text: Another Death (first reddit post!) *A soft wind ruffles my hair into my eyes as the chatter of people, the constant rumble of car engines, the ringing of bicycle bells and a million other sounds around me were all silenced to a minimum.* *I look up from my phone just in time to see the lights to go green, before everything seems to stop and go at the same time. People in black and white and grey around me buzz with sound and begin to walk along with me, while the cars to the side screech to a stop.* *In the middle of the road, I distinctly see a bright red object hurtling towards me from the corner of my right eye, right before it hits me.* *The next moment, I am knocked to the ground, as the sky turns to a bright blood red, black and white sparks flying everywhere, my ears buzzing. I feel my foot being crushed by the wheels, then my leg, then my chest.* *And then everything goes dark.* Sometimes being stuck with the one memory where you die sucks. Especially when it’s a painful one, like getting run over by a car. As I reattach my scythe to my back, I take out my buzzing tablet, and receive my next target, AKA the next upcoming death. *Name: Danielle Hills (Female)* *Location: 37.7749oN, -122.4194oE* *Death signature: 37%* *Estimated time till death: 12 minutes and 43 seconds* Being a Grim Reaper isn't really hard. Sure, you lose all memories of your past life except for the last few moments before you die, which is not the best thing to cling to when you’re having a bad day. You also have to wear the big black cloak for all eternity, which *really* depresses some of the other Grim Reapers, which is probably why there are very little mirrors in the dead’s world. But, you do get to help bring the normal souls to their next life, or eternal pain/happiness to the really bad/good ones, which always brings a nice sense of accomplishment. The job is quite simple. Receive details on the next death. Find and follow. Wait until person dies. Reap and collect soul from dead body. Sometimes I regret my initial decision to accept the role of a Grim Reaper. I mean, over the few years since I started, I had the deaths of some people--good people that made it *really* hard for me to swing my scythe down on them. It didn’t help that every time I reap a soul (which is just severing the bond between the soul and the body with my scythe), I also get to go down memory lane and relive the part where I got run over by a car. It doesn't take me long to find her. She looks quite normal, with a simple black dress and a rather large smile on her face. I watch her walk out of a large building, waving cheerfully at a few other people before leaving. I follow her for a few streets as she walks at a leisurely pace, until she stops, checks something on her phone, and begins to run, her smile replaced by panic. I speed up as well, until a few minutes later she rushes into a hotel building, where through the large glass panes I can see her urgently gesturing something at the front desk. I pass through the walls, lean over her shoulder, and in her shaking hands I can distinctly see the figures *Room 1013.* I fly up, going straight through the ceilings. Elevators tend to not work for ghosts--we just pass straight through the bottom when it starts to go up. Same goes for cars, buses, planes--anything that moves. Makes it a real pain when someone dies on a plane. It only takes me a few seconds to reach the room, where I see a couple, both sweaty and naked on a bed. “Ah.” Poor Danielle. I can already see how this ends. I take out a tablet, and recheck the details of the death. *Name: Danielle Hills (Female)* *Location: 37.7748oN, -122.4193oE* *Death signature: 88%* *Estimated time till death: 1 minutes and 12 seconds* I put my tablet back into the depths of my cloak, sit/float on the couch, and wait. Soon enough, after a minute or so, the door seems to shake slightly, right before it bursts right open and she strides in, freezing the moment she sees the scene. The other two also freeze, before they react and frantically covers themselves. The man rises, with a bed sheet tied around him, and reaches out for Danielle, but she stumbles backwards, the tears already falling like rain. I float over them, as I absentmindedly listen to them arguing, which includes quite a bit of slapping and screaming, until Danielle roughly shoves the man and tries to walk out of the door. At the same time, the tablet buzzes which means *Death Signature 99%. Prepare to reap soul.* The man grabs an innocent-looking geode from the side of the room, the other woman pounces on Danielle, and I take out my scythe. It would look rather unthreatening, a 5 foot long wooden shaft with a long curved silver blade, if you didn't know that it is used to reap souls from fresh dead bodies. I float right next to Danielle, who the next second was hit by the sharp point of the rock *hard* on the head, resulting in the familiar sound of *crack*. At that exact moment I swing my scythe down, right through her body, into the bond that connects the soul and the body. You can’t really see the bond, and it’s not exactly a stand of string, and I still can’t explain how it works or why they call it a bond. It had weakened when she died, but not completely, so cutting through it feels a bit like cutting through butter with a dull knife, but it was enough. A few moments later a ghostly figure of Danielle bounces out of the body, transforms into a strand of silver light, and then was sucked into the tablet, while at the same time I plunge into my all too familiar memory of death by car, also within a few seconds. Returning back to reality, I look down at the horrified pair. “She...we...we just knocked her out, right?” The woman whispered, her face pale. A shame that they won’t die for quite a while. Amid the deathly silence I fly out of the hotel, and in the blue-grey air I silently listen to the millions of sounds around me for a few precious seconds. Then my tablet buzzes, as the details of the next death appears.