Flash Fiction: Death Comes Knocking
Added 2021-03-15 20:01:18 +0000 UTCI always assumed Death wore hooded robes, rode a dark horse, and had a face made of shadows. The whole nine yards.
He doesn't. Death looks kinda like Jim from Accounting, except with more hair. Yet somehow, I know instantly who--or rather, what--he is.
It's the feeling you get when you go to the zoo and see a tiger yawn. That instinctive respect for their teeth, and the recognition that, yeah, this thing can eat me.
Death adjusts his glasses. "Are you going to keep me standing on the porch like a Mormon missionary, or are you going to invite me inside?"
I open my front door wider to let him into the kitchen. "Are the Mormons right?" I can't think of what else to ask. "Am I going to get my own planet or some shit?"
"Not what I'm here about," says Death. "Ezra Silus Hurst, it's time for you to die."
"I figured," I say.
Death sits down at my kitchen table and checks one of the boxes on his notepad with a #2 pencil. The whole page is just endless rows of boxes, no words. The pencil isn't even black.
"The problem, Ezra Silus Hurst, is that subsection 96b was left blank." He glares at me over the rim of his spectacles as if I were the one who screwed up. "I blame The Fates."
"The fates?"
"Capital F," Death corrects, "but yes. That's why I'm here."
"Because The Fates."
He nods approvingly. "Glad to see you catch on quick. So, which demise would you prefer?"
