Episode 1

I woke up in a void.

It wasn't a black void like space, but a pure white one. I wasn't even sure if it could be called a void. Void was absence, but here it simply seemed that nothing had ever existed.

Except me, now?

I had a vague feeling that was wrong. Shortly afterwards I was proven wrong in another way. A person covered from head to toe in a robe manifested just like that, as if all this wasn't strange enough already. The hood covered his face completely. Not a hint of his face could be seen behind it, just a cloak of darkness.

Oh.

Although I couldn't remember how I'd gotten here, I was suddenly sure I'd died.

How, when, it didn't matter, the point was that I was well and truly dead, and perhaps death with a capital A had come to pay a visit.

Still, I asked the thing in front of me. I didn't dare call it a person. Nothing that existed in a place like this could be a person, perhaps.

“I'm dead, aren't I?”

“That's right.”

It didn't beat around the bush or try to soften the issue. Great. Dead, when I'd barely begun to live. Fuck, I was, or rather had been, thirty-four years old. There were already brats calling me old, but I was still in my prime, for fuck's sake.

“And now... What now?” I shifted uncomfortably in the spot. My ass wanted a seat, but there wasn't a chair or anything anywhere. “I never believed in things like heaven or hell, so now I'm kind of....” Shitting my pants. Better to swallow those words, though. “Please no eternal torture.”

I had done things I wasn't too proud of. When I was seventeen I shot a teacher in the nuts, after which I ended up in juvenile hall, but I felt that the Almighty would be on my side on that one. But it was hard to be sure about anything then, of course.

“I'm sure we can work something out somehow. Eh? Eh?”

I winked at him and subtly wiggled my eyebrows. But I didn't really have anything in particular in mind. I could only think that my ma was right and in the end I had stepped in too much shit and ended up to my neck in it.

I should have listened to her, of course, but with “shot a teacher in the package” permanently on my rap sheet it's not like I had much of a choice either. Juvenile hall doesn't sound as bad as prison, but as far as your future prospects go it's basically the same thing.

“Joshua Lopez. Just shut up and listen. You don't have to worry about that. You're here because you didn't just die. The reaper who was going to guide your soul to the afterlife did too.”

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It made sense. My life down there had been full of problems. If there is life after death and it seemed like there was, why wouldn't it be more of the same shit? Hell at least he skipped my middle name.

“How?”

“If I knew, it wouldn't be a problem.” That wasn't what I had asked, but I didn't have the balls to correct the thing. For the moment at least. “What I can tell you is what it means to you. I don't know what's in store for your soul; it hasn't had a chance to be placed in the scales yet. But if you don't get it back, there will be neither eternal torture nor heaven. You will disappear without a trace.”

Oh. That's great.

Yes, I had spent years getting used to the idea that dead is dead and then my corpse was just going to rot and feed the ground. Mostly the worms. But now that I knew there was more, how could I let it go?

For starters, I had to see my sister again. I had to know how she had been doing. I hoped, of course, that the meeting wouldn't happen too quickly.

“And are you telling me out of kindness or because there's something I can do?”

The kindness thing was a joke, of course, though I tried not to let the sarcasm show in my voice. If there was one thing that both Spain and America had taught me, it was that if it's free, you're the product.

“You're the only one who can do it. Me, us, we can't interfere. I'm going to send you to a different world...”

“That sounds like one of those stupid Chinese cartoons my sister likes.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

I would be more concerned if Death or a reaper or whatever was so idle as to know what I was talking about. I couldn't bring myself to say that either. It occurred to me that maybe he could read my thoughts, but in that case I was already screwed, so there was no point in worrying.

“In seven days, you'll have to find the reaper who murdered one of us and took your soul.”

“Are you sure he's in that world? Whatever it is.”

In case you were wondering, no. The existence of another world didn't make me curious. Mine was a mountain of garbage, but at least my sister was in the middle of all that garbage. It had always been her and me against the world, and the only thing I really regretted was that that had changed.

Just now, in dying. In going away.

“That's the only thing we're sure of.”

“And I don't have, I mean, you're not going to give me any more clues or...”

I thought I'd have more time to try to get information out of it, but the next moment they were gone. That thing and the void I had ended up in after my death, however it happened. Yes, I was still unable to remember it. It sure wasn't anything pretty so I couldn't say I was in a hurry.

What surrounded me was a meadow. Progress, compared to literally nothing, I supposed. There were no funny little animals or fantastic creatures, nothing like that either.

I assumed the fantastic creature was actually me.

A man from another world.

Who didn't know anything, so I was more lost than a black Jew at a Ku Klux Klan meeting. That bastard hadn't even given me a map, or a place to start! He had just told me to go and do it, like it was so easy.

“You son of a bitch!”

My scream spread across the meadow. After a long pause...

“I hope he didn't hear that.”

The surroundings weren't the only thing that had changed.

My body (which was semi-transparent, by the way) had changed as well. Mama always said I had the soul of a little boy, but I hadn't believed her on that one either.

Yeah. I looked like I was about nine, maybe ten years old.

That was the most pleasant thing about it, actually.

I may not have had hair down there now, but I did have hair up there. I missed my luxurious mane of hair. A metaphorical tear, but very masculine, spilled from my heart or my soul or whatever was left inside me after whatever had happened for me to have died and end up in this mess.

“So, what the fuck do I do now?”

Episode 1: FIN