Near Death Experience

The sickness would not leave me. I tried all sorts of home remedies, rested for 4 days, got frustrated, hid under blankets flush with bad imaginings. Eventually, there was a knock at the door.

Through the glass viewer was a short hispanic man in a gas station uniform carrying a plunger.

When I greeted him, he spoke in a voice that could have come from a bullfighter's corpse, "I am Death, the end of all things. I am the chill in all wind, hair on end, I am the unknown deep, the sting behind the final blow and the underground silence of slack skin".

"That's pretty big talk, um, Death" I said, confirming the word on his name tag, "How come you aren't a skeleton? And where is your cloak and big scythe thing?"

"Budget cuts, lad. Behind the scenes the unions are acting out, the roof is leaking, the props are being stolen, it's a mess. Last time I saw you was that night in Cincinatti with the strychnine." said Death.

ME: Man, it's been a long time. Come in, have a beer. Does this mean my time is up? What a shame, I'm not going to see the next Star Wars movie or finish my new books."

DEATH: Other business brings me here. I need my disease back. It's a wrinkle in the works.

ME: A wrinkle in the works? That's vague, semi-mysterious, self-protecting, and tells me nothing. You should run for president. Or at least be a phone psychic. What's the real reason?

DEATH: You really want to know? A plastic six-pack can holder.

ME: A six-pack holder?

DEATH: A six-pack holder. The disease was engineered by a bio-chemist and a voodoo queen to send to a terrorist leader in Peru. It got mis-routed in a Bangkok whorehouse, shipped over the wrong ocean in a cargo hold, cracked open at a warehouse, blown through the wind and reached you when you were racing your nephew around a building. Remember coughing? Your time is not now, there is an important work you must do yet.

ME: Important work? Does this work involve a party, or at least a guest band?

DEATH: Nothing so grand. In 2 days, you will throw away a plastic six-pack holder without cutting it up first. It will choke a sea-gull to death in a land-fill. If this sea-gull were not put down, it would have flown over a beach and defecated on the shoulder of advertising executive Adam Jones. Jones would get angry over this, and when he returned to the office he would fire his secretary. The secretary would then cease her lunchtime affair with a former army private, telling his wife the sordid details of their encounters. The wife would then climb a clock tower and kill a random pedestrian, General Lac, with a violently thrown penny. Lac's replacement has low ear-canal fluid, and would start a global war by launching a dozen missles when he trips on a chair leg and falls into a computer terminal. This war would ultimately result in the utilization of a miscalculated but powerful chain-fusion weapon which will create an explosion powerful enough to destroy the earth. I would be out of a job. You see our dilemma. It all comes down to the highly pertinant lack of a single piece of bird-killing refuse.

ME: So, what happens to me after that?

DEATH: You will go back into the works, another role of the dice. You may have an hour. You may have 100 years. You may have longer if you eat your fiber. It matters little, everyone reaches me eventually.

Death lights a cigarette and says "And now, I'll be taking the disease back. We will of course meet again". The smoke from the paper coils like a giant snake. It fills the room, obscuring vision and bringing vertigo. I fell, or maybe rested, and awoke in a clear room smelling vaguely of Marlboro's and containing a drained beer can. The sickness is not completely gone, but I do feel a bit better. Am back to work today, losing my voice, and using too many tissues. How was your weekend?