The Mind state of a Mobster

Everyone starts off with a gun. It's painfully easy to point and click to make a long struggle into a short drop. It's even easier to kill someone with a phone call; hence the reason I have a job. To be a "hitter," you could have several different motives; most people do it for power.

It is in this way that these people kill to gain rank and find their last weapon in hitter training to be a telephone. The phone is a weapon that's only suited for those who know death and have carried out the sentence but who also no longer have a reason to kill. It's OK for people who are in it for the power but for those of us who enjoy the job, our last weapon is the knife.

Nothing, and I mean nothing, is more satisfying to the professional hitter as the struggle followed by the look of fear and surprise in the mark's eyes as the knife slowly drains the life from the mark's body and into the hands of the knife weilder.

To kill with a knife is the ultimate in professional killing because it brings you as close and personal as you can get with death. It moves you into a warm embrace with a real life escaping soul. It's enough to make you want to kill an innocent but that's against the rules.

Evil doers are acceptable targets though because in that final moment where your hand is over their mouth and nose, the weight of your body pressing their warm spiritual essence upwards, they see the extacy that is their final moments and you get the sensation in your mind that this may be the most transcendant, good and truly purest moment of their lives. It's not always  rapture though.

Anthony Maurice Genovece better known as Tony Mo, once "allegedly," chopped Berto Benece's head off with a pizza spatula for sleeping with Frederico Genovece's sister. He later told Rico Genovece, "upon entering the establishment, I knew he was going to run and as I could not access my gun or knife, the closest thing was a 3 foot pizza spatula so I did him with that instead." Poor Tony could have turned him into the headless horseman were it not for that pesky spinal column which turned Berto into a pez dispenser instead.

Tony told Rico about the ordeal not half an hour after the event over baked lasagna and Pasta Fajole. It is my impression that Rico got his emotional mortal retribution over the hanging spirit of Berto in the clothes and skin of Tony Mo as he sat at the table that night.

This may need some explaining: you see, when a hitter kills a mark, some believe that as the soul leaves the body, it hangs in the air like a bad stench on the hitter himself.  Some might be worried about such things haunting them but there's very little one can do to punish the rich and damned.

Oh! There's an evil spirit haunting me? Either kill me or shut the fuck up and let me sleep.

Story Stopper

Part IV: Lost but not forgotten

It's always in times when I am most surrounded by people that I get lost in the fray between the two worlds. To people around me, I look as if I'm simply lost in deep thought but my Soul actually becomes disembodied from its host and floats in the great vacuum between the here and the beyond. I feel my great wings stretch the crevace and glide while others can only fall.

Deviel exists here since she chooses not to take corporeal form and often times I have met her here in between the death of wives and children. I meet her here after my body's death and my waiting for a new form to inhabit.

Once she asked me why I didn't just stay there.

"You are immortal, my Grim," she said, "what's the point of experimenting with humanity? It's almost cruel and masochistic to put yourself through that and then tell others that there's a point to letting go."

"You of all creatures under god should understand my choice, oh Promethius of the people: one cannot understand the value of life and what they have to surrender without first becoming a part of what they are."

"You are wise to think so, my eternal," she said, "but you forget that a reapers job is not to die but to live forever in the pursuit of ferrying people to the beyond. How does it make any difference in your thought pattern if you know that you will never go through the specific process in which your essential function is involved?"

In this moment, I happened to be out at a late night blues bar and I ended our conversation with a snap back to reality. She had a point and it drove me crazy to think about it. Was there really no point to corporeal life as a reaper? Was my existence simply to preform my function and not to diversify?

Human life was so filled with meaning and future but time was boring when it was no longer linear. Existence meant days with no sunset. Deviel made her peace with her non-linnear time because she devoted herself to function. Were it not for her messianic qualities, it was a miracle god did not make her the grim.

I believe that it was in the year 1 AD, however, that I understood how this cycle of death and living amongst human beings was critical to my being the grim. I never realized in 10,000 years that god put so much emphasis on the meaning of being human until the Christ child came along. In the days before him, heaven and earth were separate entities. God was loving but he was to be feared first and foremost. What was interesting to me, also, and what I had not realized in my inception was that none of my protégé were able to recorporealize as I could until 1 AD.

As they were, those reapers I had assigned the task were lost and forgotten to the world but my accomplishments in all my incarnations as a human were always there and remembered. A higher angel once told me how blessed I was for being given that gift. Of course, there were exceptions: I could not talk about the beyond to human beings, but I was able to accomplish so much from all the life I lead in multiple forms.

In this way, Deviel was wrong. I may have been lost as a reaper, never to put meaning towards any one of my many human lives but each one of my existences meant something for a future of humanity that I helped to contribute towards. In this way, I became a better Grim and told her of my learning as we both grew together.

Story Stopper

Part III: Pure Soul

In the time of non-acceptance of death, there's a window to recruit a reaper before they turn into a spirit orb that must be ferried to Heaven or hell; in times like this there's the possibility to talk to the individual before acceptance takes effect and they become that orb of light that goes to heaven or hell however the order may come down.

I use these periods as recruitment tools. A lot of souls need reaping and ferrying so it's in these moments that I have to put on my HR hat and hire new reapers.  I may be the grim but there's a lot of work to do and I have to keep the gears in the machine oiled.  That's mid level management for you in a nutshell.  My job is more enjoyable though because being a reaper, one gets to be human and angel simultaneously until the job calls and I must go back and forth.

I remember in 5,000 BCE meeting a human soul with the tenacity to be what I was who also had the love and strength to become more Devin or Deviel was to become a reaper with powers beyond my own. Some might have considered her powers unholy because they did not stem from god but rather from the power of his creation and from a supreme connection with nature. Had I reaped her, she would have gone to the deepest depths of hell along with witches, however, the beauty of her spirit was loved by god and by me and for it, she became the second reaper and the first reaper to fight for the human spirit.

One might say she was the basis for the story of promethius but she fought for a second chance to reach gods light instead of the physical and superficial gift of fire.

Contrary to popular belief, Angels are all male or at least as masculine an entity as feeble human minds can percirve. I only ascended to an angelic class because I was the first of my kind and the Grim. Souls are sexless. They give up that distinction when they become those orbs of spiritual light.

I get to hier my own team, however, and they are neither angel or demon but rather (to put it simply) ambassadors to heaven or hell on the earthly plane. These days, I only work on high profile cases.

The reason I make this distinction is because Deviel and I shared sex and love outside of my angelic duties and her duties as a reaper for milenia. In that time, I sired many children with different wives over the milenia and I know it hurt her to see me loving someone else but I came back to her when all was said and done and the wives and kids, simply died.

Love is part emotion, part practicality and part adoration and although I would tell my wives I loved them in the moment that was 100 years, over milenia, there was only Deviel. That sultry seductress who could show gods light through the light of his creation at her fingertips.

As the light fades and I wait weeks, to months, to years for a client, my reapers work busily and she shines in the eyes of both god and the devil as they fight for her retirement.

Story Stopper

Part II: For love of death

Death, like most things, is poetry.  It's romance.  There's a spell at the beginning where there's distrust, denial and smitten flirting with the idea but there is always the inevitable surrender.  Within these moments, there's such a beautiful swoon.  A loving embrace between a reaper and the client who will not admit his or her own death. Like a child, they can be held with assurance of sweet release as they regail you with all the things in their life that they'll miss or all the things in their life that they'd never get to do were they to admit death or in the actual words they mean to say, "defeat."

The client is the most fragile because what's up ahead for them is unknown to even me but what's behind is what they cling to because it represents a clear world that they can understand. I both pity them, envy them and at times hate them because of how they may feel conflicted at the beginning, but those who go to heaven will know such warmth for eternity.

As an angel and one of His first creations, I get to reap the benefits of knowing gods love but always being at an arms length because of the hierchy of heaven. Just like some sort of nightmare creature, however, I chose this route and would be remiss were I to deny that this power weren't spectacular on its own. The only problem is finding things to do with eternity.

The reaping of a soul is like sex because for a short period of time, a reaper must take the soul within him to carry it to heaven because souls have no wings as we do. Those that are dropped become lost souls and can be very nasty to reclaim so it's easier to simply carry a soul within our own and bring it to wherever it has to go.

Going to heaven is easier than going to hell. A good soul has a warmth to it and is at rest with god even before they go to dwell in his garden but an evil soul going to hell will try very hard to claw its way through you and get out. Honestly, it's worse than bad indigestion.

Being that j am the Grim, j get only large and important clients. This makes it worse on my when I try to ferry them. As I said, those going to heaven are only hard because their warmth is enough to make you weep but those going to hell must be trapped or tricked or worse: dragged.

Do not let the new testament of Jesus Christ fool you, God is still by all standards wrathful, only on a different plane of existence. I have seen good men dragged to hell for not accepting his word and evil men in heaven who played for the right team in heaven. Either way, their humanity is gone once they become a spirit and they dwell in the rapture of a beautiful dream.

Story Stopper

Part I: Dead End Job

It starts back some time ago, in the BCE. One is born, one commits to the idea of miracles, hinting at a higher power, and before we know it, we have a sharp object in our sides and we're being given a choice by, what can only be described as an angel: "you are one of the earliest members of an elite group: true believers. It is due to your faith and love that we offer you a job in the afterlife. A chance to live again and even choose others to aid you in your task: to reap souls and ferry them to the life here after."

So here was the chance to be alive again and walk amongst human beings forever with no pain and no consequences of mortality. With it, however, I may carry the burdens of death and the emotions I have in forever. I said yes.

Reaping like most nine to fives is only a job and one that becomes less and less burdensome with time and help. My department started off as only me. I was given the job by an angel who served as death until he thought up the idea of reapers. I became what they referred to as an angel as one of the perks of the job but just because I had a pair of wings, didn't mean I was at the same power and level as the three headed, thousands of beating wings seraph who gave me the job; I was simply an angel. That is: not Seraphym, Cherubym or Ophanym, not even Arch Angel, just head of a department, plain old Dolphiel or Dolph as I would be known across the milenia.

The last name would change of course: Dolph Gastón, Dolph Siskel, Dolph Waters, Dolph DePaolo, etc. but it was always Dolph. The angels up the food chain have the power to alter reality so it really wasn't much of a thing that every hundred years or so, human beings would perceive that I had died. Death was easy, of course; the putrid stench, the release of a body to inhabit another. My reapers saw me for what I really looked like but to human beings, my visage would change every hundred years or so.

Death was the only downside to living forever but unless I wanted to be incorporeal, it was necessary. I could exist either way but to interact physically with the living, I needed a body. I really didn't need one after the first 5000 years or so, (due to a rapidly expanding department) but I really enjoy the basest of instincts like sex, sports and occasionally drugs and drinking. I could absorb knowledge about humans effortlessly as a perk of my promotion to angel but the physical destructiveness of man was reserved for those in his corporeal prison.

Watching humanity evolve, build itself up and fall down trillions of times was truly awe inspiring at first but eternity is a long time and over this time, we must find ways to occupy our time, but that's what this story is all about. Why else would you want to hear the tale of one who ends the story over and over?

When the drug war almost ended...

Peter pope sat on a park bench smoking a Marlboro Red and mutely awaiting his mark. The birds chirped in the twilight hour and the last leaf fell from a sycamore. From across the pond, he saw the sprawling city of Washington D.C. gripping onto the farce of democracy and gripping the silenced Beretta in his coat, he pulled back the shirt cover as a silhouette approached him through the afternoon fog.

Sitting down next to him, the mark spoke, "nice day for a lager, huh?"

"Es demasiado tranquilo para una fiesta,"he replied.

The mark pulled out a thick file from an attaché case and said, "I'm tired of politics, maybe this will help our countries finally make peace in this senseless war."

Peter turned and said, "a friend greets his friends by the light of mid day."

With this, he pulled out the gun fired two slugs directly into the Security Chief's heart. The silencer made a whisper of the chaos as it put the benefactor into his immortal slumber and the man slumped over onto Pope's shoulder.

Peter took the cigarette from his mouth and put it between the lifeless body's lips as he laid him down on the bench, lifted his legs into a fetal position and put the man's hat over his eyes.

As he made his disappearing act, the cigarette went out and the birds chirped in the muted din of an afternoon fog.

Don't it always seem to go...

The evanescing beauty of dusk is never quite as enamoring as when you know it will be your last. As I sat on a tree stump at the edge of a newly culled field; in the void of the Pennsylvania back woods, I thought of the sterility I had accepted and called to my being.

For weeks, my apathy had been growing and, as some young men do, I had begun to think that nothing in life was worth having. Death seemed to be the plausible response but I had the tenacity to fight the dying of the light because that was what was expected of me in my frame of mind.

I had ploded through the woods countless nights with the apathetic scorn of existence and, as my feet were pricked by the roughness of nature and my eyes met the scampering of mindless little cogs of nature's device, I swooned in thoughts of being bested by some nefarious hooligan bent on the destruction of all in his path or the preservation of his own existence. I felt the warmth in my spine and all around me. I saw visions of my monster swinging a knife at me as I laughed and lunged at him, doing as much damage as I could while narrowly avoiding death. I wanted death to be thrust upon me and I wanted danger in it. I wanted death to meet me face to face like an old nemesis come to tell me we could finally be friends.

In the endless darkness of the clearing beyond a fallen oak and severeal large shrubbery; not to mention half a dozen hydrangia and bushes with various names that began with, "poison," I invoked the angel of death as I shreiked, "come and find me you wretched bitch!"

The forest was silent but it had an answer and just as I sat down on a tree stump, she appeared before me from the limbs above.

"I am by no means death, son, but I believe I can help you."

In my head, my mind went over my recent exploits with accelerated furvor: women who could not excite my phalice, drugs that seemed to induce more boredom than they created beauty, silence immeasurable in tasks innumerable! In that moment my mind felt the anxiety and seemed to throb as if a din shook all thoughts to death.

"I hear your pain, Joshua, and I am here to answer your prayer."

I was speechless and seemed to be unable to speak even if I wanted to as if some preternatural power had grabbed my larynx and refused to let it vibrate.

"I am Anthiel and some might call me a sprite, others call me the accursed but my favorite title is merciful death."

Her features were soft and her skin as pail as a new bride's gown. Her eyes, however; those demonic eyes were the only life in this creature that stood naked before me. Those eyes glowed green as the trees and occasionally flashed red as satin. The strangest quality about her was one that could only be felt in the pit of ones stomach, not really a stomach pain as fear is; that mortification was plastered in the near frozen beads of sweat on my neck, but my stomach felt butterflies. The anticipation one feels right before they jump from a clif into the waves below or the quarry that welcomed them with the rush of existence. She was fecund with the thrill of life while being somehow infrangibly tied to the finality of death.

"You are at a crossroads, child and you have found the den of a god. I can give you the death you seek. I could even let you remain a child until the real death takes you from this earth enfeabled and broken and old.  The third option is you can grow. You can become as strong as I am or even more so, if you can successfully battle the horror of time. The choice is yours..."

As I felt the grip on my speech weaken, I interrupted her, saying, "Yes! Yes. I want your immortality! I want your merciful death! Give me your hatred, VAMPYR!"

"I see you've heard of me and think you know what I am but you have no clue what you will endure in the existence of endless nights and endless dungeons of immortality.  You may even be hunted, you will be tried and tested, you will not feel the exhiliration of a heartbeat anymore and you will not experience excitement the same way. Do you know what you ask?"

"Yes, I..."

"Silence! sub-primal creature. You will have a day after the bite until the poison spreads and you will be the form you are now, permenantly. After that, you will hide from the light of day for that which cleanses will kill you: fire, sunlight and god will be your enemy until you meet them with open arms and open heart. I will tell you what he told me before he cut the wings from my back and cursed me to feed off the blood of mortals forever, he said, 'Anthiel! You deny my divine plan?'
'Father! I beg you not to give free will to likes of man while your angels suffer slavery to him!'
'Your will is my will!'
'My will is to serve a merciful god and man deserves the mercy of servitude over severance.'
'Then you shall see what it means to be man! And you shall be forced to make decisions over life and death and will as I do.'
From there, a heavenly host destroyed my wings and cast me down to earth with a hunger, I had not before felt. When first I drank of man's blood, my species propagated and has grown or killed from 8,000 BCE on."

"I understand the burden."

With my comment she became enraged. She floated into the air and her hair blew back as she shook the earth and moved the wind with divine fury.

"Oh do you now? Is your tie to god gone? Does he not hear your mortal prayer? Be as I am and suffer! Suffer the pain of immortality without light!"

With that she bit down into my neck like a poisonous serpent, coiling her evil around me like some dark shroud. The pain was so immeasurable I passed out and when I awoke, I sat on the same tree stump, at the edge of a culled field in Pennsylvania. The evanescing beauty of dusk is never quite as enamoring as when you know it will be your last.