After Life, Before Death

   She stared at her body, dead on the ground. She knew she was dead, and the evidence was staring right back at her. Was there supposed to be this frozen feeling of shock? Wasn't she supposed to go off to heaven and live happily ever after? Maybe that didn't actually happen when you died.

There was this nagging feeling, though. In the back of her dead head, she knew that there was more to death than this -whatever this was.

All of a sudden a shiver ran through her, and a cold hand appeared on her shoulder and pulled her back. Then, in the blink of an eye, she found herself in an alien land. Everything was colored gray, and the land went on forever until the gray sky and gray floor blended together in a mist of white. The only thing there besides her was a gray sea and the hand still on her shoulder.

In a gasp of shock she turned around, expecting to see Death himself as she was taught to imagine him. Instead, she was met with the cold eyes of a young boy -the only splash of color in this land of endless gray. His dark hair shagged low on his forehead, making it hard to properly see his eyes, but she could make out the specks of gold glowing in the brown. He wore dark jeans and a black hoodie that was pulled up to cover his head. In all, he looked like a dork, but she seemed to find it adorable.

"Aren't- aren't you supposed to be older?" She asked with a slight quiver in her voice, pointing at the boy.

He seemed unfazed by her curiosity and reached out to grab her wrist. She quickly pulled back, the thought of going with this stranger enough to scare her to death -as if she wasn't dead enough.

"Stubborn girl, your kind is supposed to follow me. But, if you must know, the Death you're thinking of is my father."

He kept his hand out towards her, but this reveal made her shrink back even more. She was taught there was only one death, does this mean that there are entire families of the people that take her kind's lives? She could hardly believe it.

He reached out for her again, but this time she didn't back away. The thought that he had a family made her think of him as much less of a monster. Even without a family, he didn't look like a monster, not the way humans made death seem. He looked like her, a teen just trying to get through life. She guessed he didn't have that problem, though, since he wasn't alive.

He pulled her toward the gray ocean, and that's when her panic started to kick in. Was he going to drown her? She was already dead, could she be killed again? But still, she felt that that was not what he was planning to do.

Once they were waist deep, a boat seemingly appeared beneath their feet. He sat down, and she followed his lead. The boat, like everything else, was bland. She felt that the wood was painted black, but the thick fog that was permanently settled over the ocean made it hard to tell.

"Where are we going?" She asked once the boat had been in motion for a few moments. Would he take her to heaven? Or hell? Did those places even exist? Her brain just kept filling with questions for the minute or so of silence.

"Well, I'm not sure." Death had answered. "As Death, we don't get to see the world of the living or the world of the dead."

Her heart fell at his revealment. Was this really the only place he got to see? The boring grays? Did he have even a home? She was sure he didn't, since there wasn't a landmark anywhere in this place and she would see it if it did exist.

"So, this is... everything?" She asked in complete shock.

"We don't live by the same standards you humans do. We don't need a home or family or life to survive, we were born to do this." He motioned around him.

"Oh..."

"My turn to ask the questions now. Why are you here so young? Most humans are, by human time, in their seventies when I get to meet them."

"Well, I got into an accident, but you couldn't see that, could you? Since you can't see into the living world."

He shook his head solemnly and turned his attention wholly to the direction we were going. How he knew where to go was a mystery to her. They seemed to be in the middle of the body of water, and she couldn't see anything but the water and sky fading together no matter where she turned.

He felt her gaze on him as he steered them near the other side of what he liked to call the Middle Ground. He could tell she was dying to ask a question, but he gave her the time to collect it.

"Does it always take this long to take people to...wherever? How do you keep up with everyone who's dying on Earth?" She asked, but he could tell by the tone in her voice that it was not what she originally intended to say.

"I'm Death, do you really think I confine to the human standards of time? For this time, the time I'm taking you to the other side, there is no human time passing. The few seconds that I'm affected by, are the ones that I spend pulling you from your world to here."

"Is that how you age?" She wanted to know. "And how you have an elder, your father?"

He nodded her head to her, thinking about the tale of it all. "My father is older than time itself, and has taken many more lives than me. For each of those lives, he gains a second, and each of your human years in the equivalent to a second for us."

Her eyes widened in shock, and she stared at him with utter disbelief. How old would that make his father? How old would that make him?

"Remember, though, time doesn't affect us in our will to live or die. It only ages how we appear to you." He said to her.

She still stared at him, but suppressed the millions of questions running through her head as she saw land ahead. "That's it, huh?" Stammered out of her.

"We still have a way to go. I'll grant you one last question, if you'd like. I don't really get many talkers around here, anyway."

She looked up at him with a glint of sadness in her eyes. "Do we ever get to come back here?"

He stared at her before slowly shaking his head. Then, the boat bumped into the shore that seemed so many more miles from where they were only a few moments ago.

She got out of the boat with his help, and they walked up to the dark gray wall that he had come accustomed to. With one last sad smile he helped her up, her foot falling on an invisible step that he's never been able to find.

"It was lovely meeting you." She said as she gave him a kiss on the forehead, reminding him of his mother. She lifted her foot of the ground, and then, as soon as she was there, she was gone.

He knew that if he wanted, he could do what his father had done. Given her the chance to stay here, in this world of gray. It's what his father had done with his mother. But humans, they couldn't live in the world the way he and his father could.

His mother had gone mad, to the point his father had to erase her from the universe. He watched his father suffer after doing it, but he knew it pained Death more to watch his wife suffer.

So, for the sake of this interesting girl, he let her go. "If you love something, you must let it go." His father had quoted, something his mother would say when Death went on rambles about taking her from her peace. That was long before he was born, though.

Finally, he pulled back from the wall, his job needing him. But upon looking down, he saw something that made him smile and feel a little lighter-

Right where she had her last step was a small, green plant, adding some color to this world and his own.