Death sat at the bus stop reading the latest newspaper. It was a cloudy day, one that threatened only to block the sun, as opposed to a day that threatened to soak everyone who ventured out of their home. It was mid-morning, and the rush of people who used public transit to get to work had begun to thin. This was death’s favorite time to leave for work, though if work called, he didn’t have much say in the matter.
Death’s newspaper was the usual sad tales of wars in far away lands he had once, and always would, frequent. Another murder here, another missing child there. Though he had lived for a few eons, some of the rigamarole of the human struggle would always effect him. Death tsked without a tongue as he read a story about a small business fighting against the expansion of a rather aggressive corporation. Good for them, he thought.
Why was death sitting at a bus stop? The last time he tried to take the White Horse-- his steed of old-- out for a jaunt, he’d been ticketed, the horse booted and impounded, and the amount of fines he had to pay for having a horse in city limits had been astounding.Surprisingly, reaping was not a lucrative business. So having to attend court for tickets was always a pain.Not to mention that his was a name that could never be said by the tongue of man, much less pronounced by a bailiff. So that was all there was to that, as far as transportation went. So, Death sat at the bus stop every morning, scythe and newspaper in hand, and read about the endless flow of life around him.
He had at least 30 minutes before the next bus came and expected the wait to be as boring as it always was. The stop at which he sat, a busy downtown transit center, played audience to the clotted traffic of the early morning, as it had done since cars had become the popular mode of transportation for humanity. Death could remember the few times he had waited for a coach with fondness. While the way had been bumpy due to roads being nonexistent, he had always been fond of rusticity of the whole affair.
Out of the corner of his eye socket, He saw a woman in her 40s, overweight and frazzled as she lugged along her groceries in a cart that squeaked resentfully with each move it made. She sat down two seats away from him but he didn’t make much of a note of it. Death was so common that very few people recognized him for what he was. About 5 minutes went by before Death was startled by a small hand tugging at his sleeve. The reaper turned to find that the hand was attached to the chubby arm of a girl in pink. At the most she was 7 years old, he guessed. She was surely the first human to talk to him in what seemed a eternity.
"Yes?" Death said in his many voices.
"Aren’t you the skeleton man who took my gramma away?" The girl said.
“I could be. I tend to be many different versions of myself. So it might not have been me who took your ‘gramma’, child."
The little girl’s brow wrinkled as she puzzled over the Reaper’s words. Last time she checked, there was only one death.
“Did your brother take her?" the girl asked, pleased with her solution. If death had eyes, they would have been rolling. Resigned, death lowered his paper for a moment and looked towards the girl.
"You see, people die everywhere all the time. When they die, someone has to show them the way to the light. And that someone is different depending on the person’s faith,” Death said, as he slowly lifted his paper back into place. “This is why I cannot tell you if I was the one who took the old woman you called ‘Gramma’ because I simply can’t. That is just how it is."
