1 Dying

It was mostly a boring day for Edward.

Clean the gallery, turn off all the lights, set fire to the whole building.

The usual.

This was a low point in Edward's life, even compared to the loosely strung series of low points that was his life.

He had always wanted to be an artist; it didn't make the most money, but it was a job that he could be passionate about. However, life was, and always will be, a bitch.

The very art that he wanted to create, was what he was currently cleaning and enviously muttering at. In fact, he was so infuriated that he set the entire gallery alight.

Okay, I lied. He didn't do it on purpose: he was just a clumsy idiot.

Anyway, his past and all the twists and turns of his life that led up to this point didn't really matter now; at this moment in time, he was more worried about saving it.

Edward looked back at the roaring flame, laughing at his pathetic attempt to escape the jaws of death.

He was shitting bricks.

'Please Lord, we're cool, right? I mean, I didn't do that much evil. Is this for that one time I hit an old woman? That was her fault! I mean, how was I supposed to know she was going to walk on the Zebra Crossing?'

He realised his thoughts weren't really going to help the situation and focused on running for his life.

His legs ached but they continued to move, adrenaline the only thing keeping them moving.

Breath becoming more uneven, his eyelids slowly closing as the flames gnashed at his legs. His whole body began to give up, ready to embrace fate.

As he turned a corner he thought would be his last, he saw the moonlight: it was the exit.

He thanked every God he could think of and his body seemed to have been refilled with energy. Words couldn't describe how relieved he was as he almost skipped out of the exit with glee.

However, his happiness was short-lived.

Despite having worked there for a year or so, Edward had neglected to remember that there were stairs outside of the building: a hell of a lot of them.

It seems he got caught up in the heat of the moment.

Launching himself out of the inferno, he couldn't stop his momentum and smashed his body onto the stairs on the way down.

His neck was broken on the second step.

***

"Next!"

Edward was jolted awake by a monotone shout.

He looked around to be greeted by a completely black landscape. The only thing around him was a long queue of people that seemed to continue for miles both in front and behind him.

"What the hell is going on?" He muttered to himself, rubbing his head and neck.

The man in front of him turned around and smiled, revealing a set of slightly misshapen teeth.

"Oh, alright there?" He extended a hand to Edward, the wide grin still plastered on his face.

Edward returned the hand shake but didn't speak, continuing to stare at the man's clothing.

The man was wearing a thin, brown jacket that looked very uncomfortable, with baggy trousers of the same sort of colour; rips and sewn on patches covered both jacket and trousers.

"My name's Jack, by the way," he smirked as he tipped the crumpled and plain flat cap that sat atop his head.

"Uh...yeah, my name's Ed," he recovered from his shock.

"What? Is it my clothes?" Jack chuckled, "Judging from your outfit, your from the 21st century, right?"

Edward nodded.

"Yeah, I've seen a couple like you. Anyway, I guess you wanna know where you are?"

Edward scratched the back of his head in reply.

"Well, you've died - and before you have a breakdown about it just shut up and don't make a scene."

"Bu-"

"Quiet! Where you are right now is the queue to heaven - there's no stairway, don't ask." Jack seemed amused by Edward's constantly shifting expression. "Where you start in the queue depends on how good of a person you were, you've started in the middle."

"But how does it move? People die all the time."

"I told you not to interrupt me...but good question. There's a period of time between death and the queue where your held in limbo for a bit, but still, for someone at the back...let's just say they'll be thinking about what they've done for a long, long time."

"So, when did you...uh...die?" Edward asked, wondering if it was a politically correct question to ask.

"1871," he responded with a mischievous glint in his eyes.

Edward gulped, deciding that it would be best not to ask what he did to be so far behind in the queue.

***

And so, time passed.

Years, decades, centuries, there wasn't really a way of telling, considering that everything around was black, except from the outfits that the people arriving wore.

After a while, people stopped appearing near Edward's part of the queue, either meaning everyone was better or worse people than him past that point or, more likely, humanity, was extinct.

After an even longer while, Edward got to the front of the queue. At the end, there was a man in long, black robes with a scythe leaning on the desk he was hunched over, head down. Next to him was a silver door frame, but looking through it made everything distorted and constantly moving.

"Ummm, hello," Edward tried to catch the man's attention.

"Name," the monotonous voice, that had echoed throughout the queue all this time, interrupted.

"Edward Forde."

"Date of birth."

"November 14th, 1998."

"Date of death."

"I think it was the 6th September 2020."

"You think?" a face, with one side revealing the skull, looked up at him.

"6th September," Edward gulped.

"Any major sins we need to know of?"

"I hit a lady with my car once, but it was an accident, I swear," Edward pleaded.

The man seemed utterly uninterested.

"Did she die?"

"No, sir."

"It's fine then."

Sighing with relief, Edward missed the muttering of 'rookie' from the man.

"Finally, how did you die?" The man questioned.

"Well, I was running from a fire..."

"So you burned to death?"

"Not exactly. I sort of ran out of the building, down a flight of stairs."

For the first time the man stopped writing. Even when he had previously looked up at Edward, he continued writing.

"Are you serious?" He cackled.

"Yeah, but I don't think dying is that funny, I mean I was-"

Ignoring Edward's monologue, the man just started laughing at him.

"You're a fucking idiot, you know that?" He insulted him as he continued to roar with laughter.

Words couldn't describe how pissed Edward was. After what could've been millennia of waiting, he had just been ridiculed, and he wanted to vent a thousand years of anger.

He jumped over the desk and started to furiously punch the man in the face, who eerily continued to laugh even whilst his face was under attack.

"Michael, you can deal with this one," the man clicked his fingers, still laughing away.

A flash of white light appeared and Edward was gone.