Grim Reaper • Chapter 7 

(My Life As A Teenage Grim Reaper Series)

by Megan W.,  11

A November 2024 Monthly Story Challenge Winner

Read the previous chapters:  Ch 1, Ch 2, Ch 3, Ch 4, Ch 5, Ch 6

Truth be told, I panicked. I totally freaked out at the sound of the crash. I was now stuck between a job and my mother's scream.

“Mom?!” I called downstairs. “MOM?” No reply. With this silence, I rushed out the master bedroom to find a LOT of broken glass. The ENTIRE glass handrail of the stairs had shattered. Hephaestus, Persephone and Bob, My dad’s three headed dog sat at the bottom of the broken mess. When they saw me, they whined.

“What the-“ Then I realized that my mom lay unconscious, a few feet behind the dogs. I raced to her side. People in the underworld could never die, and they only needed to sleep a few hours a night. However, they can faint. (That happened to me once.) The first thing I did to try to wake her up was rapidly shake her, as I saw many of the humans shook their dead. “Arrooooo!” Hephaestus howled and Persephone nudged mom with her nose. Bob looked around confused. I picked them up and set them aside. I don’t think the sound of chihuahua panic would help. I grabbed my phone and called my dad just to start incoherently blasting the words "Dad, emergency, glass, broken, faint, and Mom!" out of my mouth.

“NICOLA SYLVIA RAVEN!” Dad’s voice shot through the phone like an arrow through a heart.

“What is going on?!” Dad shouted. I quickly explained the situation with as little grammatical mistakes as possible. 

“The glass handrail, it shattered, I think mom tripped on something, most likely the dog, leaned on it, and it broke. She’s unconscious,” I said.

“Alright, I’ll come home right now.” Dad’s usual serious calm had returned. As he hung up, I rubbed the wound in my hand that I hadn’t noticed till now. I also realized that it was contributing to the tiny pool of blood around mom’s lower calf, just above her ankle. The scarlet puddle was very slowly expanding. I am no nurse, but I knew that wasn’t a good sign. I was about to get a cloth to soak up the blood when I heard two sounds. One, a whooshing of a cape. Dad had returned. And second, the unfamiliar voices of human beings. Not souls. They were alive.