How To Be Dead #1-3 (The 'How To Be Dead' Grim Reaper)

by Dave Turner

He checked his pocket watch. A gift from three old friends. Crafted for him by Patek Philippe & Company in 1933 with a movement as complicated and precise as the dance of the stars that he had counted for millennia.

SOME DAYS YOU are Godzilla. Other days you are Tokyo.

Pride comes before a fall and physics is a harsh mistress.

'I think that if you always have to think outside of the box, then you probably need to get a different box,'

'You can't change the world with grand gestures. You have to do it in tiny increments.

As my mother always told me, if you love someone set them free. There's a possibility that they won't press charges.'

Sometimes, though, he liked to travel to a desert far away from civilisation and lay staring up at the Milky Way's thick, glowing ribbon looping around the Earth. A galaxy that contained more stars than there were grains of sand beneath him and every atom of each of those grains was born out in the cosmos. Death didn't understand why humanity didn't spend more time and energy on space travel. It wouldn't be exploration. It would be going home.

'I was not ready to take a wife.' 'And you are now?' Conquest laughed. 'No, but she's who I've been looking for in all my years of walking this world. I just didn't realise it until I met her. When I looked into her eyes that first night, I was excited, amazed, scared and unsure of myself. I knew what it was like to be human.'

Then Julia was next to him. She smiled and Conquest felt thousands of years fall away. He was new and reborn and the world was once again full of infinite possibilities.

Death could grasp the distance between the farthest stars, but the idea that his two friends were gone forever was too big.

The tragedy of life is that everything dies. The blessing of it is that nobody knows when. He wished the world would grasp that fact.

'By the end of it all humanity, generally, disappointed Conquest. But not you. He always followed your exploits with great interest and pride. I don't think he was trying to save the world. I think he was saving you.' Julia MacDonald died with a smile on her lips.

Anne Mitchell looked up at the clear summer sky. When she was a kid, she asked her father why the sky was blue. He told her that it was because the sky loved the ground, but the ground was so distant.