Grim Reaper Short Stories Series

The Tenant - Grim Reaper Short Stories

The Reaper did not speak. He did not even move, for what need did he have to chase anyone? Everyone comes to him eventually. Men, women and gods all are consumed in his ever waiting black. Clive, sighing deeply, turned to look Death in the face. In the form he took for Clive, Death stood around seven feet tall. The hood of his monk’s cowl falling to just above the bridge of the nose, had there been a nose to speak of. Instead, there was simply a hole, a cavernous nothing, like death itself, that hung like a cave above the fixed death's head smile. The unmoving, unflappable grin of the skull, never to be bargained with, never to be moved. In one hand, from which straggled tendrils of long rotted flesh hung like threads, the figure held a huge scythe. The blade for which, was so keen that the air moving around it seemed to divide and slice as it touched. A blade kept sharp for the reaping of souls. The severing of the cord from the mortal plain. As he stared into the inevitable, the gaping abyss represented by the figure standing before him. Clive thought back to the images he had seen of ‘Death’ to the medieval woodcuts, their finer details blurred with the bleeding of the ink. Or the finely etched engravings of Albrecht Duhrer and Goya, with Death, the hooded skeleton or rotting ancient cadaver. He wondered if all of those hours poring over medieval manuscripts had formed this image for him. Whether to others, Death appeared in a different shape or in no shape at all. The thought flashed by like a furtive glimpse one sometimes catches of a rat, so fast and elusive that you are left to doubt if it was the thing itself, or merely its shadow that you saw streak by. Now though, there was no time for contemplation. Now was the time for terror.

It was a Monday. Monday was the day grandma got her medicine. She took some pill that some white-coated doctor told us would keep her alive, if only for a little while. I walked to the pharmacy a couple of blocks away through the rain. Careful to avoid the divots and dips in the beat-up sidewalk where puddles were beginning to form. There’s an old store that sells rugs and carpets between Grandma’s and the pharmacy. I wove through a small crowd of disappointed people exiting the store, beneath the broken neon red sign that read Jackson pet instead of Jackson Carpet, leading would-be pet owners astray. The red luminescent glow of the misnomer blurred on its edges through the drizzle and fog. One customer had brought her dog along with her. A young, well dressed and well-accessorized woman was knocking in quick bursts on the wood-framed glass door of the shop. Seemingly not understanding the miscommunication the sign had presented, even after seeing a stockpile of rolled-up rugs waiting in the store beyond. Her white-knuckle fist gripped a long, fuzzy velvet leash that strangled a fat, wrinkly old Rottweiler. The ancient beast struggling to keep up, letting itself be dragged behind along the wet pavement like a sack of old potatoes.