Harbinger

Death comes to us all.

Harbinger

 

       The gremlin-like creature scurried about unseen by the human eye. Some called him the trickster.  In Native American mythology he took the shape of a fox, a coyote or a crow.  In Norse mythology he was often called Loki.   Still others imagined that he was an angel of death or a grim reaper of sorts.  And those did exist in order to take the souls to the afterlife, but they didn’t have the dirty job of actually setting the sequence of events into place that caused the death.   No, reapers and angels did not kill.  That was job of the Harbinger.  

      More recently he’d been given the name of Graveling by a television writer.   It didn’t matter what he looked like or what his name was.  His duty had always been the same. 

      He was a harbinger of death.

      Today he was drawn to a family gathering in a small Midwestern town.  There he watched as a young man bragged about his new gun.   Slowly, the harbinger climbed the refrigerator and poised himself at the top.  Death had come to this family and he was waiting for the right moment to cause the fatal accident. 

      Though he did not know the reason behind his orders, he knew that death was not as random as it seemed.  Though often cruel and tragic, death had an important place in the universe.   Without death, there could be no birth or rebirth.  There would be no change to speak of and that would be bad. 

      Then the moment came.

      The harbinger of death hopped on top of the man’s shoulders.  The man could not see the creature, but he could feel a weight there.  The harbinger made sure that a live round remained in the chamber after the man ejected the magazine and reloaded.  He helped the man pull the trigger.

     Much to the man’s surprise, the gun went off.  He heard the loud explosion, which rippled instantly through him.  There was only a moment of pain before everything went dark.  The bullet had gone through his brain and lodged into the wooden beam above the kitchen door. 

      A reaper suddenly appeared beside then disembodied spirit.   The man looked down at his body, sprawled out on the floor the fridge.  For a moment he wasn’t sure what happened, then he saw his sister bending down and pressing a towel his head, which was bleeding.

      “S**t,” the man said.  “I didn’t really just shoot myself did I?”

      “Yeah, you did,” the reaper replied.  The reaper, in this case, was not wearing a black cloak and carrying a scythe.  It was a beautiful young woman who was quite a bit shorter than the man who was 6ft 3inches. 

     “That was stupid,” he sighed.

     “Perhaps, but it was your time to go"for whatever reason.”

     “I suppose,” he said sadly. 

     They watched for a few minutes as his sister tried to revive him, with no luck.  Then the paramedics arrived.   The man and the reaper wandered off toward the great white light.

     The harbinger of death, unseen to all but the dead and the magical, scurried out of the kitchen.  He had another appointment at an intersection soon.  He had to hurry if he was going to cause the fatal crash that was on his agenda that day. 

Reviews

[jlhaessly]

Imagine if they really do exist. Nice short read.