Haunted MTL Original – Hanging By A Thread – Charles Rainey
“Hanging By A Thread” By Charles Rainey
Gaspard Boucher died at midnight—as my death list prophesized with full accuracy, so much so that under the bold print of his name an entire report of his death, step-by-step, was recorded.
Before his death, he went to a satin-infected Italian restaurant to meet his date from an online dating site. He sat down next to her, despite her looking a hundred pounds heavier from her single profile picture. After some time passed since their placed orders, two piping hot soups were delivered to their tables. Gaspard waited for the temperature to lower, but his date scooped a spoonful with haste. She blurted a carefree usage of damning Jesus Christ’s name, spitting drops of bisque over the table’s cream-toned linen and on his rosy cheeks. He told her he
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forgot his handkerchief in the car, then walked out of the restaurant in a brisk pace. He blocked her from his cellphone before he twisted the key in the ignition.
After shutting his apartment front door, he walked through the studio-sized living room—the walls and the extended cotton curtains matched the color of my skeletal pallor, and the room itself was rather barren aside from the wrought iron bed, a Cherrywood bookshelf here and there, one filled with self-help and bible-study books and the other holding vinyl of gospel and soul music. Atop those shelves were framed polaroid photos of a rat’s nest-haired little girl, sometimes depicted with denim overalls, with one strap loosened, or in a pink puffed pseudo-Victorian dress, holding a plastic pumpkin overfilled with a wide array of rainbow candies, and another one displayed her in a velvet gown and cap with Gaspard himself besides her, smiling, his arm around the shoulder of the smirking girl: her name was Taiya Boucher. He flipped every one of her picturesque eyes down into the wood of the shelves.
Gaspard channeled his frustration of the night through a frequent ritual he loved to perform: he opened a closet door and grabbed a tube sock, then a rope that had been hanging amongst ironed button-up collar shirts—sky-blue and dove-white—and tied it with fierce knots, against the sturdy pole that held all the clothes up high, so that it became a noose. There was also a wooden chair in the closet—Gaspard moved the chair so that the rails were faced towards the living room and the seat towards himself, then he stepped onto it and placed the loop over himself like a necklace. He unzipped his black slacks and let it tumble down—likewise he did the same with his boxers. He placed the tube sock over his member, then slipped off the chair to execute his ritual—he stroked and stroked….
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In this particular instance, he prolonged his short time window of ecstasy by one second longer than he usually did, against his cautious nature. He overestimated the extra second and kicked the chair, the one he used as a safety measure, down to the floor during his frenzied state of euphoria. The noose squeezed him like a coiling serpent, then he sliced the air with rapid kicks while his gouging bloodshot eyes burst in slow rivers. Swaying back and forth like the lung of a grandfather clock he shook his body, in desperation, to loosen the braided snake at his throat, but within every second his strength was sapped as if a venom spread within him. As time drifted, his body eventually fell limp—though the tube sock remained erect like a tombstone.
This is your first time witnessing Gaspard’s death, but I had experienced it many times.
However odd this scene of death may seem, there was one stranger yet.
Surely you have had a moment in your life in which you failed to act in a certain manner, and you knew acting upon that choice was the right thing to do, but you instead froze, powerless, as if the scene was scripted and you were a puppet with strings tied around your neck.
Or consider the time you have spent with my words: reading the last paragraph of this tale will not affect the manner in which Gaspard died. That is how reapers perceive your lives—like books already written, while you flip from start to end, page by page.
I can see the look on your face in reaction to my choice of words.
You are like one who is exploring the dense forest in the dead of night with a torch—you only see what the vague light reveals to you, within the moon’s haze, and even then you are unsure of what lurks in the forest floor briers waiting to jump out. I, on the other hand, watch you
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from behind the display glasses of a zoo, perched upon elevated balconies like clouds, with a folded paper map in hand, showing me where you all are, where you are going to go, and when you will shed your flesh—at least, that is the case for the human souls that I was assigned with.
It is not a zoo for the entertainment of others; the only ones allowed within are those of us who were born into it—the harvesters, the reapers, the collectors. When the soul has grown as abundant as it can within the confines of meat shells, it is our duty to harvest the souls and guide them towards the proper exit.
I say “our” because there are more of those like me. We are all given maps to our own mortals—as we stalk one name at a time. I was not on a conversational basis with the others, so I never had a chance to glance at any of their own lists but I did frequently see them as I passed by performing my duties: sometimes one or two here and there, while during scenes of widespread massacres we invaded the area like rodents carrying the Black Death.
I saw them when I passed by the Euphrates River as they traversed through crowds, through the flesh of walking humans, without a mark left on the reapers’ intangible forms: as I traveled by clay courtyards, like fragile sandcastles, and reed huts, like straw temples, that were dwarfed by the mud-bricked ziggurat within the heart of the city; the humans of that time thought themselves unworthy to live on the same elevation of gods or within vicinity of the holy clay palace’s first steps, so they separated their abodes away from the staircase to the heavens by erecting massive sunbaked walls (eventually the tides of time flooded those river people, then other intruding humans rebuilt the tumbled structures and reclaimed them as their own). I was collecting the souls of robbers and murderers who had rotted within the confines of gibbets,
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those copper cages that strapped against their flesh, causing the victims to starve in thin cloths of their own dried blood, hoisted up like a banner to deter all other would-be criminals. The other reapers, tucked in their oversized black cloaks and silver-fanged scythes in hand, without uttering any words, collected the souls of those who died in the same manner but for other reasons—incest, adultery, smuggling, and so on.
When we were not circling the imprisoned carrion, we attended funerals: they were, like all funerals, strange: more so in those antique days when the dead were deposited into their holes alongside a feast of barley cakes, freshly-grown dates, apples, and mulberries, fire-roasted wild fish and fowl, and the treasures the individual left behind, such as silver, gold, or the shimmering navy of lapis-lazuli—the amount depended on how well the deceased was loved amongst family and friends. Once the soul was broken out of the meat shell, the hatched souls discovered that, no matter the excess or lack of wealth, or affection, from their physical life, death made all humans equal.
Reapers trailed behind targets days before their expiration. What a sight it was to follow those early founders who irrigated the wetlands, rowing their canoes through the maze of piercing reeds, like sharpened green spears thrusting towards the sky, as we waited for the day we would guide them to their new labyrinths.
In that wrinkled land, I read a story about a king named Gilgamesh—when the pantheon of gods murdered his rival, the man who had transformed into his truest friend, he set out on a journey to find eternal life.
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It is a good story to read because it explains my point, but in a superior way since it is told by your own ancestors: Gilgamesh fails and learns that human life and death are intertwined by the same woven threads—only gods live forever.
It should be said that Gilgamesh consulted, within the underworld, with the one man, alongside his wife, who truly did achieve immortality—he is the man who many of your time call Noah, from that book bearing a golden cross, who saved his innocent family and preserved various wildlife to survive a damning flood: his real name is Utnapishtim.
Why did Gilgamesh abandon his mission? If Utnapishtim succeeded, then the possibility existed. It must have been an error on the author’s part.
As far as I knew there was no Utnapishtim to ever have lived, but I could have been wrong. I was limited by the humans on my list, like other reapers were limited by their own assigned humans. Perhaps if we had combined our efforts, we could have known the entire history of the universe and further unlocked the meaning of it all: why humans exist, and why I was chosen to perform this specific task, amongst the others—I must admit the job provided security.
It has been argued that Gilgamesh lives on through legacy—implying immortality is possible through the longevity of achievements. I failed to see why humans think hundreds of years, thousands of years, mean anything against the infinite expanse of the universe. I thought it better for you humans to imitate the attitude of your early river ancestors: at least they were submissive when their life expired.
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I said that gods live forever—and I had always thought of myself, and the others, as gods due to our power above humans (you see the same trait in many of your dictators). But to be a god, there must not be an end.
I have reaped souls from: Egyptian slaves who died from the sheer exhaustion of carrying boulders on their backs—to craft pointed houses for men who said they spoke to imaginary gods—and Greek naval soldiers, who either drowned or were mutilated, under the waters of Salamis—to fight for democracy, in which people centuries ahead of them eventually became bored with the concept of voting—and from the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who were not allowed the courtesy of leaving behind corpses—the bombs named Fat Man and Little Boy eviscerated their entire flesh and transmogrified them into implanted shadows within the rubbles of Imperial Japan…
…And Gaspard Boucher was the last name on my list of souls.
I saw his name on my list early on, before the death of Jesus Christ, but I assumed that the unwinding scroll, would refresh, just like your internet browsers. Upon Gaspard’s death, his bold printed name remained atop a mountain of blankness.
Why my employment had to end with him, when I had been so loyal in my duties, had no discernable logic: was it punishment? Or simply an accident?
As I stood in front of the struggling Gaspard, while that slivering rope tugged at the muscles of his neck, his retches matching the cadence of a clicking clock, I stared at his blackened name written upon my list, wishing with every passing second that other names would
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materialize underneath it and the parchment would expand out like an eternal cog turning and turning and turning…
I knew everything there was to know about the lives of my humans, but I knew nothing about myself: where I was created, when I was created, or where I would end, when I would end. How could I know such much about others but not about myself—how could I be a god if I lacked knowledge?
When his body surrendered, a portal emerged from the middle of his creased forehead, invisible to human perception but simple for a reaper like myself to witness—an amber mist spilled out from the portal, like a confined sandstorm, or a condensed cloud of dirt, and it cried out in grinding sobs. It tried to take the form of its previous physical shell, but it lacked the mind-and-body symmetry it used to have. Despite his limitations, Gaspard, the ghost of dust, continued to wail, long enough for him to revive the drained wetlands of old Sumer—then he ceased at an abrupt stop and muttered to me, like a breeze through the scuffling leaves of an autumn tree:
“Please. Help me hide my body. I can’t let her see me like this.”
“That is beyond my power. I must take you to your destination now.”
Gaspard remained silent for a bit. I moved closer to him within the pastel white room, curtains pulled against each end to hide the earth away, or himself away, but then he spoke with a sharp edge in his haunting tone, “What if I refuse? What then?”
“Force will be necessary.” The silver blade of my scythe glistened.
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“Isn’t there anything I can do? Anything I can give you so that you can do this one thing for me? Wait—no, for my daughter. For Taiya.”
Gaspard shifted towards the frames that held the photos of Taiya—his mass of encircling dust covered the toppled pictures, increasing the speed of their ferocious movement similar to that of an irritated beehive. The dust particles within his cloud were piercing through the solid matter of the bookshelf and photos, like a child touching their own reflection within still water.
“No matter how hard I try, I can’t turn these back over. I want to see her face—but at the same time, it tears me apart thinking of the face she’ll make when she finds out about how I died.”
“Even if you could bring it all with you, there is no use for it along your new journey,” I said. “You should have exercised more caution. You took too large a risk, and now there are consequences. It comes with your mortality.”
The sphere of dust settled to a near stall, like the orbit of planets, and said, “Can’t you understand? Aren’t you human too?”
I chattered my teeth—it was the closest act I could perform to enact a human laugh. “What gives you that thought?”
“Well, look at you…you’re a skeleton. A human skeleton. I didn’t think the Grim Reaper would be a real thing, but here you are. Still, you must have some connection to us.”
He made a good point: how did my society of reapers permeate within their mythologies? Perhaps Utnapishtim did exist after all—the man who became immortal. Could it be that he
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could travel between the realms of mortals and deities? And shared with those early humans the truth of our existence? Surely he was never promoted to a reaper because what business would a reaper having sharing knowledge amongst mankind?
“Of course there is a connection: my list is what connects me to you all,” I said as I held up the sealed scroll. “It is an error of judgment to assume I was ever like you. I have always been here: since the beginning, until the end of—”
But what was this end? The end of my job…the end of my life? Were they not both intertwined? My life had been nothing but reaping. And yet, I could hardly remember the first few souls I reaped. Should I have not remembered every soul out of the millions? How they begged for their second chances? For them to bid their final farewells and beg for forgiveness, as if their paths were not already plotted?
“The end of what?” Gaspard said.
I stared at the man-cloud, then responded, “Until the end of my list.”
“And when does that stop?”
“You are the last name on this list.” I said this with false assurance, imagining that some divine messenger, with dove wings and golden harp, would descend from the cosmos to deliver a fresh scroll of my new victims.
Gaspard’s vaporous form bounced in excitement. “Then you can stop?! You have all the time in the world now! You don’t have to take me away right now…trust me, I’ll accept my death…but please, after you help me. For my daughter’s sake!”
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I could have aided this Gaspard—I would not dare say his eccentricity for autoerotic asphyxiation made him a lesser being; plenty of other humans engaged in far worse activities—the man never harmed another, rather only harming himself.
And what if I granted his final wish? I could not simply make his carcass vanish without a trace. I could perhaps set it aflame to eliminate any trace of the embarrassing scene he left behind, but the lingering effect was set in stone: a daughter had lost her father.
Out of all the souls, why would I have risked my flawless streak of obedience for him? It was as useless as trying to go back in time and save those sun-scorched slaves kissing the sand, those marine brigadiers sinking to the depths of Poseidon’s domain, or those atom-split sky gazers—from the land where those Eastern dwellers said the sun originated; would it not be an insult to those pitiful souls, victims of an unforgiving universe, if I were to make an exception to this person, when I never offered them a chance as well?
Either I abetted them all, or I reserved all mercy and performed my duties; I had gone too far down my path to go back now—my steps, like humans, return back to the marks they left behind.
I sliced the remnant Gaspard with my scythe so that his gaseous form was pulled into the mirror-like surface of my weapon’s belly—the noise of his flickering movements, like an infectious haze, had dissipated, but I heard the lingering breezes of whimpers.
When I looked into the scythe’s gleaming edge, I thought I saw the faces of familiar humans: ripe and withered, scarred and smooth, umber and beige, colliding within themselves, tearing themselves away, like heads of a hydra disgusted by their own siblings—trapped within
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the same body. It was impossible. Only Gaspard’s soul remained trapped. Why then did the whimpers multiply as a chorus?
I walked backwards through his timeline, retracing every step he had ever taken.
The corpse of Gaspard woke up from a slumber and re-enacted his scene of wildly resisting the neck-biting rope. His safety chair moved on its own to rise up and touch his feet. His undergarments were pulled back up, he removed his twined necklace, put everything back in place, and then left the closet. He retrogressed towards the bookshelves that held the photos of Taiya, faced down into the wood—then placed them to their original standing positions.
I, again, saw the wide-gutted lady seated amongst the cream-clothed tables, surrounded by servants with swept-back hair, carrying trays filled with pristine wine glasses—except they were all walking backwards too; and instead of spitting, the large woman absorbed drops of spit, off of Gaspard’s face, and into her mouth—as if by telepathy. Rather than leaving with disappointment, Gaspard left with nervousness. I shadowed him, walking through the entrance door.
Many negative miles turned into years. Gaspard and I watched as a ceremony of velvet-robed children gave away miniature diplomas to the principal of their school. When it was over Gaspard removed the golden-tailed cap from her head and gave her a kiss, and then she backpedaled into the backseat of her mother’s van. He watched as the car drove off into the busy streets, reversing away as the sun rose from the west.
I skipped past more years, stopping within a sullen marriage ceremony: Gaspard and a cross-armed blonde woman, with prominent crack lines on her forehead, sat at opposite stands of
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a barren courtroom—the only other inhabitants were two men in matching suits but differing ties, a man near the entrance doors, wearing a golden star on his chest and a pistol by his hip, and a balding egg-head man who sat atop the highest stand at the back of the room, commanding the view of every empty bench and patriotic flag, wearing a cloak similar to mine but without the hood; he held a miniature wooden hammer instead of a scythe. I stood next to Gaspard’s stand. No one said anything to me, nor gave the courtesy of their eyesight. Gaspard and the woman were given papers containing their signatures and magic pens—with the tip of those pens, they traced their own signatures to make them vanish off the papers, and just like that they were married. No one applauded. Afterwards everyone left, with their backs turned against the entrance.
More time passed. That blonde woman laid on a hospital bed, with a blue sheet spread across her abdomen—she had lost the lines on her forehead. Gaspard was there with her too, as well as a doctor and nurse. No one minded my presence. The husband and wife cried because their shrunken child, the infant Taiya, had to be pushed back into the womb. The medical staff proceeded, and by doing so Gaspard’s wife groaned as the veins in her neck pulsated. After Taiya had been pushed inside, feet first, becoming a giant lump within the belly, they stuck a needle in the mother to steal an odd liquid away from her body. Minutes later, she was wailing away, piercing the eardrums of the looming Gaspard as I hovered over him. Then the hospital workers rushed her, pushing her wheeled bed to an ambulance while Gaspard followed. They raced the husband and wife back home, despite the clear pain she was still in.
The lump in the belly subsided within nine months. Gaspard and his wife held a bedroom ritual wherein he extracted the unborn Taiya with a needle he contained underneath his boxers.
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I wondered if I would be extracted out of existence, once I finished leading Gaspard’s soul to his final destination.
The same hospital scene seemed to occur again, however this time Gaspard, bawling incessantly, had become the shrunken baby, held by a sterile-white masked man that hid his nose and mouth—his assistant dressed in the same fashion, tending to the dead woman on a bed. How the father was there for the birth of Taiya was not replicated here—Mother Boucher was the lone deceased parent; seconds later, the mother spat out a breath, as if the presence of the baby restored life into her, leading to her exhaling in rapid bursts… then she screamed when the masked man inserted the tiny Gaspard into her. Once the baby became a hill of flesh within her belly, everything froze in place: the spastic mother, the masked workers, even those outside the door window.
A portal, similar to the one that had opened up in Gaspard’s forehead, in his moment of death, emerged from the mother’s stomach. I was the only one spared of the paralyzing pestilence, like an instant-freezing snowstorm, invisible and silent. I struck the portal with my scythe, ensuring the entirety of the blade sunk within that condensed void.
I thought I heard the voice of Gaspard pleading—no, the voice of an entire civilization, comprised of humans from varying time periods. They had no reason to associate themselves with each other, nor shared any similar language to communicate with each other; yet their vocal ensemble twisted itself into a boisterous screech.
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The portal shrunk, like a star imploding, or a thread being knotted by a weaver, until it seemed to disappear into thin air, leaving the blade of my weapon alone, shining bright like lapis-lazuli, with not a speck of dirt around its luster. The cold and clean steel frightened me.
After I deposited Gaspard to his final exit, another reaper summoned itself, behind me, through a larger portal than the one before. Staring at the twin reaper was the same as staring into a mirror. We stood there in that frozen hospital room—the glaring whiteness of the room and the clean edges of our scythes made the marrow of my bones itch.
The first reaper I had ever interacted with, and the last, said to me, “The Boss speaks to you.”
I nodded my skull. To my twin, the Boss and I were already communicating. He knew I would already come with him, despite the turmoil of my thoughts—I thought of striking him with my scythe and fleeing somewhere in time, or asking him if I could see my written name on his death list. He shared the same massive dark cloak, the pulled-over hood shrouding the gaunt features of his dead visage, the massive harvesting tool, but a differing list of names. What would be the point of seeing my name…of seeing the entirety of my life, even the early parts that I could not remember at all? Would any of it save me?
He attacked the hospital door with his scythe, but the door did not react at all; no knock was resounded nor a splinter sent flying. Rather, a slit within was made into space-time itself: the reapers used its bony hands to peel back the layers of violated atoms, to a human it would look like he was rupturing the air, or dissecting a phantom; he was creating a violent opening, which resembled pieces of thread being ripped apart, and the reaper tore apart more of the entwined
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strings, then made a movement with his head while looking into my eye sockets. He wanted me to go through—I did.
I came into another eerie room contaminated by the color of eggshells. The twin reaper behind me released his grip on the space-time opening so that it closed back up—the threads of the hole sewed itself back up, like vipers joining bodies.
The roof was a cloud-colored curved dome so high that it was impossible to distinguish, even with my own heightened perception, where the apex was. Even more sinister were the crystalline mirrors, towering over any skyscraper or ziggurat, which displayed the entire view of the ever-expanding universe—it looked like an amoeba, filled with galaxies speckled with bursting stars and black holes, that stretched itself outwards without any particular pattern or rational movement, but did so at such an accelerated rate as if it were racing to spread its plague in the limbo beyond it. The strangest aspect of the room was that it also followed the expansion of the monstrous amoeba, so the windows themselves were spreading out, enlarging the already colossal room. There was a man sitting at a large stainless-steel table, wide enough to hold a banquet for a Last Supper, in the center of the room. I approached him and found that he was no man at all, or rather half a man: half of his face, down the middle, was skeletal, just like mine; the other human side of his face was that of an old man with a massively wild beard—the hermit-like beard matched the pure white of his pupil-less eye. His robe was the opposite color of mine, but he had the hood pulled over to obscure the rest of his features.
“Come on over here and have a seat with me!” He held out a skeletal hand and pulled his fingers towards himself, as if to pull me in.
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I walked to the table and laid my scythe down upon it, then sat down.
“Why are you here?” He asked.
I did not know what to say at first, since it was the most idiotic question I ever had, even counting the ones many of the humans had for me. “What do you mean? I was the one brought here. Who are you?”
“I’m the Interpreter!”
“Who is it that you interpret for?”
The old man, in a sudden flash, slammed his fists on the table and roared, “For who else?! The Boss, ya idiot!” He pointed his finger towards a window, then turned his body around in a three-sixty degree motion. I assumed my tone had been professional and polite but this Interpreter thought otherwise, based on the visible anger that spawned from nowhere.
“Okay—well, I was brought here by another reaper. May I help expedite this process and mention that I too am a reaper? My death list has depleted of names. Perhaps I am here to recover a new list?”
The old man changed his boisterous volume to a shy murmur, “Ah. That makes sense to me.”
We paused for several seconds as he half-smiled in my direction. His tempestuous mood concerned me. Then I interrupted the silence, “So then may I retrieve my new list and return back to duty?”
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“Of course!” He opened a drawer from his side of the table, then pulled out a scroll and handed it to me with promptness.
I nodded my head and grabbed it. “Does this one have an endpoint like my other one? Will I have to return again to attain another?”
“I don’t think so. Maybe.”
“Have any other reapers had to experience this situation?”
“I’m not quite sure.”
“I see—well, I suppose I will continue on with my mission. Thank you for the reinstatement.”
“Okay, bye!”
His lack of clear answers irritated me, but I guessed that my feelings of terror over my own demise were all for naught. Had I not succeeded in maintaining my career? All I had desired was to continue performing my duty to the best of my abilities. I stood up and grabbed my scythe…yet—
“Will you ask the Boss something for me?”
“Absolutely!” He said in cheerful outburst, remaining in his seat.
“How has my performance been?”
“Just fine I think!”
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That was the analysis of my entire career: a guess. “And what is the purpose of the reapers’ mission?”
“That is a darn good question!”
Another silence took hold of the conversation.
“Sir. Can you ask the Boss that question for me, please?” I said.
The once white surface of the dome above us flickered, like a child fiddling with a light switch, so that the whiteness merged with the outside amoeba’s body. I saw that the universe, the formless monster, was crushing entire galaxies, ending countless lives of those that could have existed, like an adolescent human popping the pimples on its face with his dirty fingers, scarring his own skin in the process.
The old man rose up. The human side of his face turned red as he belted out the noise of a beast I had never encountered—whatever it was, it sounded like the shriek of one dying. Then he yelled out, “What the fuck does it matter! Enough of your goddamn questions! Just go!” As he said this, I saw something that resembled a mouth form within the universe, originally I thought it was another galaxy, but no—it was mimicking the movement of the old man’s mouth.
“Sir, my respects to you. I meant no offense. I appreciate everything you have done but I have to know why: I have devoted my entire being to this job…I have to know where it is all leading to.”
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The old man laughed at my face; the amoeba’s mouth mirrored him. “What’s it all leading to?! It’s leading! Leading and leading and leading! I’m just going to go, and keep going—going fucking forever!”
I was horrified. I wanted to hate this creature who held power over me…but how could I? Had not Gaspard looked at me the same? The humans all looked at me the same. I answered none of their questions and refused all of their dying wishes. What for? So that I could serve this monster who wanted to keep going?
“What about the rest of us then? Humans and reapers…are we only here to follow after you? Were we ever meant to match your pace?”
The old man hastily clawed at his own face—at both the skull and the flesh; the amoeba through the windows was devouring itself with the multitude of mouths it had at each end of its pseudopods. The amoeba regurgitated itself out into the whiteness beyond its body, further and further stretching. From its vomit, suns were formed. The old man stopped attacking himself and smiled. He was bleeding from the slits on his flesh, and he had left scratch marks upon the ivory surface of his skull.
“That is a darn good question!” He repeated, as droplets of blood dripped off of his chin and crashed against the lustrous table.
I clenched my hands into fists, “Are you willing to give me any answers? Have I not proven myself worthy of at least this?”
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He groaned, “You all always want things. What for? I can’t even give myself answers. And does it matter? I’ve become what I am without having to answer shit. So fuck off with your questions—”
The old man wore the same stupid smile from before, again, and continued, “Why are you here?”
I could not imagine a worse Hell than to keep cycling the same conversation with the old man. I ripped the new scroll in half, then into pieces, repeating the savage motion until the scroll resembled flakes of snow falling upon the glistening table.
“The fuck do I care? You’re all replaceable. I’m not! I’m forever…” the old man said, then he started blabbering in gibberish—the mouth behind him spat out asteroids of the crunched galaxies.
“So how exactly do I go about the resignation process?”
He smiled as the universe rained meteors on several planets, expanding the disease of molecular life on them all.
“That is a darn good question!” He said.
I sighed, then corrected myself, “Give me my resignation letters so that I can be relieved of duty.”
He opened another drawer, and pulled out a few files, as well as a pen, and slid them to me across the table.
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And here I am now, thinking of the proper words to end this strange tale. I wish I could tell you everything, but I know not when the Boss will erupt in another rage and simply destroy me by a whim, as random and brutal as he does to life within him.
There will be another reaper who will stumble upon this resignation letter—it is unlikely, though it would not be impossible considering the blatant unawareness of my superior and his puppet. As powerful as the Boss is, he lacks direction.
Perhaps Utnapishtim will find this and spread it amongst mankind. Yes—I believe he was a reaper all along, and those ancient people who were gifted with this knowledge spread the myth of reapers, like how Prometheus spread fire within the hearts of men. If I can have the same effect, then it would be to spread this fire:
The Boss does not write our timelines, we write them ourselves.
It has always been this way. When that feeling of déjà vu occurs? It is simply ourselves traveling back within our own memories—like how I have traveled back within all my memories to show you the meaning…the meaning we write for ourselves. The choices we write have meaning, unlike the Boss who has none—he simply is (he goes and goes and goes, with no reason for it all).
Those threads that are attached to all of us…they are not the same puppet strings like the ones on the Interpreter. They are the plotted outlines that we forgot we authored. I apologize for thinking that my foolish Boss was the one responsible the entire time. Your beautiful limitation is that you bathe in your lives by sequence, second after second—I wish I could have done the
Rainey / Hanging by a Thread / 23
same with my life instead of devoting it to something so worthless, never questioning my own obedience.
So do not despair like Gilgamesh did—if we were all granted immortality, we would become monsters without purpose.
With that said,
I resign from my reaper position,
💀
What if ours weren’t the only reality? What if the past paths converged, if those moments that led to our current circumstances got tangled together with their alternates and we found ourselves caught up in the threads?
Marla returned home after the funeral and wake. She drew the key in the lock and opened the door slowly, the looming dread of coming back to an empty house finally sinking in. Everyone else had gone home with their loved ones. They had all said, “goodbye,” and moved along.
Her daughter Misty and son-in-law Joel had caught a flight to Springfield so he could be at work the next day for the big meeting. Her brother Darcy was on his way back to Montreal. Emmett and Ruth were at home next door, probably washing dishes from the big meal they had helped to provide afterward, seeing as their kitchen light was on. Marla remembered there being food but couldn’t recall what exactly as she hadn’t felt like eating. Sandwiches probably… she’d have to thank them later.
Marla had felt supported up until she turned the key in the lock after the services, but then the realization sank deep in her throat like acid reflux, hanging heavy on her heart – everyone else had other lives to return to except for her. She sighed and stepped through the threshold onto the outdated beige linoleum tile and the braided rag rug that stretched across it. She closed the door behind herself and sighed again. She wiped her shoes reflexively on the mat before just kicking them off to land in a haphazard heap in the entryway.
The still silence of the house enveloped her, its oppressive emptiness palpable – she could feel it on her skin, taste it on her tongue. It was bitter. She sighed and walked purposefully to the living room, the large rust-orange sofa waiting to greet her. She flopped into its empty embrace, dropping her purse at her side as she did so.
A familiar, husky voice greeted her from deeper within the large, empty house. “Where have you been?”
Marla looked up and glanced around. Her husband Frank was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, drying a bowl. Marla gasped, her hand shooting to her mouth. Her clutched appendage took on a life of its own, slowly relinquishing itself of her gaping jaw and extending a first finger to point at the specter.
“Frank?” she spoke hesitantly.
“Yeah,” the man replied, holding the now-dry bowl nestled in the faded blue-and-white-checkered kitchen towel in both hands. “Who else would you expect?”
“But you’re dead,” Marla spat, the words falling limply from her mouth of their own accord.
The 66-year old man looked around confusedly and turned to face Marla, his silver hair sparkling in the light from the kitchen, illuminated from behind like a halo. “What are you talking about? I’m just here washing up after lunch. You were gone so I made myself some soup. Where have you been?”
“No, I just got home from your funeral,” Marla spoke quietly. “You are dead. After the boating accident… You drowned. I went along to the hospital – they pronounced you dead on arrival.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Frank said. “What boating accident?”
“The sailboat… You were going to take me out,” Marla coughed, her brown eyes glossed over with tears.
“We don’t own a sailboat,” Frank said bluntly. “Sure, I’d thought about it – it seems like a cool retirement hobby – but it’s just too expensive. We’ve talked about this, we can’t afford it.”
Marla glanced out the bay window towards the driveway where the small sailboat sat on its trailer, its orange hull reminiscent of the Florida citrus industry, and also of the life jacket Frank should have been wearing when he’d been pulled under. Marla cringed and turned back toward the kitchen. She sighed and spoke again, “But the boat’s out front. The guys at the marina helped to bring it back… after you… drowned.”
Frank had retreated to the kitchen to put away the bowl. Marla followed. She stood in the doorway and studied the man intently. He was unmistakably her husband, there was no denying it even despite her having just witnessed his waxen lifeless body in the coffin at the wake before the burial, though this Frank was a slight bit more overweight than she remembered.
“Well, that’s not possible. Because I’m still here,” Frank grumbled. He turned to face her, his blue eyes edged with worry. “There now, it was probably just a dream. You knew I wanted a boat and your anxiety just formulated the worst-case scenario…”
“See for yourself,” Marla said, her voice lilting with every syllable.
Frank strode into the living room and stared out the bay window. The driveway was vacant save for some bits of Spanish moss strewn over the concrete from the neighboring live oak tree. He turned towards his wife.
“But there’s no boat,” he sighed. “You must have had a bad dream. Did you fall asleep in the car in the garage again?” Concern was written all over his face, deepening every crease and wrinkle. “Is that where you were? The garage?”
Marla glanced again at the boat, plain as day, and turned to face Frank. Her voice grew stubborn. “It’s right here. How can you miss it?” she said, pointing at the orange behemoth.
“Honey, there’s nothing there,” Frank exclaimed, exasperation creeping into his voice.
Marla huffed and strode to the entryway, gathering her shoes from where they waited in their haphazard heap alongside the braided rag run on the worn linoleum floor. She marched out the door as Frank took vigil in its open frame, still staring at her. She stomped out to the boat and slapped her hand on the fiberglass surface with a resounding smack. The boat was warm to the touch, having baked in the Florida sun. She turned back towards the front door.
“See!” she bellowed.
The door stood open, empty. No one was there, watching. Marla sighed again and walked back inside. The vacant house once again enveloped her in its oppressive emptiness. Frank was nowhere to be found.
So I guess it’s goodbye for now. Feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or here on her website.
Today on Nightmarish Nature we’re gonna revisit The Blob and jiggle our way to terror. Why? ‘Cause we’re just jellies – looking at those gelatinous denizens of the deep, as well as some snot-like land-bound monstrosities, and wishing we could ooze on down for some snoozy booze schmoozing action. Or something.
Honestly, I don’t know what exactly it is that jellyfish and slime molds do but whatever it is they do it well, which is why they’re still around despite being among the more ancient organism templates still in common use.
Jellyfish are on the rise.
Yeah, yeah, some species like moon jellies will hang out in huge blooms near the surface feeding, but that’s not what I meant. Jellyfish populations are up. They’re honing in on the open over-fished ocean and making themselves at home. Again.
And, although this makes the sea turtles happy since jellies are a favorite food staple of theirs, not much else is excited about the development. Except for those fish that like to hide out inside of their bells, assuming they don’t accidentally get eaten hanging out in there. But that’s a risk you gotta take when you’re trying to escape predation by surrounding yourself in a bubble of danger that itself wants to eat you. Be eaten or be eaten. Oh, wait…
So what makes jellies so scary?
Jellyfish pack some mighty venom. Despite obvious differences in mobility, they are related to anemones and corals. But not the Man o’ War which looks similar but is actually a community of microorganisms that function together as a whole, not one creature. Not that it matters when you’re on the wrong end of a nematocyst, really. Because regardless what it’s attached to, that stings.
Box jellies are among the most venomous creatures in the world and can move of their own accord rather than just drifting about like many smaller jellyfish do. And even if they aren’t deadly, the venom from many jellyfish species will cause blisters and lesions that can take a long time to heal. So even if they do resemble free-floating plastic grocery bags, you’d do best to steer clear. Because those are some dangerous curves.
But what does this have to do with slime molds?
Absolutely nothing. I honestly don’t know enough about jellyfish or slime molds to devote the whole of a Nightmarish Nature segment to either, so they had to share. Essentially, this bit is what happened when I decided to toast a bagel before coming up with something to write about and spent a tad too much time in contemplation of my breakfast. I guess we’re lucky I didn’t have any cream cheese or clotted cream…
Oh, and also thinking about gelatinous cubes and oozes in the role-playing game sense – because those sort of seem like a weird hybrid between jellies and slime molds, as does The Blob. Any of those amoeba influenced creatures are horrific by their very nature – they don’t even need to be souped up, just ask anyone who’s had dysentery.
And one of the most interesting thing about slime molds is that they can take the shortest path to food even when confronted with very complex barriers. They are maze masterminds and would give the Minotaur more than a run for his money, especially if he had or was food. They have even proven capable of determining the most efficient paths for water lines or railways in metropolitan regions, which is kind of crazy when you really think about it. Check it out in Scientific American here. So, if we assume that this is essentially the model upon which The Blob was built, then it’s kind of a miracle anything got away. And slime molds are coming under closer scrutiny and study as alternative means of creating computer components are being explored.
Jellies are the Wave of the Future.
We are learning that there may be a myriad of uses for jellyfish from foodstuffs to cosmetic products as we rethink how we interact with them. They are even proving useful in cleaning up plastic pollution. I don’t know how I feel about the foodstuff angle for all that they’ve been a part of various recipes for a long time. From what I’ve seen of the jellyfish cookbook recipes, they just don’t look that appealing. But then again I hate boba with a passion, so I’m probably not the best candidate to consider the possibility.
So it seems that jellies are kind of the wave of the future as we find that they can help solve our problems. That’s pretty impressive for some brainless millions of years old critter condiments. Past – present – perpetuity! Who knows what else we’d have found if evolution hadn’t cleaned out the fridge every so often?
Feel free to check out more Nightmarish Nature here.
Continuing our junkyard dawg werewolf story from the previous St. Patrick’s Days… though technically he’s more of a wolfwere but wolfwhatever. Anyway, here are Part 1 from 2022, Part 2 from 2023 and Part 3 from 2024 if you want to catch up.
Yeah I don’t know how you managed to find me after all this time. We haven’t been the easiest to track down, Monty and I, and we like it that way. Though actually, you’ve managed to find me every St. Patrick’s Day since 2022 despite me being someplace else every single time. It’s a little disconcerting, like I’m starting to wonder if I was microchipped way back in the day in 2021 when I was out lollygagging around and blacked out behind that taco hut…
Anyway as I’d mentioned before, that Scratchers was a winner. And I’d already moved in with Monty come last St. Patrick’s Day. Hell, he’d already begun the process of cashing in the Scratchers, and what a process that was. It made my head spin, like too many squirrels chirping at you from three different trees at once. We did get the money eventually though.
Since I saw you last, we were kicked out of Monty’s crap apartment and had gone to live with his parents while we sorted things out. Thank goodness that was short-lived; his mother is a nosy one for sure, and Monty didn’t want to let on he was sitting on a gold mine as he knew they’d want a cut even though they had it made already. She did make a mean brisket though, and it sure beat living with Sal. Just sayin.
Anyway, we finally got a better beater car and headed west. I was livin’ the dream. We were seeing the country, driving out along old Route 66, for the most part. At least until our car broke down just outside of Roswell near the mountains and we decided to just shack it up there. (Boy, Monty sure can pick ‘em. It’s like he has radar for bad cars. Calling them lemons would be generous. At least it’s not high maintenance women who won’t toss you table scraps or let you up on the sofa.)
We found ourselves the perfect little cabin in the woods. And it turns out we were in the heart of Bigfoot Country, depending on who you ask. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never seen one. But it seems that Monty was all into all of those supernatural things: aliens, Bigfoot, even werewolves. And finding out his instincts on me were legit only added fuel to that fire. So now he sees himself as some sort of paranormal investigator.
Whatever. I keep telling him this werewolf gig isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be, and it doesn’t work like in the movies. I wasn’t bitten, and I generally don’t bite unless provoked. He says technically I’m a wolfwere, to which I just reply “Where?” and smile. Whatever. It’s the little things I guess. I just wish everything didn’t come out as a bark most of the time, though Monty’s gotten pretty good at interpreting… As long as he doesn’t get the government involved, and considering his take on the government himself that would seem to be a long stretch. We both prefer the down low.
So here we are, still livin’ the dream. There aren’t all that many rabbits out here but it’s quiet and the locals don’t seem to notice me all that much. And Monty can run around and make like he’s gonna have some kind of sighting of Bigfoot or aliens or the like. As long as the pantry’s stocked it’s no hair off my back. Sure, there are scads of tourists, but they can be fun to mess around with, especially at that time of the month if I happen to catch them out and about.
Speaking of tourists, I even ran into that misspent youth from way back in 2021 at the convenience store; I spotted him at the Quickie Mart along the highway here. I guess he and his girlfriend were apparently on walkabout (or car-about) perhaps making their way to California or something. He even bought me another cookie. Small world. But we all knew that already…
If you enjoyed this werewolf wolfwere wolfwhatever saga, feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or here on her website.
