I met Death when I was sixteen. I knew who he was the moment I laid eyes on him. It was like seeing God. You just knew who it was.
He stood over the body of my mother, her face blank, her eyes unfocused, staring at the saucepan that had fallen from her hand and splashed its contents across the floor. I was a teenager, taking in a scene that my mind could not understand, refused to understand, rejecting it outright in every way. The scene was only a picture, a thing to view and dismiss, and set aside into the empty void of forgotten memory. Yet it stayed. It was burned indelibly into my memory. My mother, splayed across the floor, spaghetti sauce flung across the vinyl, a wooden stirring spoon undulating slowly like a teeter totter in a storm. And then the man, standing next to her body, his face saddened, but slowly shifting to jubilant as he watched my face change slowly from shock to horror.
“You see me?” He asked softly, his hand pointing at my chest.
“I… my mom?”
Death looked down to survey the scene again. “Aneurysm.”
“Did she…”
“She is already gone. She did not suffer, if that is what you are asking.” Death shrugged and stepped over my mother’s body. He was barefoot. “She is not here, so you can’t talk to her.”
“Am I about to die too?” I asked.
“Of course not. Not your time.”
I swallowed heavily and watched his face carefully. He was a cosmic force embodied into that of a middle-age, yet ageless, white man. Bald, a soft face with a square jaw, and small freckles across his cheekbones and crossing the arch of his nose in between.
“Did she go to heaven?”
“She moved on.”
“That is not an answer.”
“Look at you, Ms. Intelligent,” Death chuckled. “Debate team?”
“Maybe,” I retorted.
“Fair enough. Are you angry with me?”
His brow furrowed slightly, and he appeared to actually care. I wasn’t, strangely enough. “No. I guess not. Worried.”
“Oh?”
“Just me now,” I sniffed, a forgotten magazine clutched in my hand. “Dad is long gone.”
“He is in Singapore. Sleeping right now,” Death grinned. “You want to see him?”
“Not really.”
Death’s eyebrow went up. “Why?”
“Not much of a father, just a sperm donor,” I admitted frankly.
“And funny too,” Death said to himself more than to me. “Strange day.”
I still felt the heavy pressure of tears camping out the back of eye sockets. Out of the corner of my vision, I could see my mom’s hand stretched out across the fake tile floor as if still stretching for the fallen spoon.
“It is ok if you cry,” Death said consolingly. “I don’t mind.”
“Don’t you have other people to take?”
“Who says I am not?”
“But you are here,” I pointed out matter-of-factly.
“And I am there…” Death pointed at himself standing in the living room. “And there…” Death pointed at himself looking in through the kitchen window. “And there.” Death waved at me from the kitchen table, reading the newspaper as if the suburban domestic dream was very much alive.
“Ah. Neat,” I murmured.
“You seem smart. But not that smart.” Death winked at me.
“Why do you say that?”
“You haven’t figured out…”
“Why I can see you?”
Death’s eyes went wide fractionally. “I retract my previous statement. Smart as a whip.”
“So…” I said.
“So?”
“Why can I see you?”
“The powers that be have finally granted me an apprentice,” Death declared proudly.
“Shit.” My stomach felt like it was made of knots that wanted to be regurgitated violently.
“No, truly.”
I dropped the magazine, and it fell to floor with raspy crinkle noise that only laminated glossy fashion magazines can make. I put both of my hands to my temples and rubbed in exasperation. “So you are telling me that I just literally just came in on my mother dying at the hands of my new boss? Do you have any idea how insane that sounds?”
“Says the young lady carrying a conversation with Greche.”
“Greshag?” I frowned. “What kind of name is Greshag? Grease hag?”
“Greche. Gray-cheegk. Very old tongue. No longer spoken on this Earth,” Greche paused thoughtfully. “For about five thousand years or so. Maybe longer. I assure you, it was spoken in fear at one time.”
“Death too hard? Grim Reaper not applicable?”
Greche scratched his chin absently. “Oh, I suppose they work, but Greche works so much better. It is one of those words that had a bunch of meanings. Death means no longer alive, and Grim Reaper makes it sound like a boring harvester of wheat, frowning at the scything work. I have never used a scythe, but it looks fun. At least the Youtube videos make it look oddly satisfying.”
“Oh you have got to be kidding me.”
“No, Grim Reaper is a horrible name.”
“Not that. Youtube?” I exclaimed.
Death pulled out a battered phone, and flicked his thumb upwards across the screen. “Sure, its a website that shows videos…”
“I know what youtube is!”
“Oh. Then what I am kidding you about?” Greche had a confused face at the interaction.
“That you watch youtube videos,” I said, incredulous. “You are a timeless being, right?”
“Yes.”
“You are everywhere?”
“Yes.”
“You know everything?”
“Oh god no. Hardly anything actually. That is why I love the Internet. I used to have to hang out in libraries in my spare time.”
“But you are timeless!” I rolled my eyes in a huff.
“So?” Greche defended. “I do not understand why you are getting so upset.”
“Because my mother is dead on the floor behind you, and I am talking to the GRIM REAPER, and he watches YOUTUBE.”
“Ah. Yes. Well. There is that,” Greche nodded. “A little unconventional I suppose. But I assure you I am a very good boss. And I am sorry about your mother.”
I felt a tear well of its own accord and drop down my cheek. “Yeah.”
“Do you need a good cry? I can wait and watch some TV.”
“Wait?” I said, my brain had already spaced the fact that I talking to Death. “Why are you waiting?”
Greche grinned again. “I am not leaving without my apprentice…”
“That again,” I paused and ran a hand through my long brown hair to get it out of my face. “How am I supposed to waltz out of here with my… Mom! Laying! Right! There!”
“I knew you were angry,” Greche commented more to himself than I. “Go ahead and have a cry. An ugly one. You can get blubbery and sniffy and all that if you need to.”
I sighed. “And just what does being your apprentice even mean?”
“It means I show you the ropes. Fight some, live some, save some. That sort of thing.”
“Fight? Fight what? People refusing to die?”
Greche shook his head as if it was obvious. “Oh, no, young lady. Actual fighting. Bad things roam the Earth. Souls rot. Greater powers interfere. Its a mess out there. And so far… we are woefully understaffed.”
“Oh please. How can you be understaffed when you just proved, most dramatically, that you can be in multiple places at once?”
“Because even when I can be in multiple places at once, I may not be able to act in all those places. It takes effort, man. Cut me a break,” Greche rolled his eyes in a perfect imitation of a valley girl. “Just imagine that if I can be in multiple places at once and I am STILL falling short, how big of mess it is! I need an apprentice, hell, I need three. And it will probably take you a couple hundred years to figure out the whole splitting your observation space thing as it is. So if we are going to argue about the semantics of what the hell I deal with every day, you are going to lose, because I am on this side…” Greche drew an invisible line between the two of them, “…And you… are on that side!”
“Because I am alive?”
“God no. I am alive too. Do I look like a corpse?” Greche grimaced through a thin frown. “I meant that I am the guy that knows the pool of shit he is standing in, and you can only see the fence surrounding it from the parking lot.”
“Gross,” I returned.
“Apt.” Greche reached out to take my hand. “See for yourself. Warm skin, heartbeat, all the signs of life.”
I tentatively reached out and ran my finger across his very solid palm. “You said you were thousands of years old.”
“I am. Older than most religions,” Greche winked.
“So if you are alive, and older than anything, and can be in multiple places at once, and are invisible… and you are a grim reaper…” My brain started to whirl and twirl about in my skull, the impossibility of the reality wrapping me up, unleashing me fiercely like a top, only to spin in place, it gave me a goddamn righteous headache. I put my hands to my temples and exhaled heavily.
“Just Greche,” he corrected. “All of the other stuff is parlor tricks.”
“So as an assistant…”
“Apprentice. You would be my right hand man, er, woman,” Greche corrected quickly.
“I am sixteen!”
“And homeless now. You are a minor, and that means that state can do with you what you wish, Rachel. With no family, your options are slim.”
“Shit.” I furrowed my brow and tried to think it through. The headache was not decreasing any. “And you are expecting me to waltz off into the sunset with you? I don’t even know you!”
“Yeah you do. My name is Greche. I introduced myself.”
I shook my head and grinned at the comment against my best judgment. “Yeah, you did. But its just a name.”
“A name can mean a lot.”
I didn’t respond right. I looked over to my mother, laying so still, as if she had become a rug or accessory to the kitchen decor.
“There are perks. Being an apprentice means you can live a life that you can barely imagine. It means seeing things that 99% of humanity never knows about… it means being a part of something so much larger that it actually makes our little planet and all of its people seem insignificant. It is a big opportunity.”
“Yeah?” I sniffed.
“Yeah… plus its not really optional. You have been recruited. Whether or not you come right now, you will come eventually.”
“I will?”
“Guaranteed,” Greche stated, as if no other option existed.
“Why do you say that? Maybe I wanted to grow up, finish school…”
Greche interrupted, “…find a boy, go to college, get married, have two and half kids, a dog, a cat, a quiet life, and then have me show up on a Monday night when you are 89 years old, and you say ‘Hey, I know you.’ And I say, ‘Yep. I introduced myself to already, it’s Greche, remember?’ But you will be an old bat with a bit of alzheimers and dementia, and you will say ‘Nice to meet you, Greche.’ And then I will laugh and tell you to stop being an old bitty, you have to be an apprentice. But you will be dead already. So opportunity lost.”
“You can see all that? Oddly specific,” I said in a whisper.
“Or you can save us both the trouble and you ditch your lame excuse of a quiet life and come see what you can see, with me. Greche.”
At the time, I remember thinking to myself: fuck it. “Fine. Let’s go.”
“Any goodbyes to this place?”
“Do I need anything?” I asked.
“No.”
“Then what do I need to say goodbye to?”
“See, Rachel. You were meant to be an Apprentice. Great minds think alike!” Greche winked.
“We will see,” I shot back.
“Right now in fact. Let’s go take care of the demon down the street. The bastard owes me money.”
What can I say? Hell of a first day on the job.