on his neck, he knew and accepted immediately that he was dead.

When prompted, all I had to do was confirm what he already knew.  He began as most people do when they're surprised and swore.  After I had confirmed what he already knew, we both stood over the scene and admired the poetry of irony I had laid out in front of us.

When he finally spoke, he said, "what comes now?"

"I am to convince you to accept your death and then to imbibe your soul to carry it to the afterlife."

"What? You mean like eat me?

There was another long moment where he looked around at his surroundings and then up as he smiled.

"I always knew I'd be telling death to eat me when he told me I was dead but I never expected this kind of irony," he said.

He laughed for a bit and then surprised me with his last request.

"Do I get to ask for a last request? I mean if you're here to take me to the other side to a fate inevitable, do I get a last cigarette or something? The same as a man tied to a stake in front of the firing squad? Or do we even have the time for something like that?"

I laughed out loud when I thought of time and death existing in the same instance but realizing the man was serious, I told him, "Of course. We exist outside of time now. If you've ever heard of the echo: a ghostly Repeat of events that happened in the past cast in real time like a hologram, that happens because souls exist outside of time so that death can reoccur at any moment in time..."

"I don't need a science lesson but that's interesting to know. Thanks. I just want to see my wife again. She was a nut and we didn't always see eye to eye but she was my wife and I loved her in my own way."

The two personalities were polar opposites. He was a personality filled with darkness, violence and personal torment and she was made of such light that she almost shimered like an angel when her car arrived.

I had the power to exist outside of time so I could certainly speed up time to the moment she got home to see the scene.  Here in the Phoenix sun, you'd think one person would have passed the body and called it in but in the two hours that were two seconds in our time, no one had noticed the body at all. When she got out of the car, she reminded me of Deviel with her shimmering ora that looked like the pure blue light of heaven.

This was my charge's first time seeing an ora as they are not truly visible to the human realm. Most nuts who say they see oras are either victims of near death, hence part of them are trapped in the afterlife until they die, or tripping on psychedelic drugs.

When the wife saw her husband's head hanging on by flaps of skin and a crushed spinal column, she fell to her knees and began to cry in gasps and inaudible screams. It wasn't that we wouldn't be able to hear them she was just to frightened and hurt to make any sound.

My charge, for all his toughness and talent for mimicking and profiling psychopaths and sociopaths, was actually softer and warmer on the inside than anyone in his life might have known. He reached out for her with such passion, his heart broke simultaneously with his acceptance of death.

The spirit orb floated around in circles where the wife lay face down on the pavement sobbing like a wounded dog. Opening my mouth it slowly floated into me and my wings stretched alive, tearing a hole in the fabric of space-time and making a doorway to the vortex that lead to the beyond.

As I felt the great pain in his soul floating inside of me and vomiting the residual emotion that permeates off of every soul, I thought about the irony that this soul whose evil thoughts were so poignant that they emulated and rivaled E.A. Poe, was on its way to heaven.

A man who had felt lost his whole life still accepted the glory of god in his soul enough to ascend to the great and colorful planes of Elysium. As I neared heaven, I opened my mouth and he went forward through the "long tunnel" that leads to "the light at the end of the long hallway" at the opening to my mouth.

It all seems a bit rediculous when I say it out loud but seeing heaven, I didn't feel like entering it for the first time. I didn't even laugh at the rediculousness of the situation because layed out before me were fields of green that went on forever and bubbles that represented different worlds that belonged to the spirits of all time; their colors flashing like TV screen echoes on the walls of American dens across the nation.

I turned and floated back into the vortex feeling the wind on my wings and watching the floating reapers without any wings but with the ability to move in any direction  on any plane of existence because of their title.

Life for any human is hard but dying is what comes naturally. Never dying is hard but we find ways to make it. Always being the one to set up the dominoes but being forced to let the human knock them down wasn't even satisfying because being the Grim, I get to see death in every form but what does it mean to die? Or to give death by your own hand?

A Quiet Tuesday

Sitting in my favorite chair, reading Edgar Allan Poe, I become overwhelmingly aware of the silence in our home. The grandfather clock's heart beats in the hallway with the speed of a humming bird.  It's ticking and pounding mimic my imagination when I have a good story idea, pounding away at the weary keys on my computer.  It's funny how slothful I can be on a lazy, hot day in a Phoenix July.  The sun creeps through the windows and beams of it reflect off the dust in our home. It's almost as if hands are reaching into my home.

As the strangeness of the light begins to get to me, and quite frankly, the strangeness of Poe's imagination, I decide that there's got to be a place in our house I can go to get away from phantom specters in the middle of the day.

My wife is an interior designer and always believed that a view of nature was important to sound mind, body and soul.  I have to hand it to her, she makes me feel incredible, not to mention her sexual prowess would intimidate rabbits, but to the tormented mind that I so well disguise, she comes across to that part of me as invasive as the gaunt and yearning solar fingers that plague my diseased mind right now.  Don't get me wrong, to look at her, you'd say what a lucky guy and I do feel that way but she's slender with perfect shape, filled with energy and joy and my demons could plague and darken the skies of Neverland were I to let them freely express themselves like they wanted.

For the time being, it is not my demons I fear but those demons that exist in reality: heat, UV exposure, the eerie feeling that I am not alone and death himself walks amongst the hydrangea that so neatly moat my home.

"What am I reading for anyway?" I tell myself.  "There's articles to write and bills to pay.  Suffer the writer who doesn't infest the world with the insanity of a deranged mind through his tortured drivel."

Looking down at the story of Annabel Lee, the irony of the preceding thoughts are not lost.  I admire Poe but people make him out to be a god.  As if he never scratched his butt when he arose from a lazy boy in a Phoenix July.  The desert heat sticks to you.  It surrounds you like a warm blanket when you think back to New Jersey where you were raised but after living here for some time, that warm blanket becomes a noose and just as maddening as the still beating heart of the dead old man beneath the floor boards or that damn grandfather clock that won't fucking shut up with its incessant ticking of the seconds that whine through time in a never ending loop that goes on to infinitum till the ticks become a hum and you wonder why there's never a tock?

"It adds character," my beautiful wife would say.

It adds character like the windows everywhere and the bony sunshine fingers that mock me and scratch the floor...

There's a scratching noise from somewhere.  Where is that coming from?

I head into the garage; Yes! At last. The garage where there are no lights and no peep holes for the heat or sunshine.  If only it were air conditioned in here because it's like one of those "rejuvenating," clay sweat lodges out in the desert.

Scraaaaaatch... Scraaaaatch... Scratch scratch...

There it is and it's coming from outside the garage door.

I pull up the segmented pieces of chained wooden door links like a serpent into the top of the garage and a cat, as if startled jumps directly into my line of sight.  Being the dumb ass I am, I actually get startled and bump my head on the garage door which I have not fully lifted yet.  Well! The weight is more than I can bear on my head so it knocks me down to the floor but this brilliant ballet ends with all segmented heavy wooden pieces crashing down on my neck as I watch my own demise.

When I come to, I can clearly see the chaos that has become of me and my head barely hangs onto my neck through pieces of lacerated skin.  Behind me, there's a man with wings and a rather cro-magnon brow.  He looks to be Mesopotamian or something middle eastern but is that even possible?  Mesopotamian?  How do I even know what that looks like?  His smile looks devious and yet at the same time proud as if he'd just figured out how to make some incredible Rube Goldberg machine that ended in...

"Aw shit... I'm dead..." I say aloud.

I can tell he's speaking Aramaic but for some reason I can understand him as he says, "Yes, my good sir, you are indeed."

Story Stopper

Part VII: Dead Stop

It had been building for a few weeks and although j had for seen it, there was nothing I could do to stop it. A soothsayer is a human being with the extraordinary gift to predict the future but a reaper exists outside time its self and therefore he knows the future.

I remember it in bits and pieces as I do most of my experiences being human. I was a student at Virginia Polytechnic institute in the year 2048.  You'd think there would be flying cars and robots everywhere but not much had changed, really.

The first thing I remember is lounging at the bottom of a staircase that crossed under a bridge and looked out onto a garden. It was there that a couple of students were talking philosophy and though I could see them, there was a man in a long black camel skin coat who stood in the shadow of the bridge. His face obscured, he talked to me of philosophy and as I debated him, I walked over to him and crossed past him and as I walked into the garden, I saw that this man was wearing a Guy Fauks mask which made my human brain think, "what a poser," buy my angel mind was terrified.

The next scene I remember is seeing the man in the mask on the roof of a building and as people passed by, no one seemed to notice. I had just gotten to an art building when I heard a scream from behind me. Several people wearing Guy Fauks masks walked around an island amidst a brick walking path circle with guns drawn. People ran and I ran to a small concrete wall jutting out from the ground like a tree would grow. It had a square base at one end and columns that grew out of the ground like tree trunks along the way up a hill.

In front of me, I saw the panicking art students and in their panic, I saw them looting art supplies like oil base paints and charcoal pencils. I remember thinking to myself, that would be how humanity would act when doom is imminent. All the while, this man in the Guy Fauks mask stood at the top of the building looming like a seven foot tall gaunt monstrocity or a perverted VanGough version of a human gargoyle. Still, no one noticed his presence but me.

As the chaos escalated, someone noticed one of the people in the Guy Fauks masks open and close a briefcase while someone else shouted, "bomb!"

I remember being glad I was on my back behind that end pillar of cement but I also remember thinking if the bomb should go off, how much of this mortal body would be protected from the blast? I remember trying to change positions as the chaos ran rampant and more people tried to take shelter being the slats in this small wall. Still other people next to me, stood next to the wall, watching the bomb squad at work as they arrived.

None of it made very much difference because as the time for the explosion drew nigh, I could feel it in my bones. As the bomb exploded, I crawled out of my physical form and into a world where time had stopped.

Not stopped for real, mind you. Only god can stop the flow of time but more along the lines of the world was on pause like one would pause live TV from a TiVo remote: the program keeps playing but for the moment at least, I am able to view a still image of the world that is already burning in live time.

Ironically, the man on the roof top could still move in this frozen time and at this, it became apparent as to who he was. I had gotten my job from him.

"Good evening, Samael," I said.

Stretching out three pairs of darkened wings, he floated to the ground, leaving his mask on.

"The heat from it is amazing, is it not?" He said.

In the moment the bomb had exploded, the last thing I felt with my human nervous system was the heat and the last thing I saw was a great blue light; it was the lightest shade of blue I had ever seen.

"I have been at this job for a long time, Dolphael," (He pronounced my name slightly differerent than I did) "...and in none of my destructive exploits have I ever seen the awesome power of mankind's own vision of destruction equaled. I reigned down vulcanized sulfer from the skies on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and the power of that destruction made me weak but these days, all it takes is the slight convincing, in human form no less, to fit a bomb into a briefcase and set it off. What is the high angel of death to do with himself when his job gets to be this easy?"

As he wandered the frozen scene, he poked and prodded at the stagnant chaos in this vignette from a nightmare. He loomed over those who cowered in fear of the explosion and I found the irony that they were all this close to the true angel of death and the Grim reaper, but still afraid more of the bomb, almost humorous. I say almost, of course because mass death such as this, despite it being god's will and god's personal hand of destruction, is still tragic in both the metaphysical and the physical sense.

Our lord kills indiscriminately but he is the designer and everything he does has a part to play in his master plan. Looking at the way Samael scoped out the destruction, however, made me think that after all this time, making world wide floods, hitting the planet with an asteroid, reigning down burning silver and the list goes on to infinitum, I thought I might have seen a glimmer of joy exuded from the being of Samael.

Even I had to admit that he had become an artist at destruction and the people were almost placed in this vignette of frozen time to make a living work of art. A living work of Goya, mind you, but never-the-less a picturesque vision of the beautifully grotesque avant garde.

In this moment, I remember the times when I was still reaping often and the times I had orchestrated deaths of my own to picturesque horror. I misses those days.

"Well," Samael told me, "My job is done here, time for your reapers to come collect the mess. Good to see you again Dolphael. I miss your early work. Perhaps I'be inspired you with what's happened here. I look forward to the individual encore. Until we meet again, Dolphael."

With that he faded away; like a sand sculpture drying out and falling apart grain by grain. I hated to say it but the truth was, he had inspired me and I couldn't wait for an order from god to end a person before his time. I wasn't going to pass this one onto one of my lesser reapers this time.

Story Stopper

Part VI: Death is timeless

Watching a fire burn one can experience a moment in which all reality is represented. It eats the fuel that it has and in this way it is as ephemeral as time its self. For a reaper, time is not linear. Yesterday could be a Scottish Moor as it was for Deviel and today is the fourth of January 2086 for me. The period of time in between is immaterial because the days are not counted as one proceeds to the next but rather any proceeds to any. It becomes aparant to me in times like this why God created the universe: because existing outside time and space is exhausting.

This can make living a human life stabilizing to me. As it was the first time I made love to Deviel: the wind in between worlds kissed our ambivelant naked forms as we melded souls in the eternal abyss. As much as we experienced this emotion, our aomebic forms stretched across space and time to every creature feeling exactly as we did in that every moment.

You see, the tunnel between worlds stretches across all time and space so that all time and space has access to both heaven and hell. As we were, our forms were like a great white gelatinous spirit blob that would seep through the pours of this swirling gateway to seek out the human emotion known as love and live that knowledge in our embrace. In all recall, I do my best to describe it using words the human mind can understand but there is another language of sensation that is impossible to dictate to any mortal at any time.

This romantic tryst, however, is entirely draining and though Deviel, not being an angel cannot, "take a vacation," I find it useless were I not to take advantage of the ease of human life. One might query, "what about your duties while you're living as a human?" To this I say your lives are as brief as a fly flapping its wings once. In the grand scheme of my duties, 8 human lives are but a flash in the pan.

I have many reapers but time means nothing to eternity in the timeless tornado between the worlds. I can live a human life and then go back to the moment when it began as if nothing happened at all. The paradoxes perplex, I'm sure, but there is no need to concern yourself. There is a body that mimics my actions that holds a place in time but my consciousness does not have to be there.

I have loved in human form and it seems like forever but to know forever is painful when I think about it in human form and peaceful as the grim.

Humans focus on things so ephemeral because they exist in a world that ends. Hubris and pride leading to murder was especially poignant in Deviel's most recent case because the human flaw is timeless but the moment meant nothing.  I am curious at times, however, what can be considered timeless to a reaper or a Grim?