Page 10 of Grim

And I drop my smile.

Just like that, the act is over. No audience, no reason to pretend. I wrap my arms around myself as I sit on the couch, staring at the blank TV screen.

She’s scared. I know that.

So am I.

MarriedtotheJob

One Hour Before the Present

“And 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 deliciouscrack. 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 theReaper Regulations Guidebook.

Which I find absurd, of course. I died centuries ago, and any customer service I had left in me evaporatedsomewhere 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. Ameeting.

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.