Gods and Writers
“It used to be, but it is all handled by one of the sisters now. One retired to Florida, the other was bought out by the remaining sister. She now writes the fate of humanity with her outsourced writers. And ever since bringing on Edgar Allen Poe and Ernest Hemingway, you can see the interest deaths that celebrities have been having…. Poe has a knack for making those particularly interesting.”
Matthew smiled at that, “But I am still not seeing how this is causing my problems.”
“Well,” Nick went on, “You are sort of a spanner in the works and it has Fate all in a hissy fit.”
He continued, “You see, you still being here is upsetting the natural order of things.”
“Fate had already written timelines for your wife, and for your bosses. Timelines that cannot start until you are out of the picture. So they are kind of disjointed. On one hand, they have no storyline with you, on the other; they cannot continue any storyline as long as you are here.”
Matthew looked sullen into the darkness. “So you are here to take my soul.” He did not know why that was suddenly a scary prospect. After all, he had come here this evening for the express purpose of ending his life. Why is the reality of it better than the abstract of it?
“Can’t do it.”
Matthew looked over in surprise, “Why?”
“Well, you see,” Nick tried to explain, “we have a pretty narrow window to collect a soul otherwise the soul is trapped. It is how you get ghosts.”
“Then why am I still alive? And not a ghost?”
“Your mortal body never died, so you never became a ghost and so in a sense you are stuck and we have a problem.”
Matthew did not like the sound of that, “Then you are here to kill me.”
“Not that easy. To kill a living person with a soul that has passed its expiration is a higher-level call. And Death would rather not tell Hades that there was a mess-up of these proportions. So we have to figure out a solution that is low key and sets things right.”
Nick looked over at a now pale Matthew, “And that is why I am here.”
“So what are you going to do?” Matthew’s mind was filled with many different scenarios of painful deaths and dismemberments. Tortures that would make even the cruelest of sadists cringe in horror and disgust.
Kohl moved his hands away from the keyboard. He moved his right hand to the mouse and moved over to click on Facebook. He looked and noticed that he had a message from someone. The last thing he needed was a distraction, but this was a person that he talked to very rarely so he answered.
“Hey, how are you?” the message read
“Working on a story,” Kohl answered hoping that he would take the hint. Kohl held his hands up to his head and held them there. He yawned, the late-night starting to get to him.
“Oh, tell me what you decide to do with Matthew.” With that, the Facebook user disappeared and the chat window closed. Kohl looked at the message in the seconds before it disappeared perplexed.
How did the person know who he writing about, and how did he even know that there was a problem to be solved. Kohl noticed that the chat window was closed.
He looked over at the clock on the desktop and noticed that is was nearly three in the morning. “Probably imagined the whole thing,” he thought, “time for bed.”
With a final yawn, he saved his work and stumbled off to bed.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.