I did not even hear the door close. Suddenly I noticed her presence, sitting
a few feet away from me in the evening darkness of my den. I didn't even know
how long she'd been there quietly watching me from the shadow behind the screen
of my open laptop computer.
"Aaa!" I gave a quick startle when I saw her. My heart raced. "You about gave
me heart failure!"
"I get that sometimes," she said in a quiet voice, tinged with a dark whiskey
rumble that didn't square with her petite size. "But then I'd lose a bet I made
about you."
Awareness dawned, along with the odd disorientation one gets when rising too
quickly and smashing into an unseen shelf or steampipe. I knew who this woman
was, and there was nothing good in that knowledge. The ticking of the wall clock
in the hallway suddenly got louder. It was like a countdown.
"You're her," I ventured.
"Her 'who'?" she asked.
A pause. "Ellen?" I grabbed at my only hope.
"Sorry, not today." With that, my hope fell.
I embraced my fate. "Toi.........ummm, errr..."
She sighed. "Go ahead, say it. You want to."
"Toilet Seat Girl."
"Yes. Yes I am and you can guess why I'm here."
My heart, strangely, was not racing, and my mind was focused on the novelty of
the moment. "I'd guess that maaaaaybe you read some of the early posts in the
thread and have a bone to pick with me about the way I portrayed some things.
You're not a vengeful person though, are you?"
She laughed. "I did read some of the crap you wrote early on. You suck at this,
and hadn't really seen much of the show either. But you're right, I'm not a
vengeful person, at least not vengeful enough to travel 14-hundred miles out of
my way for a job." A job REAPING, I wanted to scream.
"So, what? then. You got a post-it with my name and a plane ticket? That's
just weird. And what has even happened with all you un-dead people anyway?
You know, after I watched the complete series TWICE on Hulu, thankyouverymuch,
I went to I-Tunes and rented your movie, and I must say whoever wrote that hadn't
seen the whole TV series either. Where did that come from?"
She stood and turned to stare at my favorite piece of art as she spoke. (It
was the desk statue of the devolving man with monkey hair, sitting on Darwin's
book and puzzling over a huge Homo Sapiens skull.)
"Good guess on the plane ticket and post-it. And thanks for watching the movie,
but that was yet another alternate reality; once the new boss was officially gone,
we all woke up the next day and Der Waffelhaus was right where we left it.
Pretty weird, but good. If you haven't guessed by now, you yourself have
kind of slipped into an alternate reality."
And indeed I had. "Yes." There really was no hope for me, except the chance
that a door to somewhere else would open. "How did I do it?"
The question earned me the famous WTF? look in response. "I don't know, I just
know I was sent to travel here, for you, to balance something out. I'm not sure
what."
"Oh. Then you're not going to reap 'Star Trek' or anything either, that was
also a pretty dumb story idea."
"That WAS dumb. You don't reap a show! Studio executives reap shows. So anyway,
I was amused that you saw Ellen Muth as a Christine Chapel possibility, even though
you fucked up the whole story with that Vulcan mating crap. Kinda pervy really.
Is she even tall enough to play Chapel? I'm just sayin'. Majel was a big girl in
those days."
"I made mistakes. Sorry." Suddenly there was a crashing sound in my kitchen
and a shout of "Bloody 'ell!! Georgie, I burned my tongue, owwww are we done yet?"
She spun and shouted down the hall, "MASON! Be good, I'm not done yet!" She
turned back toward me. "He's on probation for two weeks, so I took him along because
no one is safe if he's unsupervised."
Interesting. "So you're the boss of the crew now? Der Waffelhaus came back,
but not Rube?"
"Rube got transfered, not vaporized. I get a couple of letters a month from him,
it was his idea that I take over for him. That's what it said on the first pile of
post-its someone left at my door."
"You said if I had heart failure, you'd lose a bet. You and Mason bet on how
I'd die?"
Mason flopped onto my sofa, with a plate of spaghetti still steaming from its
two-minute ride in the microwave. "We did and one of us should have won that bet
by now. It's past his time, isn't it Georgie? Sorry to be blunt mate, but you've
seen the whole series twice, we sure don't have to tell YOu how this all works."
George sighed as she turned back to me. "I think what balances out once you're
reaped is the whole stretch of the story arc you created. You know, I read so many
books before I died, and I still read, but as a reaper I appreciate the creative
process like I never did before I died. It's really special and it's possible
that the callous way you've written this arc has put too much unneeded tension
into the various realities you borrowed from to concoct the stories. Whatever
it is, here I am, there Mason is, here you are at your computer and I got a pink
post-it burning a hole in my pocket."
We all turned toward the hall as the wall clock softly struck nine bells. "Sounds
like the hour of opportunity to me, Georgie, maybe you should have another peek at
that post-it," Mason said through mouthfuls of spaghetti. George turned to me and
said "I'm sorry, it is getting close."
She moved toward me and we both knew why. There was no running, not from this.
George raised a hand toward my cheek, then suddenly smacked my forehead as if to
wake me up. A strange sensation passed through me, hard to define, like a sudden
shift in my center of gravity.
"I always wondered if I could reap with that move. I guess I can," she said,
turning toward Mason with a grin. "We should have bet on that too."
"I am not really such a betting man, Georgie, I'm a speed freak and we really like
a sure thing." Mason finished a bite of french bread with a slow, quiet belch.
"That was delicious. I bet George that you'd cack it by choking on your dinner, and
I guess that won't be happening now."
Yet I was puzzled to find myself puzzled in my final moments. "How can you
reap me? You're fictional characters, you're not really even Ellen Muth or
Callum Blue. How does that happen?"
"Remember the show? We REAP fictional characters, that's what we do mate," said
Mason. "Tell him why I'm on probation George."
"Mason slipped me a bogus post-it, for a girl named Claire down in Odessa Texas.
I removed her soul about three dozen times before I figured out that she was not
just A cheerleader, she was THE cheerleader and she wasn't gonna die in her storyline.
Then that Sylar guy tried to eat my brain. There's one big ass graveling inside of
that dude."
Realization dawned on me. "I'm writing this about me, and I'm fictional too."
George nodded.
"Then I guess there's just one question left. How did YOU bet that I would die?"
"How else? A space toilet to the head, so you can be dead like me!" She smiled
and backed slowly away from me.
I turned automatically toward the huge crash which exploded the roof of my house and
Qapla!!!
