Deathcabs and Drycleaners

“Not all wisdom is based in truth. Nor is all truth accepted by even the most wise.”

— Thalor Arkanis,

Third Prophet of the First Order

Death leaned lazily against the hood of a black-and-yellow checkered cab, staring down at my lifeless corpse as it bobbed in the murky water. The cab wasn’t one of the sleek, newer models—this thing was a fossil from a long-forgotten era. But in a world where the cost of parts rivaled rent, relics like this were more rule than exception, patched up with mismatched upgrades just to keep rolling.

The ocean’s idle ebb and flow made my body dance, bouncing against the stilts of the dock. The motion only made it seem more dead. I stood silent and still, trying to make sense of the scene.

“Well, I’ll be damned. Jack Callaghan, in the spectral. I’m a huge fan.”

Death’s smile faded as he placed a hand on my shoulder. “Real shame,” he said, thrusting a long finger toward the body. “It’ll be a few hours before anyone finds it, at least. Hate to see water damage like that. Not to mention the hungry fish. I’m not a betting man, but if I were, I’d put money down on a closed casket.” He reached down with one slender arm and lifted my face out of the water, taking a moment to consider it. “Yep, definitely closed.” He dropped it with a splash.

Death looked different from what you’d expect. He wore a cloak and bore a scythe, as he’s classically depicted. But the cowl was pulled back, revealing the face of a man. He looked middle-aged, with faint lines around his eyes, the kind etched by years of smiling. His skin was sun-kissed, though still pale at the neck, and he had the unassuming air of a dad who never missed a soccer game but forgot his own anniversary every year.

The thing that got me, though, wasn’t his face. It was the way he felt real— too real—while everything else around me was paper-thin, like a cheap holo-projection. The world was off, flat, empty, like it had been sketched by someone who forgot how depth worked. My head throbbed, intense rhythmic drums, like the System was trying to sync with something that didn’t exist anymore.

I tried to focus, but my life was a haze—a chaotic jumble of fractured images, static, and half-formed thoughts. Desperate, I triggered a Status Check, but the only response was a flare of agony, a white-hot spike tearing through my nerves. The System was gone, glitching itself into oblivion. And me? I wasn’t far behind.

“Don’t worry about the mind fog,” he said, with the bedside manner of an experienced nurse. “The memories come back... or they don’t. You’re thinking without a brain now. New sensation. Don’t know why people try to think with their brains anyhow. Gums up the works, if you ask me. But what do I know? I’m just the embodiment of Life’s Ending, the face of Transition itself.”

“It’s coming back to me. But it’s a bit of a blur,” I replied, my voice distant, like it belonged to someone else.

“Quite right. Few people like to hold on to their lives. Easier to let it all slip away, isn’t it? Don’t think too much about it—always leads to headaches.” His accent was a patchwork, shifting like a bad signal, slipping from one region to another mid-sentence, as though he couldn’t quite decide who he wanted to be.

I studied him, then looked back at the body— my body. I should’ve been more shocked, maybe terrified, but I wasn’t. I’d seen plenty of strange things: demons, cursed houses, hellish battlefields filled with horrors that refused to die. But this? This was something else entirely.

Reality flickered, faint bursts of shadow and light dancing at the corners of my vision like static on an untuned Spectral Vision. Jagged images pulsed through my skull—splintered shards of something half-remembered. Memories? Hallucinations? A system glitch? I couldn’t tell anymore. I’d heard the stories about people cracking after one too many hits of Demon Juice—brains frying like eggs in a greasy diner, neural interfaces shorting out in their final frantic spasms. Machines gone haywire, humans unraveling in tandem. Maybe this was my turn: the slow, messy decay of whatever was left of me.

This is your brain. And this is your brain on Demon Juice.

Reality rippled, a hollow hum echoing somewhere in the distance.

“I’m definitely going insane, or dying,” I muttered, the words heavy and inevitable. “Or both.”

From this perspective, the corpse hardly even looked like me. Maybe it was because it was dead, or because I wasn’t used to looking at the back of my own head. Then again, and more likely, I wanted to pretend it was someone else. That I was looking at the body of some other poor hapless schlub. That this was all a bad dream. The details of my life came slowly when I let them, but they slipped through my fingers like gossamer if I reached too hard.

“So, this is it?” I asked. “I’m dead?”

“I’m afraid so, buddy. But don’t sweat it, no-body’s perfect.” Death waited with an expectant stare before shrugging off his smirk with a sigh. “Tough crowd.” He shook his head subtly. “What do you expect when talking to stiffs?”

“You’re not really what I expected,” I said.

“You know, I get that a lot. It’s like the hood and scythe aren’t enough anymore. People want the whole song and dance. I mean, that was good and all for the first thousand years, but come on, can you honestly tell me you’d prefer this?”

He lifted his hood over his head. Black tendrils of smoke spiraled around him, raising him into the air several feet. His face, hidden behind the deep and endless darkness of his hood, left two fiery orbs peering back at me. His hands, skeletal and grotesque, pointed down at me as he rose higher and higher still. Winds crashed hard, and I struggled to stay on my feet.

Then a voice that sounded as old as time itself. To say it spoke would be wholly lacking. Rather, it intoned without speaking. Deep and full and all that was.

“DEATH HATH COMETH, PUNY MORTAL. BOW NOW FOR YOUR TIME IS AT ITS END. ACCEPT THE FATE OF ALL. FOR I AM THE DESTINY OF ALL CREATURES. THE FINAL WORD OF ALL WORDS. THE…”

“Okay! Okay! I get your point,” I shouted out against the whipping winds. This was insane.

Within a blink, he was the middle-aged man again. “See what I mean?” he said, straightening up and dusting himself off. “And all that smoke leaves a smell. Heck of a time at the dry cleaners.” He assessed me briefly. “Hey, you don’t happen to know of a good dry cleaner in town? Possibly one familiar with shawls. Good cleaners are hard to find. I’d machine wash, but I hate to...” He looked up and caught my eyes before shaking his head. “I suppose not. Well, no matter. It’s about time to go.” He opened the backseat of the cab and made a sweeping motion with his hand.

I watched him closely, half-expecting another one of those unsettling transformations, but he stood unmoving, one hand casually shoved into his pocket, the other gesturing toward the cab door, like he was the chaperone at a school dance. It was almost disarming—too normal for someone like him—and that’s what bothered me.

Death wasn’t what you think. It was like the punchline to a joke that you missed, leaving nothing but an empty, bitter feeling at the end. Maybe life was the joke after all. I glanced down at the corpse sprawled out in front of me, bloated and already becoming a feast for flies. The sight was familiar, yet the finality of it was distant, like something just out of reach.

Then I looked at Death—really looked at him. I’d never imagined what he might be like, but this wasn’t it. There was something familiar in his eyes—a look I’d seen too many times before. It was the same haunted stare I’d caught in worn-out car salesmen and down-and-out hustlers: nervous, desperate, like he was about to pull a fast one on me. It was as if...

“Alright,” I said, turning towards the cab, pushing down the gnawing unease twisting in my gut. “Let’s get this over with.”

Before I could reach the door, Death materialized in front of me, his eyes now brimming with concern. “Just like that?”

Something didn’t sit right. He was holding back; I could feel it.

“Why not? I sure look dead to me,” I said, nodding at the waterlogged corpse. “It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do. So, tell me—can you catch the game in the afterlife, or wherever I’m headed?”

Death raised an eyebrow, his expression a mix of incredulity and something close to amusement. “This is where most people beg. You don’t want more time? No unfinished business? No lost love or vendetta to settle?”

I’d seen cons before, and this smelled like one. Death wanted me to plead, to bargain for another shot. And maybe a part of me wanted to, but a bigger part of me hated being played.

“Nope, I’m good.” I shrugged, trying to keep the macabre surrealness of it all from crushing me. “I’ve lived my life. Wasn’t the best life, but it was mine. And, as my old man used to say, ‘when it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go.’” I attempted to dodge around him, but he moved to block me again.

“Hold on,” he said, raising a hand. “Are you really ready for what comes next? Don’t you even want to know where you’re headed?”

I paused, considering his words for a moment. “Don’t care.”

His grin faltered, darkening into something almost... worried. “It’s not where you think.”

“I said, I don’t care.” I made toward the cab door again, but Death didn’t budge. His eyes narrowed, sharp as a knife. Then, as if deciding something, he deflated a bit.

“Alright, fine, you got me,” he muttered, frustration clear in his voice. With a swift motion, he slammed the cab door shut, the lock clicking ominously. From his cloak, he pulled out an hourglass and turned it on its side. Instantly, the world ground to a near halt—the ocean froze, waves suspended mid-crest, and the flies buzzing around my corpse hung motionless, their wings caught mid-flap.

“What’s with all the theatrics, Death?” I asked, my patience wearing thin. “Think I’ve had enough of the song and dance routine.”

“I figured if you asked me, it’d be easier than... well, it doesn’t really matter. They warned me you’d be difficult,” he said, shaking his head.

“Why are you really here? And what the hell is going on? You make a habit of collecting every soul personally?”

Death’s eyes darted around, his movements suddenly jittery, like he was expecting someone—or something—to be watching us. “Keep it down,” he said, his voice low, tinged with a Manhattan accent that wasn’t there before. He was trying to sound casual, but there was an edge to it.

The realization hit me like a brick. “You’re not supposed to be doing this, are you?”

“Technically, no,” he admitted, his reluctance palpable as his gaze slid away from mine. “But then again, you weren’t supposed to die just yet either, so we’re both in a bit of a gray area.”

A knot of anger tightened in my gut. “What do you mean, I wasn’t supposed to die? I’m standing here, pretty damn dead, aren’t I?”

Death sighed, rubbing the back of his neck like he was shouldering the weight of a thousand worlds. “Someone snipped your thread too early. Cut you loose before your time.”

I narrowed my eyes, suspicion and anger mingling. “So what, someone whacked me?”

“In an Eternal sense, yeah,” Death replied with a shrug, as if tampering with the cosmic order was a typical Tuesday. “Someone’s been messing with the scales. I had a word with Fate—it’s not her doing, which is saying something if you know how tight she keeps her threads. That little detail should keep you up at night.”

“Eternal?” The word was heavy in my mouth, like the cold weight of a loaded Glock.

“There’s a handful of us,” he said, waving it off like it was no big deal. “Time, Fate, War, Love, even the Devil himself.”

“So you’re saying you guys are, what, gods?”

“Eh, not exactly. We keep the show running, sure, but gods? No. I’m still on the fence about whether there’s really someone up there pulling the strings or if it’s just us making it up as we go along. If there is a man upstairs, you’d have to admit he’s made some weird decisions. I mean, look at sex—or the duck-billed platypus. Who thought those were good ideas?”

He smirked, but the darkness in his eyes didn’t fade. “No, we’re not gods. And the positions aren’t permanent either. Think of it more like an immortal nine-to-five.”

“Good benefits?”

“Eh,” he shrugged, “not a lot of vacation time.”