“You sure about that?” came from Shawn. “She did lose that jumper. Really inspired. I let three of mine go be demon chow. She taught me how it’s done.”
Cookie moved as a blur, was on Shawn whaling away again, him screaming like a girl.
So much for Ellie stopping the fight and not getting into trouble. Niles would arrive to Ellie watching this all go down, because there was no way Cookie would listen to reason now. The wind whipped Ellie’s hair into her eyes and she blinked, smarting.
Screw this, Ellie thought, Screw you all. She turned, walked, head down into the wind.
I’m going home.
Against her breast, the pocket-watch thrummed again. She did not notice.
Chapter Six: The End of Time.
Three years, Ellie thinks. Three years.
Three years as a reaper. At an average of one soul every four hours, that was well over five thousand people. Probably. Ellie did not feel like tabulating anything without her phone calculator. But reapers could not own electronics, because interacting with them was wonky, for the same reason that they could not start cars or fires.
Technology, any technology, no matter how primitive—reapers did not do well.
Except their tools. Her pocket-watch thrummed again, a second warning. Incoming mentor, ahoy. But Niles would arrive near Cookie and Shawn, because that was where the call had been placed. Ellie would not be there to see him.
Just for a moment, Ellie thought about turning back.
Niles, she would say. I reaped a guy who only died because he saw me across the street. Explain it to me, Niles. You know everything there is to know.
But she would be in trouble. Witnessed a fight but did nothing. A week in solitary.
Nevermind, she thought, and walked on. She might as well do the forbidden—return to her family home. If she was going to be punished anyway, it made no difference.
Had not been back in a while. Might as well take the opportunity.
Her bruises smarted. Seemed more and more, lately.
Ellie turned a corner. Three blocks down and she could still hear Shawn wailing. Things had been quieter about a year ago—before Shawn joined the reaper squads. And Ellie knew that she would probably know Shawn for a very long time. An eternity.
Tiredness shot through Ellie’s body. She wished she could close her eyes and rest. Sleep was impossible for reapers, of course. All biological functions were defunct—sleeping, eating, peeing, sex. She could still opt to eat and drink, but there was no stomach to hold any of it. Food and water went to nothingness.
Reapers spent all their time working. Layovers were rare, once you got old enough to be used to the job. Ellie started out with twelve hour layovers between assignments. Now she was down to six hour layovers whenever Susan felt sorry for her. Or was inflicting some kind of passive-aggressive punishment. Or both.
Ellie walked until she found a bus stop with a hobo lying on one of the benches. He moved his feet so she could sit. Maybe she could try to pretend to sleep. Lie on the grass somewhere and close her eyes. Might be nice.
I’m going home, she thought again, sticking her hand into her breast pocket. The metal rivets of her pocket-watch were warm to the touch. Tugging at her scarf, wincing at the sting, she observed the dials and lifted her pinkie to begin the manipulations. A twist there, a half-turn here, flick that gear to connect its teeth with another.
Her throat burned. On the inside and out. Ellie blinked her eyes rapidly to clear them.
There. The address: 1617 West Apple Street, Colorado Springs...
She clicked the knob. The world flashed in an eyeblink.
Ellie tipped backwards, butt slamming to the grass and wetness soaking the back of her jeans through the folds of her coat. Cursing, she heaved herself upright.
She had neglected to remember that she was sitting before traveling.
This was her childhood home’s front lawn. The garden gnome her grandmother gifted her parents for their wedding stared as she walked to the front porch, each step squishing in wet grass. The gnome wore a domino mask like a superhero.
There were more Halloween decorations than she remembered from last year. A ghost hung on the hooks reserved for potted plants in the summer. A skeleton sprawled on the front porch rocking chair, the other chair holding an orange pumpkin bowl marked, TAKE ONE. Peering inside, Ellie found a single mint patty on the bottom.
What do you know, she thought, snatching it. Little buggers followed instructions.
Peppermint and chocolate. Her favorite.
The door was locked. Ellie jiggled the handle, then tapped the wood. A click.
She entered quickly to stop the wind coming in after her. The house was warm, with just a hint of stuffiness, a smell that her mother battled every day and never quite disappeared. Tile entryway, a shelf with pegs and snow boots underneath to her left.
Walking to the kitchen, Ellie heard her father say, “What happened to the paper?”
“It’s on the rack,” her mother responded, as Ellie entered the room.
Her father was in his blue plaid housecoat, like from an old film. His dark hair was still a mess, unbrushed, and his old man glasses perched a little further down his nose than necessary. He wore a pair of dog-faced slippers with red tongues poking out.
In the kitchen nook, her mother was in fuzzy pyjamas, clipping coupons with left-handed scissors. The mess spread over the table and spilled onto the nearby chair. There was a plate with crumbs before the seat next to her, evidence of Ellie’s brother.
Just for a second, Ellie expected them to turn, to see her, to respond.
Perhaps they would say: Ellie, welcome back to the waking world, sleepyhead, now have some brunch. Or: Ellie, you really should get up at a more reasonable hour.
Or: Oh my God. Ellie, is that you? How are you alive?
Then her mother would start crying and her father would get that blubbery look on his face when he was trying not to join in. They would fold their arms around her and say, Welcome home. It was all a bad dream. Praise God. Hallelujah.
And Ellie could tell them so many interesting things. Like: Mom, Dad, you guys have to lose weight. Turns out the door to Heaven is really narrow and they must’ve labeled gluttony a sin so people could be thin enough to fit through.
Or: There are like twenty ways to die in this room, did you know? Put away the scissors. Turns out, most people die at home, so this is actually the most dangerous place for us.
Or: Mom, Dad, don’t ever die, okay? Turns out....
“...no place is happy,” Ellie said, finishing the thought out loud.
Neither of her parents reacted. Her father did not even look at her as he advanced to the rack, a small side table that held slots for magazines and assorted mishmash. Ellie could see there were some new additions—her father liked to subscribe to old papery things like newspapers and nature magazines full of pictures.
As Ellie watched, he combed through the mess and did not find what he was looking for. He was right about the paper not being on the rack, and gave her mother a look saying ‘I told you so.’ She shrugged and snipped another square from Safeway.
“Robbie!” her father called. “Did you take the paper for the funnies?”
A pause, and then from further into the house: “What?”
“Did-you-take-the-paper,” her father repeated, louder and more sing-song.
“What?”
“Robbie!” her father called, and he was no longer calling for the paper.
Ellie withheld a snicker when, after a moment, there was the thump of feet across the ceiling and the creak of a door opening, but with attitude. Her brother came bumping down the stairs, but when he appeared at the kitchen door, Ellie froze.
For the first time ever, she was looking up at him. Her brother’s nostrils were level with her eyebrows. His frame was like a twist of metal clothes hangers.
Well, Ellie’s mind supplied, it has
been a year since you came, and he is that age...
In another two years, her brother would be as old as her. When she had died.
Robbie had a book under his arm. Tilting her head sideways, Ellie read: The Life of St. Augustine. Just some light reading, she thought, dazed. When she had died, her brother had mostly been into comic books and video games. Since then, however...
“What?” said Robbie, and his voice was different from what she remembered.
“Did you take the paper?” asked her father.
“Yeah, I put it by Paprika,” said Robbie, referring to the parakeet that they had bought shortly after Ellie’s death. Ellie swore the thing could see her, though she had never heard of animals being able to see reapers any more than humans.
“I wasn’t finished with it,” her father complained.
“Okay,” said Robbie, and he turned to walk down the hall. That was it: just ‘okay.’ Ellie watched him head down the hall, stepped out herself to follow. Her brother ducked into the living room, picked up the paper from the top of the stack under the stand of the birdcage, and walked with Ellie to the kitchen to hand it over. No fuss.
Who are you, Ellie wanted to say.
Her father did not seem to think this unusual. He smiled at Robbie, who grinned back. Just briefly—a flash of a moment. But in that moment, Ellie saw, they connected. Good job, her father seemed to say. Thank you, her brother seemed to reply. A simple little task, done without complaint, an acknowledgement of service.
It was the sort of exchange Ellie and her father used to have. Robbie, not so much.
Ellie realized that her throat was stinging, that her hand had snuck to pull against one of the ends of her scarf. She swallowed, observed the kitchen. Robbie was picking up the left over plates, putting them into the sink with a clatter. Her father slumped into the head seat and pawed through the paper. Her mother hummed, snipped.
Abruptly, Ellie realized there were only three chairs around the kitchen table.
Looking up from the mess, she saw the latest addition to her mother’s kitchen decorations, one of those word-art paintings that read:
AND THE LORD SHALL WIPE AWAY EVERY TEAR FROM THEIR EYES; AND THERE WILL NO LONGER BE ANY DEATH; THERE WILL NO LONGER BE ANY MOURNING, OR CRYING, OR PAIN; FOR THE FORMER THINGS HAVE PASSED AWAY.
Underneath, there was a nail in the wall, and one of her scarves was tied to it, like a shrine, but the red fabric was in bad need of dusting.
“What is this bullshit,” Ellie said, aloud, and the words burned her tongue.
She dug the pocket-watch out of her coat, nearly clawing herself in the process. The dials screeched as she flicked at them through the gold rivets with her thumbs, clumsy, savage. Four years ago. Then she clicked the knob, and—
Suddenly Ellie was not in the kitchen. Took her a moment to recognize she was back on the porch, still in front of the house. Only there were no Halloween decorations. Instead, potted spider plants hung from the hooks on the porch ceiling, and there were three rocking chairs instead of two, their shapes visible in the moonlight.
Inside the house, she heard her mother yell, “Why won’t you ever listen to me!” Her father roared back, “When you say something worth listening to, I will!”
Frowning, Ellie tried the door handle. Locked. A tap, a click, and she tried to open it. The door obeyed, but slowly, with perhaps twice the weight that wood and glass should have. Ellie felt as though the air was thickening, friction increasing as she moved toward and through the frame, dense like swimming through water.
Hard to breathe, now. Like her lungs were bursting from the weight of the air, which was a net she was straining against to even stand in place. She took a step toward the kitchen, felt the strain increase. Another step. The strain doubled.
It was like Ellie was in one of those nightmares, being chased by a monster, but each step was harder to take than the last for reasons unperceived. A third step, and the force was so great she was pushed back toward the door.
Ellie could go no further.
So, she thought. I must have been to this one before.
In the past three years, Ellie had visited her home many times. Mostly in the first year, the adjustment period when she was given long layovers and Niles had moved on from tutoring and shadowing her everywhere, so she was unchaperoned. Less visits in the second year, and almost none in the third—except now, of course.
During those visits, Ellie had used her reaper’s tool to travel back and see life before her death. She saw her living self many times—an odd feeling, watching herself play games on her phone or mutter about homework, oblivious to being observed.
But an aspect of time travel was this: one could not see oneself if the other self was also a time traveler. Or, rather, one could not observe one’s dead self in any capacity.
It was like being invisible. But also knowing that the invisible person was there.
Ellie was free to look at her living self all she wanted. She was dead and invisible, after all. She had gone back to her childhood, to see her scrape her knee riding a bike, her first day at school, the day her father was ordained. All possible.
But if she was not careful, she could only see each event once.
The moment a dead Ellie arrived on a scene, another dead Ellie could not arrive. The observer could not be observed.
If Ellie traveled back and stood in a room to watch, then that room—all lines of sight—were cut off from her later. And not just sight—hearing, too. If Ellie stood in a room and yelled, her other self could not be in listening distance. Any of the senses counted.
Ellie also could not leave things like messages or tokens, could not drop a glove for her “younger” dead self to find, could not flip open a book and leave the page to be seen. No messages back and forth in time, no meeting of minds. No paradoxes.
As she had told Keith Smithson: This is the past. Already done, can’t change it.
When Ellie had found out this rule, she had wept. If she had known from the beginning, she would have done things differently—planned things better. There were ways to observe an event without herself being observed, so she could see the same event more than once. But many of her important life moments—her grandmother telling her life story, her brother being born, her parents teaching her to read—were now inaccessible, because she had been stupid, had stood in the middle of the scene to see.
Niles had told her: But you shouldn’t be observing these moments at all. Visiting family is banned. Reaper’s tools are not meant for this, Ellie. They’re meant for reaping.
She had not gotten any solitary that time. Niles judged her pain as punishment enough.
And so now Ellie stood in the doorway and listened to her parents argue. The universe, reality, God—all of it, would not let her move closer. No observing the observer.
Her mother was shrill, occasionally screaming. Her father’s words moved in circles, like a parody of the argument itself. Why don’t you just file for divorce, he said, you don’t like being married to a man who does the Lord’s work—Maybe I will, she kept repeating. Maybe I will. You keep forgetting—you’re not married to God, you’re married to me.
Ellie recalled where she had stood the first time revisiting this argument. Her parents had paced, gripped at air with their hands, clawed at each other’s words. Violence in their eyes. Any moment they could begin beating each other bloody.
Glancing up, Ellie stared through the porch ceiling to where she knew her old room was. Up there was Ellie Sullivan the younger, lying in bed with the covers pulled over her head and the pillow wedged around her ears. Or—no. Not this night, she recalled. This time she had sat awake and listened to the whole thing, start to finish.
At least they could have tried to keep it down, came the thought, and Ellie laughed. The kind of laugh that burned like fire, and realizing what she was doing, she flung her hand from the end of her scarf. Did not help—the bruises were agitated,
throbbed.
Taking a few steadying breaths, Ellie thumbed the pocket-watch’s knob again.
She was back in daylight. Wind stirred her hair, made the bendy joints of the skeleton look like it was waving. She tucked her pocket-watch away, opened the door, stepped inside, heard her father say: “What did we decide on for dinner, again?”
“Pizza,” came Robbie’s voice. There was a pause. Their mother said, “Yes, pizza.”
Ellie entered the kitchen to see her father staring at them, a quizzical look on his face. She knew that he did not much like fast food or delivery, only health food, was puzzled how he had agreed to this. But Ellie had only to glance at her brother and mother’s faces to know the truth: they were pretending the matter was previously settled.
That was the only way to be able to eat pizza in this household, after all.
If Ellie had been alive, she would have joined in with them. Would have said, “Yeah, Dad. You agreed last night when Mom said the dishwasher was acting up.”
Robbie was smiling when he turned and opened the refrigerator, pulling out the water filter and beginning to pour himself a glass. Ellie could see that his face was more familiar, now, the same ‘I’m getting away with something’ smile that she was used to. But there were little differences—something gentler in his face, warmer.
Her father seemed to have figured out the con, grinned. “You’re all ganging up on me.”
“Naw,” said Robbie, pouring, “We just want pizza, Dad.”
Laughing, her mother added, “After all, you only live once, dear.”
Her father opened his mouth to reply—
And from Ellie’s breast pocket came a sound she had never heard – a chime.
Time froze.
No warning. Same as always. Ellie breathed in, observing the tableau: her parents sitting on opposite sides of the table. Robbie, to the side, smiling at them as water arched from the spout of the pitcher to his glass. In the middle, raised above like a message from capital-H, Heaven, was: AND THE LORD SHALL WIPE EVERY TEAR...
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