The Girl

*WARNING DISCLAIMER* This post is a creative piece hence contains some perturbing content. Read at your own discretion.

The girl found herself in her room. What she was doing there in the first place, she did not know. However what she did remember was a sudden blinding flash of light as the car hit her at full force. She must be dead.

Her room was the same as usual: simple furniture from Ikea, a desk drowning in piles of school stuff, posters taped to the pink walls and her beloved photographs lined up side by side in the glass cabinet. Her breathing ceased when her eyes rest upon a dark presence at the corner in front of her bathroom door. Draped in a pitch-black cloak from head to toe, the Grim Reaper seemed to be waiting for her arrival.

“Who are you? Where am I?” the girl rubbed her arms frantically back and forth to keep warm in the freezing temperature.

“The Grim Reaper. You are here and nowhere; a place in between life and death,” while the Grim Reaper’s lips remain unmoving, she could hear his voice clearly, as though it’s whispering into her ear.

Frightened out of her wits, the girl squeaked, “Why are you here?”

“I’ve come here to prepare you,” the Grim Reaper’s unblinking eyes flooded her soul with dread.

A pause. “For?”

“Your beginning of your end.”

“My beginning… my end…?” The girl’s mind was a complicated mess of whirling thoughts; unable to comprehend the oxymoron. She was dead; that’s for sure. However, the Grim Reaper’s presence and his unfathomable words did not make any sense whatsoever.

Don’t the dead end up in Heaven? Why was she stuck in this transition between ‘here and nowhere’ instead?

“Are you preparing me for my afterlife?”

“No,” its voice drifted eerily across the room, “I am preparing you for eternal oblivion.”

The girl’s blood ran cold.

Voice trembling, she choked out, “There is nothing after death? No Heaven, no Hell? No God?”

“No. There is only you and me,” the Grim Reaper gazed at her coolly.

“You liar!” the girl screamed, dropping to her knees as her feet gave way, “You liar! G- god will save me; God loves me; he will bring me there to live among angels!”

Silence.

It only seemed to grow and grow; its shadows unfurling in tentacles about the room.

Desperate, the girl crawled over to the Grim Reaper, tugging at the ends of its cloak. “What can I do? What should I do? I need to go back; I need to set things right. I need to say goodbye…”

The Grim Reaper cast its empty eyes at her. Pointing its shrivelled, decaying finger at the photos behind the glass door, he said, “Remember while you can.”

The girl immediately flung open the glass door and hugged the precious photos to her chest; cradling them as she collapsed onto the floor. Her vision blurring, she took a long, last, good look at her family and friends. She could have said goodbye. She could have thanked them. She could have utter those three words- I love you- to them when it was possible to. She should have cherished those memories when she was alive.

Now she could not.

“I’m ready,” she finally stood up after a long silence.

The Grim Reaper turned to the closed door behind him, which, on a normal day when she was alive, leads straight to the bathroom. With a slight push, the plastic door folded in, revealing what lies beyond.

No light, no darkness, no white, no black, just nothing.

Nothing.

An endless pit of eternal oblivion.

With tears streaming down her face, the girl took the first step.

“My beginning of my end.”