TW// General and indirect talk of Abuse and Suicide. Not explicit at all.
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I stand in front of the mirror staring at my reflection.
The hazy outlines and the slight transparency is gone. There is only me, clear and opaque. People can see me. People can see me. Not through me but at me. Aren’t I supposed to be fading each day, like Jess?
Jess did the steps and I could barely see her with her white dress. It was easy for her to dissolve. What is going on with me? It’s like with each step I am moving closer and closer away from moving on.
“It could be me rubbing off of you more. Reapers can be a part of the world of the living and the in-between with just a thought. Perhaps you thought about being amongst the living,” Death suggests with his arms crossed.
“No, they can still see me. When we walked down the street here, I was thinking about wanting to disappear but they all saw me,”
“You don’t know if they saw you,”
“That kid waved at me and that vendor asked me to buy an apple. They asked me. They didn’t ask you. They couldn’t see you. What is going on?”
“I am sure that you’re just thinking about being seen. It can be subconscious as well. All Reapers have that awkward phase when they’re figuring it out. I am sure this is just that kind of hiccup,” Death says “Do you feel weird?”
My body is like a pressure cooker. There is heat bubbling underneath and it’s uncomfortable. “Yes, I do feel strange.”
“I believe it is best if we do the second to last step. It’ll relieve the symptoms. You have to give up past hatred, the most long lasting emotion.”
Marlon comes into my mind immediately but even that doesn’t evoke much emotion. The bile that used to come up before is more of a dull headache now. “I’m ready,” I say and for the first time it isn’t a lie.
“That’s good,” Death tells me. “But it’s going to be tricky because you show. You can’t show up in jail,”
“Do we even have to see him?” I say, stepping away from the mirror.
Death sighs. “We wouldn’t have to but he’s hexing you. You don’t have to do anything. I’ll take care of him. I can arrange for him to be moved somewhere. Let me just see where he is,”
He takes out an iPhone and begins to type something into it. “What’s his name again?”
“Marlon Reddison,” I reply.
He presses a button and his eyebrows shoot up. “Well, the tides are in our favor. He’s dead.”
I do a double take and go over to him. “He’s what?”
We both walk into the living room and sit on the couch. He bites his lip. “He took his own life when he found no way out of his sentence. He said in his note that he blamed you. Let me click into this article,” Death says.
I sit back entirely confused. How could he blame me until he died?
“Okay, according to this article, after Marlon was arrested women started to come forth accusing him of sexual misconduct including his own girlfriend, the mother of his child. The women said they felt safe and empowered after they saw your family fighting for justice. His girlfriend said that he was abusive and thanked your family for giving her strength and supporting her. She saw their resilience and was taken aback by their kindness after she came to apologize on Marlon’s behalf. All of their serious charges would’ve ended up landing him in jail for life. So he chose to take his life even before his trial was scheduled,”
Whatever agitated me before cools off. I saw him mistreat his girlfriend. When I was there yelling at him for killing me, I saw him do so many wrong things even when she was pregnant. I became even angrier when he got away with all of it. I tried my best to make his life miserable but I couldn’t be seen or heard. All of my efforts went to waste.
I am not angry when I see a picture of him. I don’t feel sad or anything. I just see a sick little man who died in the way he lived, in cowardice. I take the iPhone and read more and more articles on my own.
His girlfriend seems to be happy and her baby is one years old now. I pause on a picture. Her blonde hair whips around her as she raises a loudspeaker to a crowd with her baby on her hip. She looks like a warrior using her voice as a weapon.
The world won’t stop spinning because Marlon died. It will move forward spinning faster into the wonderful future and it will continue to do so with every man like him when they die. No one will dwell on them and no one will ever dwell on him.
“Since he’s dead, I can check up on the database to see if I can see him. I can get his info and approximate location,” Death says, holding my hand “I can get the information now if you want.”
His eyes are careful. Those charcoal eyes try to read my emotions.
“I do,” I tell him.
He runs his hand through my hair before nodding. “Okay, let’s go.”
The room changes into a darker room. It’s not Death’s office. It’s another place with millions of blinking lights and neat color-coded cords running throughout the huge room. Death gets to work and doesn’t explain anything to me.
“M, M, where are the M’s?” Death says running his hands against the cords.
The electrical room has many halls and I take a guess that it’s underground. There aren’t any windows and the ceiling is quite low. It’s like we’re in a submarine.
“Watch your step,” Death calls out before stepping over a bunch of neon green cords on the floor. “I swear I’m going to kill Todd one of these days. Here are the M’s, the red cords. Now, the R’s,”
He leans into the red cords and starts to read a weird language on the database electrical boxes itself. “R…E….D… Aha!” Death says “He is under my company,”
He flips the switch on and off a couple times in a pattern. “That should’ve done it, now the main computer is somewhere in these cords. I should really upgrade this process,”
“When was the last time you upgraded this thing?” I ask, looking around.
“The 70s,” Death admits. “I know that’s bad but a lot is on my plate.”
We venture deeper into the forest of tangled electrical wires until we see an old school computer screen. On the screen is a shaky screen with Marlon’s name. Death leans in.
“Gotcha,”
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Loving writing these days.