I set up the table for myself, strip off my coat, roll my sleeves, disinfect my arm. Then I climb onto the procedural bed and lower myself back against the cold surface.
Cassian straps the oxygen mask loosely over my face.
“Ready?” he asks.
“As much as anyone can be,” I say. “Go ahead.”
He reaches for the sedative. As his finger moves to press the plunger, I exhale once, bracing for the closest thing to truth I will ever touch.
“See you on the other side.”
Darkness slams through me.
A part of me finds peace in this brief silence.
I am and I am not. Both feel less meaningful than ever.
So much of my life has been built around the idea of doing what’s right. Culture and upbringing shaped expectations of me that I never agreed to. Be a good son. A good man. A good doctor. A good person. Each one runs on different criteria, and what counts as good shifts depending on who’s looking. The son, the mother, the outsider, the patient, the passerby, the nurse, the colleague. On and on.
I wonder what I actually am.
Good, or bad, or something in between that doesn’t fit in a box.
Either way, I’m still here.
A sound begins to take shape at the edge of the nothing and the pressure behind my right eye is gone. The ache that bloomed there is no longer part of me. Pain in general feels unhooked.
A silhouette resolves in the brightness. A figure, tall and narrow, wrapped in something dark that swallows the glow. A line that might be a shoulder. Another that might be a tilted head. And in its hand, cutting across the light like a hooked crescent, something long and curved.
Takes my mind a moment to label it.
Is that a… scythe?
The light spilling off the blade isn’t like any illumination I know.
A Grim Reaper.
Cassian was right. The entity he swore was real is standing right in front of me. Or above me. It’s here to collect my soul. But if that’s the case, does that mean I’m dead? And if I’m dead, do I get to see my mother?
My mother. The thought of her hits something buried so deep I almost can’t reach it.
I didn’t think past the discovery. I never considered what happens after I confirm Grim Reapers are real. I just threw myself into the search, into the mechanics of getting there.
I’ve always been bad at processing emotion, I suppose. Always treated it as an obstacle. And the goals I set in its place were grand. I always dreamt big. And early on, as soon as I started reaching for those things, I realized that feelings, unpredictable and powerful as they are, rarely help you get where you’re going. Their nature is to turn you inward. Make you reflect. Meanwhile, goals demand the opposite. They punish a mind that shifts with every breeze. They reward the ones who step outside themselves and look at the task clean.
None of that seems to matter now.
Where did my mother go when she died?
Is she somewhere behind this thing?
Did something like it come for her while her blood dried on that apartment floor and the cops botched the scene outside the door?
Where did Leonard go? The man who killed her. The man I killed.
Did he get one of these too? A guide. A system. A process.
Or did he just drop?
