The Four Wotsits of the Doodad

Alf and the End of the World

Death was sitting by the bed of an extremely old man. Of course, Death had lived for centuries, but this old man LOOKED like he had. His hair was sparse and looked like his head had been dusted with a spider's web. His eyes were pale, as if the colour had faded from being in the sun too much. His voice was croaky, any smoothness drying up years before along with his skin, which had so many wrinkles it looked like someone has screwed up a piece of paper really tight and then not bothered to lay it out flat again.

Alf. That was his name. He had been on his last legs for the past ten years and now they'd given up and he had been waiting for the end to come. He was fine with it. He'd been waiting for Death, The Grim Reaper or whoever might drop by. OK, so he thought that was a figurative wish, and sitting next to him was the actual Death - in the flesh - but so what? He'd had his time and was ready to move on.

He was also the first one Death had chosen to keep alive. He figured that, if he worked on a couple of easy ones first - the old uns who were on their way out anyway - he could get a feel for the effects before working his way down to the younger ones who still had a good few years left in them. Once you were past a certain age, you'd slip out of your skin like taking off a glove, so Death hoped he could slip that glove right back on without any real issues.

The younger you were, the more you clung on to that skin and the more you tried to keep it wrapped tightly around you. They were the ones that Death thought might be harder to shove back into Life. The older the better. Easy-peasey-corpsey-squeezey.

Alf was the oldest in the ward. Geriatrics was a waiting room for the 'Other Side'. It was like waiting for a train, but with you being tied to the tracks.

At first, Alf had been convinced Death was his son, long past due for a visit. After a severe reprimand that had resulted in Alf panting and wheezing and Death wishing he'd stayed at home and not picked up the morning paper, the old man had settled down. Death, and his brothers, never told anyone their real names. They'd tried it, on occasion, and had either been laughed at or stuck with pitchforks. Death was commonly known as Adam (which he thought was quite funny), War was William, Famine like to be known as Simon and Pestilence was Peter.

That was to the outside world. Even neighbours and friends didn't know their real identities.

But with Alf, Death was so fed up with being called Brendan by the old man, he'd given in and told him who he really was. Alf, to Death's surprise, accepted the information as if he'd just been introduced to Keith, the gas man who came round once a quarter to check his meter.

The problem was, Death felt that Alf as going to spend the next 92 years telling him his life story. Death had already discovered that the old man had broken his arm in two places when he was ten from playing football and that the first girl he'd kissed had been called Doris and she tasted of bubblegum. Not the nice minty kind, but the sort that had been chewed for the past three days.

Without going to see Grim the Reaper, Death wasn't sure just how long Alf had left. He could feel that his time was almost up but just not quite how by how much. He supposed that a little push in the right direction might help matters, just to, maybe, move things along a bit, but that was defeating the object. Pushing someone over just to pull them back wasn't really what he wanted to do, so he had no choice but to suffer the throaty wafflings of the bedridden chatterbox.

Alf thought he was dreaming. He thought that this was the precursor to the end, like the bit that comes after the credits in some films or episodes of Shameless. This man claiming to be Death himself was just a figment of his imagination here to lead him into the Great Beyond.

Well, he may as well have a natter whilst he was waiting.

"And that's when the wheel came off."

Death looked up, stifling a yawn. A large toothless smile greeted him. Wheel? What? He hadn't been listening, merely nodding and grunting in various places that could have been right or wrong but it was doubtful that the old man would even notice.

Maybe someone else would be better. There was a woman in a coma two beds down. She'd be better company, wouldn't she?

"What's up?" Alf said. His milky eyes were staring at Death in an uncomfortably intense way.

"Up?" Death was surprised, a fact which surprised him. It wasn't often he could be taken unawares, and for it to be a man breathing his final breaths made the surprise at the surprise more surprising!

"Something's bothering you. I can tell. It was always the same with my wife, Edna. She'd always be keeping things to herself, but I knew. I knew, I did! Like that one time, when..."

"It's the end of the world!" Death blurted. He knew he wasn't particularly patient at the best of times. So many years of Famine's adolescent behaviour and Pestilence's petulance had shaved away at his tolerance until it was a tiny nubbin tucked away under a pile of his nerves - and it didn't take much to make those nerves raw in an attempt to reach what remained of the restraint. Finding out what happened when Edna did whatever was one plucked nerve too many.

Alf blinked. End of the world? End of his life, maybe, but he wasn't big-headed enough to think that the whole world would come to a crashing halt if he were no longer a part of it.

Nice thought though.

"End of the world?" he said. "Hardly that. I'm just passing into whatever comes next, that's all. It's not so bad. It's been a good run." Alf paused and looked at Death, this strange man sitting by his bedside to walk him through into the light. "What does come next?"

Death, being Death but not actually being dead, didn't know. Probably bizarrely, he'd never thought about it either. He said as much.

"Well, I'll find out soon enough."

And then you can spend the rest of eternity entertaining the angels with your anecdotes, thought Death.