Page 146 of Grim

“No,” he begins, the pompous judge handing down his final sentence. “An ending would be too merciful for you at this point, Kane. I made allowances for you. I trusted you to obey me. A small price to pay for the quality of the AfterLife I’ve afforded you as a reaper.”

“Quality?” I scoff. “Ripping the souls from the loved and loving. Watching children mourn their parents. Or the unthinkably worse, witnessing parents mourn their children. I buried my humanity underneath your ledgers and regulations. And for what? For this? Do your worst, D.” I spit on the ground at his feet.

He stares down to the mark I made on the floor and then travels his gaze up my broken body to my eyes. “Even in pain, you still were given a gift, Kane. Even in suffering, you could still feel. But now, I am taking that away from you. No more suffering. No more pain.”

“And certainly no more joy,” Fate pipes in over his shoulder, rankling Big D.

“Shut up.” D punctuates without averting his gaze from me.

“No more feeling at all, Kane. You will still be of service to me. And you will feel nothing at all. For eternity. It’s not an end for you. It’s an endless. You will receive your new assignment shortly. And soon, Rue Chamberlain will be nothing more than a faded memory.”

“Where are you taking me?” I ask weakly.

He looks at me with decisive finality. A wicked gleam sparkles in his eyes as he slams down his metaphorical gavel, sealing my solitude. “Clerical.”

TheBeginning

“Hello?”

LikeSandsThroughtheHourglass

Later …

The overhead lights hum their endless tune. A droning insectile buzz that chews at the back of your skull. The incessant noise makes time ooze from moment to moment in a sea of sameness. As though Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence of the same has been made manifest. What even is time? The monotony of it all fogs the mind, like watching sand pour through a frosted hourglass.

Sometimes, the lights flicker. Brief, stuttering moments where the world goes dark, and I think that maybe it’s all ending. A literal glimmer of hope in an otherwise endless numb. A proper end would be better than this. Anything would be better than this.

But they always come back on. No one ever fixes them. No one fixes anything here.

My official title is Oversight Officer for Problematic Sortings, or OOPS. I am not amused. I sit at desk thirteen of who knows how many in the back corner of some windowless, nondescript room. The same grey metal surface, the same squeaking chair, the same stack of files that never seems to get smaller. Cubicle thirteen—unlucky for some, meaningless to me. I didn’t choose it. Choice is the prerogative of the living. Sort of.

After a lengthy stretch of silence, where I was justsitting, someone finally brought me a tabbed manila folder. They handed it to me. Inside was a single sheet of white paper, which made the folder feel a bit redundant, but that was the least of my concerns. The paper read simply, ‘Reclassify old records. Begin at the end. You’ll know when you’re finished.’

What kind of cryptic bureaucratic nonsense was this? It read like a broken fortune cookie.

That was three months ago. Or three years. Or three centuries. Time doesn’t move in any one direction here. It just oozes outward all at once.

The work brings new meaning to the wordmeaningless. Old paperwork from botched transitions, files that got lost in middle-management black holes, death certificates that were filed under the wrong dates. I read them, verify the details, stamp them ‘Approved’ or ‘Requires Amendment’ and move to the next. My fingers have developed permanent indentations from the stampers.

Nobody speaks unless protocol demands it. I prefer it that way. It is easier to get lost inside the silence.

But once, at the start of this purgatory, a clerk named Beth decided to be friendly. She was new, still had that eager shine in her eyes that hadn’t been ground down by the weight of endless futility. Turns out, nothingness is pretty heavy. She leaned over my cubicle wall during her break, chin propped on her hands.

“You know, you always look like you’re in mourning,” she said with the kind of casual observation that was meant to start a conversation.

I looked up. Let her see what was behind my eyes—or what wasn’t. The absence. The echo. The hollowness.

She stepped back from my cubicle wall like I’d slapped her. Since then, she takes the long way around my desk when she needs to file reports.

They call this echelon of labor “rehabilitation.” The supervisors say this is a stepping stone back to field work or full passage to the Final Beyond. I’m not holding my breath though.

This feels like permanent erasure. With one meaningless task at a time, they’re wearing away the edges of who I used to be until there’s nothing left but this—ashell that shows up, does the work, and goes home to an empty room.

The soul I was before commanded respect. My jobs in the mortal realm and the AfterLife demanded precision and perfection, and I delivered. I had a path and a purpose and was highly regarded by all who knew me.

But that man died the same day Rue did. As did my true purpose.

“Kane Deveraux?”