Page 17 of How to Survive Your Own Death

“How did you sleep?” the reaper asked, sitting at her table like he had been there before. A dog—large, black and familiar—sat next to him.

“Like the dead,” she answered.

The reaper laughed. The dog thumped its tail. Fiddlesticks did her thing and ran away to hide.

“That’s not funny,” Geri said with a frown. Her head felt fuzzy from the sleeping pill and she hadn’t intended to make a smartass comment. Must have been her natural talent shining through.

“Incorrect. It is mildly amusing,” the reaper said.

“You’re not real.” Geri shuffled her way toward the kitchen table. Released from the hospital a few hours before dawn with a fistful of prescription meds, she went straight to bed.

Her stomach rumbled. “What time is it?”

“Supper. Your neighbors are having tacos.”

“Tacos sound good but that involves a trip to the store, which isn’t happening. Also, you’re not real.” Geri poured herself a glass of orange juice and grabbed a box of crackers. She slept the day away and her hallucination was still there, as robust and vivid as anything.

“That is not a proper meal.”

Robust, vivid, and judgy.

“Oh, sorry my dinner offends you. It’s the cook’s night off,” she said, munching into a cracker. Crumbs landed on the front of her nightshirt. The dog moved next to her, as if pleading for a snack.

“You must have adequate nutrition while you work off your debt to me.”

The dog wore a pleading expression and placed a paw on Geri’s thigh.

“Sorry, I’m not throwing crackers on the floor for a hallucination,” she said around another mouthful. “You look like the dog from the trail. Bones.”

The dog’s ears perked and her tail wagged.

“Are you Bones?”

Both paws were now on Geri’s thigh.

“Fine. Have a cracker.” She tossed one toward Bones and it vanished immediately. She’d have to remember to sweep the floor before she went to bed lest she get mice. Fiddlesticks was a good hunter but Geri wasn’t leaving garbage on the floor.

Bones looked so real. Her tongue as she licked her chops. Her eyes, asking for another treat. It made sense in a twisted way that she was hallucinating the dog she saw moments before her fall, as if her brain were repeating the last minutes before being injured.

“You’re not the doll man, though,” she said, looking at the reaper.

He pulled back the hood and a skeletal face grinned back at her. “Doll man?”

“Bones’s owner. He looked like he was suffering from a Victorian wasting disease and also like a haunted doll.”

The reaper laughed again. It was disturbing, a rattling dry sound of twigs and leaves scattering over pavement on a desolate, moonless night. “I have never been described so evocatively.”

“Yeah, well—” She didn’t have a snappy comeback. “Do you have a name?”

“I’ve had many names. Atenro. Nitis. Nekaanah. Awaheya. Leimannen. Grimmige reaper,” repeating what he said the night he invaded her apartment. “You may call me Bazel.”

“Bazel,” she repeated, ignoring the warning in her gut that naming her delusion was a bad idea. “I’m too conscious for this shit.”

She finished her orange juice and wished she could take another sleeping pill. Being unconscious was better than arguing with herself as her sanity unraveled.

The bike was remarkably crowded considering one of the riders only existed in her mind. The dog trotted alongside, oblivious to people on the sidewalk and cars on the street. The reaper, however, just hovered behind her, not exactly sharing the seat but clearly along for the ride.

“So,” Geri said, taking on a teaching tone, “you might know this as a velocipede, but we call it a bicycle.”