October Prompted Fiction: Afterlife collection: Richard - Samael shows Richard a picture - 521 words
Written for
meeks's picture prompt.
It was the day before Halloween on Earth, and Richard was spending some time in his favourite house. As with all his houses it had three rooms: the sitting room; the reading room; and the room he built because he thought it was stupid to call two rooms a house. He found that it would change depending on who was visiting. If Caitlyn was over then it would turn into a study for her, complete with filing cabinets connected to the 'afterlife filing system'. With the appearance of Samael, who had decided to make friends with Death for the first time in millenia, it would turn into a bedroom. That house was his favourite because of the view he had from all the windows.
Halloween, strangely, was usually a quiet night for Death. It was Fireworks Night that was more likely to be busy. Richard was grateful that he had time to prepare for the work he'd have to do on Fireworks Night, as it was a day that always had a lot of preplanned deaths that were likely to need him. Sighing, he looked back at the file of one man and wondered why people cared so little about those who were terrified of fireworks. With that thought he made the file disappear, wondering what he could use as a distraction.
Samael walking through the door, literally, wasn't something that Richard thought of, but Samael appeared anyway. “Richard, I have something that I think you'll like,” he said, grinning at Richard.
Richard raised an eyebrow. “You do know that phrase terrifies me, don't you?”
“Don't be a spoilsport.” Samael touched the mirror. “I promise that I won't do anything else that might lead to you having to rebuild your house.”
“That doesn't make me feel any less terrified.”
“I'm an angel. I have to keep my promises.” He turned to look at Richard. “Check this out.”
Richard stood and went to stand next to Samael. He stared at the mirror for a moment, which held a picture of what looked like Practchett's Death dressed up as a rabbit, before looking at Samael. Samael looked back at him.
“I thought you could dress up like this for Halloween,” Samael said, still grinning.
“No.” Richard looked back at the picture. “It's good work, Samael, but I am not dressing up as Pratchett's Death dressed up as a rabbit for Halloween.”
“Why not?”
“Last time you convinced me it would be a good idea to do that I ended up with blue eyes for six years.”
“You looked good with blue eyes.”
“It's not happening.”
“Fine, be boring. Do you think there is a rabbit Death?”
Richard thought for a moment. “I don't know. Generally with wild animals there's no need, but there are domesticated rabbits so it's a possibility.”
“We should find out.”
“Where did you get the picture from anyway?”
“I found it online while I was visiting a friend. I want to show it to Caitlyn too.”
“She'll love it.”
Samael smiled. “I know she will. There's some other pictures by the same artist that I think she'll like too.”
© K A Jones 2011
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.