Death is your best friend. Describe the conflict on the day you die.
The skeleton stood, jaw hanging open, moving his empty-socket stare from the body at the bottom of the three-step staircase, to its recently-separated soul.
“Are you kidding me?” It spoke with a multi-leveled voice, whispers preceding and echoing after it by just small fractions of a second.
“Okay, before you go off on me-” the young woman next to him started defensively.
“Three steps! How?!” It cut her off with pure increduality.
“I said before you go off on me-” She chided, seemingly unphazed by her own pitiful demise.
“What?! Before I go off on you, what? Do you have an explanation, an excuse, some defense of your own idiocy?”
“No,” she replied evenly, “I was going to ask that you move my skirt down. My ass could not be more exposed.” She gestured toward her own corpse, which indeed, had had its skirt flipped up in the fall.
There were no visible tells as to the Grim Reaper’s expression, but somehow, she could always sense it. Even without the socket moving, the feeling of a raised eyebrow was clear. With some grumbling, bony fingers grasped the hem of the corpse’s skirt and pull it over the exposed buttocks.
“Thank you.”
“No problem. Now where was I?”
“Pure disbelief coupled with exasperation,” she reminded him helpfully.
“Ah yes- HOW?! How did you manage to fall three steps, onto grass, and still get yourself killed? That shouldn’t have been able to break your nose, let alone your neck!”
“This really shouldn’t be surprising, I’ve kinda been flirting with death my entire life,” she replied dismissively. Once again, the feeling of raised eyebrow came over her and she rolled her eyes at the robed figure. “Oh, you know what I mean.”
“Says the woman who was just mooning me.” They both had a good laugh at that before the skeleton continued his rant. “But of all the things that should have killed you, this is what does it? The most ‘walk it off, you pansy’ kind of ordeal?”
“I haven’t nearly been killed that many times,” the dismissal was still there, but not as confident.
“Do you want the list?” The reaper shot back.
“You’ve got a list?”
“I’m the Grim Reaper, of course I’ve got a list!” With a snap and a plume of smoke, and old timey scroll came into existence. Rolling it open, he began. “Six electrocutions, hit by a pick-up truck while crossing the street, head-on collision with a bus, two consecutive black widow bites,” that one made the woman rub her left breast in painful recollection, “the bat to the head, the time your oven exploded, the time you accidentally ate undercooked chicken, the time you ate poorly prepared pufferfish, your little joyride inside of a tornado, the powdered sugar-anthrax mixup, the heatstroke, the Tide cleaning Gushers, the time you passed out while attempting autoerot-”
“OKAY!” She cut him off, giving herself a moment to recover. “How do you even know about that last one?”
The scroll was rolled back up and puffed away with more smoke. “Once again, I’m the Grim Reaper. There is not a single near-death you’ve experienced that I don’t know about.”
