Page 5 of Grim

MarriedtotheJob

One Hour Before the Present

“A nd another thing!”

The woman hurls her phone at me. I don’t flinch. I don’t move. I merely tilt my head, watching with faint curiosity as it passes clean through my incorporeal form and hits the wall with a delicious crack . Her eyes go wide. Her mouth snaps shut.

Finally, some peace.

Most stop screaming after that—nothing humbles the recently deceased like throwing a tantrum at someone who can’t be touched.

I cross my arms and exhale through my nose. Not out of necessity, just routine.

She’s still breathing heavily, which is rich, considering her lungs are currently more memory than matter.

Rolling my eyes, I remind myself why I’m here. She has to cross over .

And I’m the one assigned to make that happen. Lucky me . Reaper, death guide, post-life concierge—whatever one wants to call it, it’s my job. And apparently, because nobody likes an unhappy soul, I have to do it with something resembling a smile. It’s in the Reaper Regulations Guidebook .

Which I find absurd, of course. I died centuries ago, and any customer service I had left in me evaporated somewhere between the devastation of the plague and the invention of social media.

It’s not that I hate the job. I simply loathe the part where the living assume I care about their problems. Like they’re the only ones.

Crossing my legs, I lean back against the wall and wait for her to finish reattaching her ego.

She’s one of the loud ones. A lot of them are at first. Mortals cling to their sense of importance, right up to the moment they realize the universe didn’t even pause to mourn them.

But I’ve been doing this long enough to know how it ends.

And in the meantime, I listen to them wail about meetings and latte orders and unfinished business, as if their entire life wasn’t already a montage of things left undone.

This one is particularly dramatic. Or maybe it’s her knock-off shoes that are especially loud on the marble.

Either way, she’s annoying, and she’s chewing up her crossover countdown.

From the moment of death to the final chance to decide, souls are given a small window to make a large decision.

It’s not arbitrary, nor is it symbolic. It is some cosmic law carved into the marrow by Time herself.

A brief sliver of time to choose whether they’ll come with me to the OtherWorld or stay tethered to this one.

If they follow, they cross. If they refuse, they remain.

Not alive. Stuck. Anchored by unfinished business, delusion, or plain old stubbornness.

They are left to wander between the cracks of this world until they become nothing but noise in a hallway or a cold spot in someone else’s memory.

They think they’re clinging to some perceived purpose, but really, they’re circling the drain.

Ghosts mostly. Souls, if you’re feeling romantic.

I try not to feel romantic. It never ends well.

The window closes quickly on the mortal’s final decisive action, and once it snaps shut, there is no reopening it. At least not from me. That’s above my pay grade.

I’m just the usher. The collector. The one with the clipboard and the coat and the polite apathy that comes from watching a thousand versions of the same story unfold over and over again.

And she’s spending hers yelling about a meeting. A meeting .

Every second ticks inside my head like a metronome. A countdown. She has very little time, which she is flagrantly wasting.

Will she realize nothing she’s clinging to matters anymore? Can she let go of a life that no longer belongs to her? Will she take control of the last thing she has any actual control over?

Most of them take it down to the wire. Something always trips them up—denial, regret, panic.

Occasionally awe. But never peace. Peace is earned, not granted.

And this one continues ranting and employing projective phone technology.

Pity.

“The next time someone decides to pull me out of a meeting for something so frivolous—” she begins again.

I sigh. Loudly. “You were giving a PowerPoint on quarterly projections. You’ll forgive me if I don’t hold a vigil.”

She freezes. Her head turns slowly, like a broken doll, eyes narrowing. “A lot is riding on that pitch.”

“And now you’re dead,” I reply dryly. “Which, if I may, slightly outweighs the importance of your Q4 pitch.”

Her mouth opens and closes, resembling a fish out of water, like she’s trying to remember how to breathe in a world where the rules have changed without her permission.

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not dead, you cretin.”

Name: Katherine Sinclair

Age: 54

Occupation: Media executive

Time of Death: Four minutes and seventeen seconds ago

Cause: Sudden cerebral aneurysm while micromanaging a meeting and eating a turkey sandwich

It’s shocking how many times turkey accompanies a death .

I don’t need the file really. I know her type. They come through all the time—tightly wound, high-achieving, over-caffeinated mortals who thought legacy was something they could brute-force into permanence.

And yet here she is. Already halfway to translucent.

She’s pacing. Well, not pacing—her feet make no sound, and she leaves no mark—but she performs the idea of pacing like a windup toy let loose on a countertop.

While every case is technically unique, I’ve watched the denial cycle play out through so many faces that it’s become background noise. Still, I’ll give her some credit—this one manages to lace her denial with such pure, undiluted rage that it almost makes me nostalgic.

Almost.

“I assure you, Ms. Sinclair, you are most certainly dead,” I say, glancing at the clock on the wall, hoping she’ll get the hint.

“Now, are you prepared to come with me so we can begin your intake process? Your caseworker in AfterLife Processing, or ALP, is waiting to help you get assigned and settled into your new reality in the OtherWorld. Or are we planning to spend the rest of your final minutes playing corporate charades?”

She stiffens like I insulted her stock portfolio. Her eyes flare with fresh indignation, dark with the kind of contempt only executives and reality TV judges can properly conjure. “I can’t be dead. I have too much to do.”

Ah. The classic. Everyone’s too important to die . As if mortality consults their calendars.

“Listen, ma’am—”

“ Ma’am ?!” she barks, eyes snapping like a hinge about to break. “Oh, I don’t think so. You’re not going to sweet-talk me into anything, Mr. Men’s Suit Barn. Who is your supervisor?”

Suit Barn? This is a double-breasted, custom-tailored Cifonelli work of art.

I suppress a smirk. “I answer directly to the division head, but I promise you there is nothing my boss can do for you that I cannot. Including keeping you from haunting the sixteenth floor of your office building forever like a boardroom poltergeist.”

Her lips part in protest, but I hold up a single hand.

“Do you know what happens if you don’t make a decision soon?” I glance at the clock on the wall for her benefit again. “Time is unforgiving, Katherine. She waits for no one.”

Her brow twitches.

“A decision will be made for you. And that decision involves you spending the rest of eternity here. You linger. Pointlessly. No function, no impact on the world around you. You become a ceaseless, passive observer of a story that has moved on without you. Now, I can make you cross over. My boss would prefer it actually.” I think about the Death-issued reaper blade in my pocket and the carnage caused in the past by its edge.

“But, Kat, call me old-fashioned. I think when faced with your final free act, I should do your legacy the honor of allowing you make the call. For better or, as it’s looking in your case, for worse. ”

A flicker of uncertainty cuts through her fury, but she masks it with practiced bravado.

“Okay, listen,” she tries again, voice shifting gears, angling into the slippery silk of the bargaining phase.

“You might not know this, but I’m a very important person.

Lots of people depend on me. I’ve got teams, clients, investments.

I just turned fifty, so clearly, there’s some sort of misunderstanding happening here. ”

I lift a brow, dry as dust. “ Fifty-four actually. Naughty fib, Ms. Sinclair.”

She flinches.

I press the advantage, voice smooth as a scalpel.

“Your daughter just started her freshman year at NYU. You missed her last call, by the way. Your ex-husband remarried a yoga instructor, who owns a gluten-free bakery and has very flexible morals. And you? You buried yourself so deep in quarterly forecasts and executive strategy meetings that when your body hit the ground, no one even heard the thud for a solid three minutes.”

Her mouth falls open.

“In case you’re wondering,” I add casually, “that was long enough for your assistant to send two instant messages, reschedule your calendar, and wonder aloud if she’d get a promotion now.”

Silence swells like a tide.

And in that stillness, the final layers of her ego begin to splinter. Not enough to break her, not yet. But it’s starting. They always do, right around the metaphorical moment that the window is about to seal and they realize there is no turning back.

Her voice, when it returns, is smaller. “So, that’s it then? That’s how I go?”

I shrug, straightening the collar of my suit jacket. “You could have gone in your sleep. You could have gone holding your daughter’s hand. You went screaming about a slide deck. I don’t make the rules. I just collect and cross.”

She blinks and shakes her head.

“Window’s closing,” I state.

She’ll either choose to come with me—accept the ending and begin what comes next. Or she’ll spend the rest of her afterlife screaming at her own reflection in the glass of an elevator no one rides anymore.

“The choice is yours, Katherine, but remember, the clock ticks down the same, and once it reaches zero, there’s no turning back.”