THE BLOGFEST OF DEATH IS UPON US!!

MWAHAHAHAHAHA...

Finally, it's my day! The day of the Death 'fest!

So have you all prepared yourself? You know what it's all about? Woo-hoo, let's have ourselves some death scenes! Here's a list of the participants, make sure to go read everyone's entries and leave them a word or two...

If you want to read up on the rules/requirements, you can do so HERE. Basically, the task was to kill someone (fictionally, of course).

I'll be doing a post on THURSDAY to reveal the winner of the $10 Amazon Voucher...maybe there'll be something for the rest of you, too, who knows...(insert MWAHAHAHA). I'll also be commenting today and tomorrow on all of your stories, and I WILL get to all of you, but at last count there were 56 of you so it might take me a while to get through to everyone... 

So. Even after practicing for this 'fest, I STILL find it excruciatingly difficult to kill my characters. It took me ABSOLUTELY AGES to write something for my own blogfest. I tried and tried and tried and ended up with a lovescene, a kitchy scene of a loving prince and his wife exclaiming over the fact that she's pregnant, a scene where an evil king finds his heard and drops his blade, and one where the killing blade turns out to be false. 

Well. So I looked at my calender and YIKES it was saturday no death scene I was gonna die die die HELP and then my muse came by for a short visit. 

(Those of you expecting the death of a king, sorry, that turned into a short story in which I have NOT reached the death scene yet...I'm planning to post that a bit at a time over the next few weeks if you're interested...)

Here's the result (a little longer than I specified in my own rules, sorry), hope you like it: 

A day in...ehm...well... in the life of Death

I love my job, I really do. 

I have a great boss, I’m vice-supervisor of the day shift in my Quadrant, and it pays really, really well. The health benefits are great, and they even extend insurance to the entire family.

Wouldn’t you love it, too?

My shift starts right about the time my children - I have two, a boy and a girl - start school and kindergarten so we all have breakfast together as a family. Jonah is four and Maggie just turned ten. Martha, my wife, she works from home, doing internet research for Judgment Day. What, you’re surprised? It’s a digital age, after all. Even we go with the times. We thought long and hard about homeschooling the kiddies, but figured, in the end, experiencing normal school life would be good for them.

After all, we might live in a perfectly ordinary suburb, but we were far from ordinary.

It was my turn to make breakfast that day. I danced down the stairs with the newest hit from my radio alarm stuck in my head (something about Bad Romances), loving the way my robe swirled around me. I love my uniform. I wish I could wear it all the time but the normals tend to frown at that. Except on Halloween. I love Halloween.

Martha was dealing with the early morning bathroom chaos, so I had free reign in the kitchen. The table was set in no time, glasses and bowls and spoons all ready to go. I dug the kiddies’ favourite chocolate cereal out of the cupboard and put the coffee on for Martha and me. The puppy (whom Jonah had imaginatively named Puppy of Death, Puppy for short) was nipping at my heels, begging to be let out.

Breakfast was my job. Walking a tea-cup poodle with pink and white hair was not. I had to watch my image, after all. 

Death does not do walkies with pink toy poodles.

I was about to get the milk out of the fridge when I made the mistake of looking down.

Dammit. Puppy eyes.

By the time the puppy and I were back, Jonah had made his way downstairs.

“Daddy, where’s the milk?”

I detached the puppy from his little pink leash, thanking the Boss that I’d avoided any neighbours and thus retained my manhood. 

“Well, Jonah, I’m not sure. Where does milk come from?”

He frowned up at me, then down at Puppy. “Daddy we don’t have a cow, do we?”

“Ehm, no. Where does milk come from inside a kitchen?” I got myself a cup of coffee strong enough to make Death stand up straight (sorry but that always makes Martha laugh) and sat at the table to watch my son work it out. It took him only a second or so, then he got up from his chair and rolled his eyes at me.

“Daddy, why don't you just ask me to get it?” he asked as he made his way to the fridge. I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing and whispered “sorry” into my coffee.

That was it for my little bit of morning peace because Martha and Maggie were now onstage and live. I don’t think I could have gotten a word in edgewise if I tried, so I just nodded or ‘hmpfed’ at appropriate lulls in conversation and started silently planning my day.

There was that old lady on Sycamore Street who’d have to go today, and that accident on Main Street with the teenage skateboard heroes who thought skipping school was ‘the bomb’ and helmets were majorly un-cool or whatever the slang was right now. Then this afternoon that doctor with the new pilot’s license and at 4pm the lady with the botox and...

“Jonah!” I jumped up from my chair and tried in vain to wipe the milk from my robe. Martha threw me her napkin and laughed. “Martha!”

There was milk everywhere, liberally sprinkled with bits of chocolate cereal. Great. Even the dog was laughing at me, jumping around and licking up stray puddles of milk.

I stomped up the stairs to fetch my spare robe. Thankfully it was right where it should be, on its little hanger, fresh from the dry cleaners. I changed quickly and took a quick look at the mirror to check my hair.

Purple. The robe was purple.

Not black, purple.

“MARTHA!” A faint “What, honey” echoed up the stairs. I held the offending garment as far away from my body as it would go and stalked back down the stairs.

“Martha, what’s this?” I asked. Martha told me later that I was shouting but I’m sure I was perfectly calm. I’m always calm. Death is always calm. Even if he happens to be wearing a purple robe.

My lovely wife peeked around the kitchen door and clasped a hand before her mouth. Couldn’t hide the crinkles next to her eyes she always got when she laughed, though. Our children knew no such restraint. They took one look at me and burst out laughing.

“Oh, my,” Martha finally managed to say. “They must have made a mistake at the cleaners. I’m so sorry honey...”

Right. “Yea, you look really sorry. Where’s the spare?”

Martha shook her head and tried herding the kiddies back to the breakfast table. “We gave that to the Death Collection last Christmas, remember? For Demon Children in Need?”

“No good deed goes unpunished,” I said, then cursed.

“DADDY! The milk’s gone off!”

And that’s why Death shouldn’t curse. Forget quarters in a jar. Going grocery shopping every time a curse slipped through your lips got really old, really fast. Also, it was expensive.

“Martha, I’m leaving.” I grabbed my scythe from its stand by the door and started to vanish into the otherworld when I heard my daughter’s outraged shriek.

“Daddy, you can’t go out like that! People might see you! My friends might hear of it! I’ll never live it down!” 

I rematerialized enough to frown at her (and at the Puppy of Death who was currently chewing at the purple hem of my purple robe). “Would you rather I go naked? Would that be better?” 

I left before I could hear the next DADDY aimed my way.

Work was ok. The old lady on Sycamore Street, a Mrs Simpkins according to my notes, couldn’t see well enough to tell the difference between purple and black, anyway. It only took a gentle touch of my scythe to her forehead and up she went to meet her judgement.

The skateboard hoodlums made fun of me.

“Yo, dude, a purple robe? Did they not have rainbow colored ones?” The two of them laughed their heads off (literally - I don’t HAVE TO just touch them with the scythe, after all). It made me feel better, though I could almost feel the Boss shaking his head at me. I sighed. The guys from Hellfire Inc were in charge of vengeance, not me. It was bad form to ursurp competencies.

It also made me late for the doctor and his crashed airplane. I almost got beaten to the scene by emergency services and wouldn’t that have been a perfect disaster? Messing with the time plan was not going to endear me to the Boss.

The botox lady was kind of interesting. First time I had one of those on my list. The plastic surgeon she’d gone to that morning had just finalized his divorce and lost a sizable chunk of his fortune, so he was a little distracted when he placed the injections. Something went wrong, the poison spread, she had an adverse reaction and then I came along. I materialized in front of her just as she collapsed on her white leather couch, gasping for breath.

Her face was all contorted into a strange expression not unlike a smile. She saw me and... no, she wasn’t laughing at me. She wasn’t. It was that botox stuff. I touched her with my scythe and stared at the empty shell she left behind for a while. No, definately not a laughing kind of smile.

The rest of the day went by without a hitch. A couple of fatal accidents there, a young fool drowning because he jumped off a bridge on a dare, and that was that.

Shift over. I survived my purple robe day without bumping into any colleagues (dead people don’t count - they can’t tell tales, after all).

That’s when I remembered the meet-and-greet my lovely (and ever so thoughtful) wife had organized for the new guys in my Quadrant.

Tonight.

Sometimes I hate my job.

***

There, that's my death scene for you. Any good? Don't be shy now, let me know! And don't forget to check out all the other entries, too (for link list see above).