All Chapters of The Reaper's Pet : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

With a light, reverent touch, the man’s fingers catch and rub the oscillating crucifix of the rosary hanging from the rear-view mirror. This cabbie should be both a religious and superstitious man; in other words, your typical Filipino. Apart from the steadiness of his hands and the deftness with which they weave the taxi in and out of traffic, his aura tells me he’s seen a lot of crazy accidents on the road but never once felt anything because of them – at least nothing weird enough to freak him out and stop him from delivering a fare to their destination. But years of driving a cab sharpens a man’s intuition of people, of the different strangers he picks up on the road. Plus he’s listened enough times to stories of that “psychic” feeling that forebodes a really bad accident or a violent holdup, what the veteran cabbies are fond of sharing. The cabbie (Ray, as introduced by his ID hanging with the rosary) has had his own psychic moment tonight for the first time ever. It came with th

Models are simultaneously both the catalyst and the product of the world they live in. The fashion industry which has been arousing, feeding off and slaking the illusions of billions and billions on the planet is a double-edged sword that wounds even the select few who wield it. Rina has seen it all: fellow models OD’ing on coke and heroin, an anorexic friend starving herself to death, another jumping from the infinity pool of a high-rise and landing smack dab on the hood of a classic silver ’51 Jaguar. The press called it “the most beautiful suicide of the twenty-first century” and three more fashion models followed suit by jumping from the exact same infinity pool all through the following week. Countless others blindly chasing the glitter but left in the end with lives as fake as moissanite. She has stood shoulder to shoulder with them on the same razor-edged cliff, drunk and stoned out of their minds from all their desperate attempts to plug that insidious, indelible hole inside t

Rhaskos, that was my mortal name. My parents were from Dacia. It was a land in the midst of and surrounding the Carpathians, where Romania and Moldova now lie. But I was born in Puteoli in Campania and didn’t really know anything of my roots. Nor was I aware of how the whole world was changing in those times; every chess-piece, every square being ushered into place by a long arm and a whisper in the dark: {Imperium Romanum}. The port city of Puteoli was like a whole country unto itself, certainly world enough for a meager boy like me, what of all the merchants, ambassadors, sailors and soldiers from territories as distant and enchanted as Parthia and Aegyptus. On rare occasions but with increasing frequency now, it all comes back to me in a whiff and a faint echo: the smell of sulfur that pervaded the air from the Forum Vulcani and the sound of the whole world speaking all at once, with different lengths of tongue. Tragically, instead of being born properly into the light of day, I w

I couldn’t interfere with human affairs. Only in that final moment between life and death was I permitted to make my presence felt; when I severed the thread of life, the Umballicus, which anchored humans onto the land of the living. These were the first of the rules I had to abide by in my new role as the Atropos Wyrd, one of a triumvirate of Fate-dealers. In between my duties, I often watched Septima in my phantasmal form yet was unable to console her with the news that I had moved on to a better albeit stranger place. I yearned to tell her stories of all my travels and to instruct her how wide the world was – certainly much wider than she had thought or could ever comprehend. And when she was finally compelled to marry by her father, I was there, too, in the house where she had been raised and I looked on painfully at the sadness that hid behind her smiles. Still, she became a dutiful wife and a caring mother. And if the affection she eventually learned to feel for her husband was

I had never imagined I’d be serenading someone. In the rain, for starters. But I did. I sang as loud as I could so she would hear. The resonant sound of the guitar floated through the serendipitous background music of dripping rain. I sang the words of “Living Miracle” with the unique charm of my lighter weight voice plus a generous helping of the warm, smoky low register that I knew Sol loved. | {Beauty is skin-deep but not you} {I had to get under your skin just to see the real you} {In your face in your hair up the wall} {You scratched my itch but I didn’t scratch yours} {I went straight for the chalkboard} {I was ten nails in} {You still wouldn’t scream} {Irritation, aggravation, commiseration} {How my misery loved your company.} | It also helped that metal was all about melancholy. You could strip away all the backdrop, the lighting, the clothes, and you’d be left with the essential human experience that still needed to be shared. I saw, through all the rainwater d