We continue from where we last left Gerald.
***
If he were being completely honest with himself, Gerald would most likely put this down to one of the weirder experiences he had ever had in his life. It certainly wasn’t every day that one waited beside your own corpse for the Grim Reaper to return from the supermarket. It wasn’t the longest of waits, but it also wasn’t the shortest, and death had a funny way of slowing things down. Patience, never being his strong suit, lost to morbid curiosity and Gerald began inspecting his former body.
Having been one or two strong reality checks on the wrong side of slightly chubby, there was no mistaking the trademark signs of a heart attack. His skin was a great deal greyer than it had been a few moments ago and the only description he could give for his once blue eyes was hollow. Looking upon himself, from a perspective that he had never had before, truly made him regret not caring better when it mattered.
Disgusted with himself, Gerald stepped away from the scene and turned his attention to his wife. Still pretty, if not slightly weathered now, Agnes had still not even noticed his death. The pop-scrape of the needle and thread working her newest pattern seemed louder than ever. Whether it be that same incessant noise that had accompanied the previous twenty-something years, or the fact that she had simply missed the fact that he had just died in the same room, but it was fair to say that Gerald was ever so slightly annoyed with her.
With disgust to his left, and annoyance to his right, Gerald did what he had learned from a very early age to do when one was uncomfortable; look at his shoes. It was at that point that he noticed the fine, shimmering thread of silvered light wrapped around his ankle and leading off to his corpse. Lifting the thread between fingers and thumb, Gerald started gathering in handfuls of the line as he slowly stepped his way back toward his former body. Crouched now above his face, he traced the line back to his mouth.
Now, I’m not here to say that Gerald’s decision was flawed, you will need to be that judge. All I know, is that when faced with an ethereal thread trailing from your corpse to what you could only assume is your soul, it is probably the wise move to leave it the hell alone. Gerald had never really been considered wise.
Gerald pulled at the string, lifting a few hand-lengths of some shimmering substance from his throat. The line became taut, but with a deft little tug, he managed to loosen it again. Pulling another two feet of thread from his mouth, the trailing end left his body, tied around a worm-shaped sack.
“Hey, do you like gummy bears? They’re a bit toasted,” the voice accompanied a purplish flash. Gerald whipped his head around, thread in hand and his favourite confused look on his face.
Death froze. His mouth dropped as his skeletal hands shot to his cheekbones, his scythe clattering to the floor.
“What did you. . . what have you. . . what in the heavens and hells did you DO?”
Gerald blankly stared on as the Grim Reaper began to hop from leg to leg, muttering inaudible obscenities, hands stroking the bare bones of his face. “I can put it back?” he offered.
Runic Rumblings 