The Messenger

As he climbs the stool he had positioned directly beneath the noose, he feels a kind of anxiety and hesitation at the same time.“I’m done,” he says as he slides his head into the noose.

He thinks about his family. They were a pain in his behind. They had killed his dreams all in the name of how much they “loved and cared” about him. Bullshit. All they wanted was for him to be like them. Anything not like them wasn’t good enough.

His friends; he wonders if he ever had any. They had a certain phobia for his dark days and always disappeared when he needed them the most.

As he tightens the noose around his neck, the sting of the sharp rope gives him a second thought.

“I can’t do this anymore,” he says out loud, “I’ll just run away.”

“Bullshit,” says the person seated in the chair before him. He looks at the man who should be dangling but has now decided to change his mind. The man with the noose can’t see or hear him, nobody can.

“I didn’t abandon my busy schedule in the Middle East for this,” the person says.

And so, as the young man who has changed his mind raises his hand to loosen the noose around his neck, the seated person, Death’s very own Messenger, snapped his finger.

That instant, one of the stool’s four legs snapped. The young man is taken by surprise as he is immediately dangling while the noose tightens around his neck, squeezing his trachea and jugular, slicing the skin on his neck.

It doesn’t take long before he is nothing but a lifeless body hanging from an efficient rope.

“Done,” the Messenger says as he gets on his feet and heads to his next job.