Death Rides A Horse With One Eye
Here is another story for your reading pleasure(?)
Death Rides A Horse With One Eye
I’ve never been much of a storyteller. I’ve always preferred to keep my opinions and experiences to myself. My Pappy would say that I was a thinker, my wife would say that I was selfish; if pressed, I would say that I fall somewhere in between those two. I don’t like to tell people stories because I don’t want them to change their opinion of me. I’ve worked hard on keeping myself quiet and reserved, and I’d like that to stay the same in my old age. But sometimes stories need to be told. I think I’m telling this story to keep the darkness at bay. Frankly, I’m old and getting closer to death every day. When I wake up in the morning I’m pleasantly surprised that I made it through another night. I don’t look forward to meeting Death again. I’ve met it once before, and the experience changed my life. I was twenty three years old, and it was a back country road outside a small town in Oklahoma. I may sound crazy, and I realize waiting until old age to tell this story just lends credence to my children’s argument that I’ve fallen into senility, but this happened. I met Death, and it rides a horse with one eye.
I was seeing a girl in Mudhill at the time, even though I lived about fifteen miles south of Tourattes. I was looking to get out of the small town that I lived in, maybe move into an apartment in the city, and was trying desperately to get Cindy to join me. I couldn’t make it on my own, and I didn’t really want to try. Tourattes was a different place then, and I can safely say that the changes over the past forty or fifty years have been for the better, mostly.
Anyway, I was driving home one night after sunset, sometime around eight. The summer sun had made the day extremely hot, and I was using my old reliable four-forty air conditioner; four windows down and forty miles an hour. My car, a sedan with way too many miles on it, began to make a weird noise and I could smell something bad coming from the engine. I looked down at my heat gauge, and saw that it was in the red. I pulled the car over to the side of the road and popped the hood. Steam rose up into my face and the terrible smell of ozone got me into a coughing fit. Ever since that day, I’ve always carried a couple jugs of water with me in the car. I’ve even kept an extra can of gas in the trunk. I’ve always kept enough odds and ends with me that I can at least push whatever vehicle I am driving on to the next town.
Instead, I was unprepared. I looked both ways down the highway, and didn’t see a single pair of headlights in the distance. So I hoofed it. I figured I was about a mile or two from Kings’ Town, and I hoped I could make it there before I got too ate up by mosquitoes. I was in pretty good shape back then, because of my job at the factory, so I decided to make the best time I could and ran. I’m not really a superstitious fellow, I try really hard not to believe in holding my breath when I cross a bridge or go through a tunnel or by a graveyard, but I was young then and all of my childish fears crept back in the darkness. I felt like there was something out there, watching me, waiting to see if I would do something stupid enough to let it get me. So, I ran all the way to Kings’ Town, and got there just before I passed out from exhaustion.
Right at the edge of town, there was an all night diner called House of Eats. It was right across the street from the only gas station in the town, and I walked inside and collapsed into a booth. The waitress came over, and offered me the special. I told her that all I needed was water, a couple glasses for me, and a jug for my car. She smiled real nice, the way that people actually smile at each other when they aren’t forced to or trying to be nice, and told me she would see what she could do. She came back a couple of minutes later and handed me two portable cups with ice water, and a gallon jug. She said that there was a hose around back, and that if she waited for me to get her purse; she’d give me a ride back to my car. I smiled, and said that she was doing too much, but she waved her hand and told me that she’d be out in a minute.
Her name was Clayre.
“So what are you doing out this late at night during the week?” Clayre asked me while I filled up the water jug.
“Well, I live a few miles outside Tourattes and I was visiting some family outside Mudhill,” I lied. She was pretty, and about my age. Beautiful blue eyes, and gorgeous raven-black hair; and she was nice.
“You got work in the morning?” she asked.
“That’s why I’m heading back instead of staying up near Mudhill.”
“Where do you work?”
“The tire plant,” I said. Everyone knew about the tire plant. It was the largest job opportunity for anyone within the Three Cities area. That was until it blew down in a tornado.
“So are you trying to tell me that you couldn’t stay with your family and drive all the way down to the tire plant in the morning because you live closer to it in Two Rats? Because I’m pretty sure that Mudhill is at least as far as that city is. So what’s her name?” Clayre said. She was smart. I put the cap on the water jug and tried to change the subject.
“Where’s this car of yours?”
“Around back, follow me.”
She let the subject drop, and I took the cue to stop flirting with her, mostly. I got into her car, and we began the short drive back to the car. I told her about where I thought it was, and that I had been using a back road to get home, because I could go faster and not worry about any other cars, or cops.
Most people feel safer driving on a road by themselves. I figure it’s because there isn’t anyone else around to run into, or have to worry about them running into you. You’re free to drive like you’d prefer to, with no pressure to slow down or speed up or change lanes. I prefer to drive in a pack. It feels like there is safety in numbers. Especially whenever I get that sick feeling in my stomach that tells me that I’m being watched. At times like that, I get the feeling that one more ring has been pushed to the used side on the abacus of my life.
Clayre started to tell me about a story she heard from one of the few truckers that still used the highway that cut through Kings’ Town. According to this trucker, there was an angel of death for every profession. There was a specific angel for carpenters, masons, and other builders. There was a death angel for politicians, leaders, and dignitaries. There was a death for thieves, murderers, and scoundrels. There was a death for drivers.
This truck driver told Clayre that these death angels weren’t necessarily angels, but they weren’t demons either. They were creatures that fed on human souls. But God, or some higher, protective power, told these reapers that they could only take a soul when the person died, and not all of it. Some of it was always protected by God, because it belonged to Him to begin with. The driver told Clayre that the reapers could only take the bad parts of a person’s soul. They could only strip away everything that was on that person’s soul that was repugnant in the eyes of the Lord. Her words, which might have been the driver’s words, but I doubt it.
“So, these reapers,” she says, “they all got together to figure out how to divvy up what little of human souls that they would get to sustain themselves. They decided that they would divide up all of humanity into their separate jobs, what they did with their lives, and each reaper would get to feast on the souls of people who fell under their domain.”
“And how exactly did they decide which of these reapers got to eat whose souls?” I asked. We were parked on the side of the road next to my car. I had a sick feeling in my gut.
“Well, the way I figure it, the reapers have taste, just like we do. So they must have decided what their favorite type of food was, and limited themselves to that. I’m sure there was some squabbling, but they must’ve figured it out somehow,” She said.
“What about the reapers whose domains have dried up? There aren’t really that many explorers these days.”
“I don’t know. I’m just telling you a bedtime story that I heard. Only, that’s not all,” She said.
“What do you mean?” I asked her.
So she takes a deep breath and gets out of the car. I grab my jug of water and walk over to my car, following her, and start working on it. She looks both ways down the road, and begins to tell me the rest of her tale.
She tells me that she didn’t believe what this trucker had to say. She humored him, and poured him coffee, and hoped for a big tip. Then he starts to tell her about why he doesn’t like taking the back roads around Kings’ Town, and always makes a point to drive in a caravan if he goes down the highway through the town. Apparently, and she tells me that she looked all of this up in the newspaper archives at the library, there has been quite a few sightings over the years in and around Kings’ Town.
“Not quite like Big Foot,” she says, “more like the Devil.”
She tells me that the reaper over travelers seems to inhabit the area around this town. She doesn’t know why, but that it is particularly fond of the back roads. Not that it ever kills anyone; it just waits for them to make a fatal mistake. Or maybe it sets up traps. Scares a deer into crossing the road at just the wrong time, or spooks horses into careening down an embankment. I smile real wide and tell her that she is being ridiculous. She looks me dead in the eyes and tells me that she is being as serious as a heart attack.
“I think it has something to do with the town. I’ve lived there all my life, and I love it, but sometimes I just get the feeling that there is something evil. Not just one thing evil. A whole town full of evil, living and breathing and waiting just underneath the surface of the town,” she says with fear in her voice.
She tells me that in a lot of the reports in the newspapers, which went all the way back to the horse and carriage days when King first founded the town, someone would come across a minor accident. A horse run off the road, or stopped suddenly to avoid an animal that had run across the path. Only the people in the carriage wouldn’t be alone. There would be a rider dressed in all black, looking in the carriage. When someone happened across the wreck, the rider would take off on his horse, riding faster than it seemed was possible. The people inside the carriage wouldn’t really be injured, but they would die just the same. A few hours later, or maybe a week, but they would die. It was as if they gave up on living.
“I told this to the trucker the next time he came through the diner, and he went pale in the face,” she said. “And he started asking me all these really weird questions about what the rider was supposed to look like.”
She told him the same that she told me, everything she had learned from the newspapers, except one other thing. She told him that the rider was on a horse that only had one eye. She told me that this trucker, this giant of a man, jumped up from his stool and took off for the door. She never saw him again. Best as she could figure, she told me, was that something scared him about the rider on a horse with one eye.
I walked her back to her car, and she got behind the wheel. “Far as I can tell, there hasn’t been a sighting of the rider in a long time, probably fifty to a hundred years. Right around the time that people stopped riding horses everywhere. God knows what it’s riding now,” she said. She started her car, and drove away.
God knows, and I do too.
I wish my story ended there. I wish I could say that I drove home, woke up for work too late for breakfast and had to work on an empty stomach all day. I wish I could say that I married either Clayre or Cindy, but I haven’t lied too much in my life and I’m too old to start now.
This is what actually happened.
I started my car and drove off. It was running fine now, and I kept to my course. I did the math in my head, and I figured that I could get at least four hours of sleep before I had to be at work. By the time I got up to speed, I had completely lost Clayre’s break lights in the distance. The road was really hilly, and she was driving really fast. I had my windows down, and the cool night air felt great on my skin. I started to think about Cindy, and started wondering if I would ever be able to convince her to move in with me. I knew her parents wouldn’t approve, but I needed her help to get out of my parents place. I started wondering if Clayre would like to leave her job at the diner and move in with me. My thoughts were straying, but I told myself that I would never do something like that to any girl, especially not Cindy. Then I heard something that wrenched me from my daydreaming. I recognized the sound, and my blood turned to ice in my veins. The screeching metal and crashing sound of a car accident; I slowed down for a second, then flipped on my brights and sped up. I got a sick feeling in my gut. To this day, I don’t know what got into me, but I was sure that it was Clayre and that she needed my help.
I saw two pairs of brake lights in the distance, at the top of a hill. One set was upside down and far too high up in the air for everything to be normal. The other pair stared back at me in the dark. I let off the gas, and turned off my headlights. I was scared. I crept up to the scene of the accident, and saw something that I will never forget until the day I die. I’m ashamed to say that I drove past the wreck without stopping, but I did, I think you would have too. In between the two cars, there was nothing, but not the conventional kind of nothing. There was something inhabiting the empty space between the two cars, but I couldn’t see it. Whatever it was, it sucked in all of the light around it. I pulled next two the two cars, and crawled past. The car that was between Clayre and me revved it’s engine, only it sounded more like a horse whinnying. The nothingness turned and looked at me, and I saw that it had a face. I saw Clayre’s face looking back at me, pale and with blood red eyes. It spoke my name, and I felt it raise a hand and touch my forehead. The black mark seeped into my skin and disappeared, but I could feel it for days. I hammered on the gas and sped down the road away from the accident. I kept looking in the rearview mirror, hoping that I could get as much distance between me and whatever that was, and I noticed something peculiar. Only three head lights were looking back at me. The car to the left, the car that sounded like a horse, only had one head light.
I didn’t sleep at all that night, and I didn’t go into work in the morning. For three weeks, I was only able to sleep during the light of day. I washed my forehead religiously, but the black mark that I felt just above my eyes only faded with time. I developed a theory, behind why the car only had one headlight. It was because it wasn’t a car at all, just like the horse with one eye wasn’t really a horse. Whatever it was, it was half in this world, and half in wherever the reaper’s come from. Call it the spirit world, call it hell, or call it another dimension. Wherever they are from, it is under and in everything. The reaper’s can’t be outrun, or hidden from. They belong to a world much larger and more dangerous than our own. We’re easy prey to them, that’s why they hunt us. The car only had one head light because the other head light was shining in the ether.
I know I don’t have much time left. I’ve tried to live a good life. I’ve stayed away from gambling, alcohol, whores, and drugs. I’ve kept my words to myself when others would lie to get their way. I haven’t been religious, because I’ve never been able to find any god that would fit the things I’ve seen. I’ve tried to travel as little as possible, but everything I’ve done with my life has centered on the road. From making tires to building cars, owning a delivery service to getting great deals on airline stock, my whole life has been tied up with travel. I wonder if that had something to do with the mark on my forehead. I wonder if the reaper was somehow calling dibs on my soul, and has orchestrated my life to make sure that its claim rings true. Have I lived my own life? I hope that I have, and I hope that I left this world a little better in spite of me. Because the mark has started to resurface, just above the eyes, in between the eyebrows; every new day is a blessing and a curse. It means I have one more day to live, but that I am one more day closer to meeting Death again.
Death Rides A Horse With One Eye
I’ve never been much of a storyteller. I’ve always preferred to keep my opinions and experiences to myself. My Pappy would say that I was a thinker, my wife would say that I was selfish; if pressed, I would say that I fall somewhere in between those two. I don’t like to tell people stories because I don’t want them to change their opinion of me. I’ve worked hard on keeping myself quiet and reserved, and I’d like that to stay the same in my old age. But sometimes stories need to be told. I think I’m telling this story to keep the darkness at bay. Frankly, I’m old and getting closer to death every day. When I wake up in the morning I’m pleasantly surprised that I made it through another night. I don’t look forward to meeting Death again. I’ve met it once before, and the experience changed my life. I was twenty three years old, and it was a back country road outside a small town in Oklahoma. I may sound crazy, and I realize waiting until old age to tell this story just lends credence to my children’s argument that I’ve fallen into senility, but this happened. I met Death, and it rides a horse with one eye.
I was seeing a girl in Mudhill at the time, even though I lived about fifteen miles south of Tourattes. I was looking to get out of the small town that I lived in, maybe move into an apartment in the city, and was trying desperately to get Cindy to join me. I couldn’t make it on my own, and I didn’t really want to try. Tourattes was a different place then, and I can safely say that the changes over the past forty or fifty years have been for the better, mostly.
Anyway, I was driving home one night after sunset, sometime around eight. The summer sun had made the day extremely hot, and I was using my old reliable four-forty air conditioner; four windows down and forty miles an hour. My car, a sedan with way too many miles on it, began to make a weird noise and I could smell something bad coming from the engine. I looked down at my heat gauge, and saw that it was in the red. I pulled the car over to the side of the road and popped the hood. Steam rose up into my face and the terrible smell of ozone got me into a coughing fit. Ever since that day, I’ve always carried a couple jugs of water with me in the car. I’ve even kept an extra can of gas in the trunk. I’ve always kept enough odds and ends with me that I can at least push whatever vehicle I am driving on to the next town.
Instead, I was unprepared. I looked both ways down the highway, and didn’t see a single pair of headlights in the distance. So I hoofed it. I figured I was about a mile or two from Kings’ Town, and I hoped I could make it there before I got too ate up by mosquitoes. I was in pretty good shape back then, because of my job at the factory, so I decided to make the best time I could and ran. I’m not really a superstitious fellow, I try really hard not to believe in holding my breath when I cross a bridge or go through a tunnel or by a graveyard, but I was young then and all of my childish fears crept back in the darkness. I felt like there was something out there, watching me, waiting to see if I would do something stupid enough to let it get me. So, I ran all the way to Kings’ Town, and got there just before I passed out from exhaustion.
Right at the edge of town, there was an all night diner called House of Eats. It was right across the street from the only gas station in the town, and I walked inside and collapsed into a booth. The waitress came over, and offered me the special. I told her that all I needed was water, a couple glasses for me, and a jug for my car. She smiled real nice, the way that people actually smile at each other when they aren’t forced to or trying to be nice, and told me she would see what she could do. She came back a couple of minutes later and handed me two portable cups with ice water, and a gallon jug. She said that there was a hose around back, and that if she waited for me to get her purse; she’d give me a ride back to my car. I smiled, and said that she was doing too much, but she waved her hand and told me that she’d be out in a minute.
Her name was Clayre.
“So what are you doing out this late at night during the week?” Clayre asked me while I filled up the water jug.
“Well, I live a few miles outside Tourattes and I was visiting some family outside Mudhill,” I lied. She was pretty, and about my age. Beautiful blue eyes, and gorgeous raven-black hair; and she was nice.
“You got work in the morning?” she asked.
“That’s why I’m heading back instead of staying up near Mudhill.”
“Where do you work?”
“The tire plant,” I said. Everyone knew about the tire plant. It was the largest job opportunity for anyone within the Three Cities area. That was until it blew down in a tornado.
“So are you trying to tell me that you couldn’t stay with your family and drive all the way down to the tire plant in the morning because you live closer to it in Two Rats? Because I’m pretty sure that Mudhill is at least as far as that city is. So what’s her name?” Clayre said. She was smart. I put the cap on the water jug and tried to change the subject.
“Where’s this car of yours?”
“Around back, follow me.”
She let the subject drop, and I took the cue to stop flirting with her, mostly. I got into her car, and we began the short drive back to the car. I told her about where I thought it was, and that I had been using a back road to get home, because I could go faster and not worry about any other cars, or cops.
Most people feel safer driving on a road by themselves. I figure it’s because there isn’t anyone else around to run into, or have to worry about them running into you. You’re free to drive like you’d prefer to, with no pressure to slow down or speed up or change lanes. I prefer to drive in a pack. It feels like there is safety in numbers. Especially whenever I get that sick feeling in my stomach that tells me that I’m being watched. At times like that, I get the feeling that one more ring has been pushed to the used side on the abacus of my life.
Clayre started to tell me about a story she heard from one of the few truckers that still used the highway that cut through Kings’ Town. According to this trucker, there was an angel of death for every profession. There was a specific angel for carpenters, masons, and other builders. There was a death angel for politicians, leaders, and dignitaries. There was a death for thieves, murderers, and scoundrels. There was a death for drivers.
This truck driver told Clayre that these death angels weren’t necessarily angels, but they weren’t demons either. They were creatures that fed on human souls. But God, or some higher, protective power, told these reapers that they could only take a soul when the person died, and not all of it. Some of it was always protected by God, because it belonged to Him to begin with. The driver told Clayre that the reapers could only take the bad parts of a person’s soul. They could only strip away everything that was on that person’s soul that was repugnant in the eyes of the Lord. Her words, which might have been the driver’s words, but I doubt it.
“So, these reapers,” she says, “they all got together to figure out how to divvy up what little of human souls that they would get to sustain themselves. They decided that they would divide up all of humanity into their separate jobs, what they did with their lives, and each reaper would get to feast on the souls of people who fell under their domain.”
“And how exactly did they decide which of these reapers got to eat whose souls?” I asked. We were parked on the side of the road next to my car. I had a sick feeling in my gut.
“Well, the way I figure it, the reapers have taste, just like we do. So they must have decided what their favorite type of food was, and limited themselves to that. I’m sure there was some squabbling, but they must’ve figured it out somehow,” She said.
“What about the reapers whose domains have dried up? There aren’t really that many explorers these days.”
“I don’t know. I’m just telling you a bedtime story that I heard. Only, that’s not all,” She said.
“What do you mean?” I asked her.
So she takes a deep breath and gets out of the car. I grab my jug of water and walk over to my car, following her, and start working on it. She looks both ways down the road, and begins to tell me the rest of her tale.
She tells me that she didn’t believe what this trucker had to say. She humored him, and poured him coffee, and hoped for a big tip. Then he starts to tell her about why he doesn’t like taking the back roads around Kings’ Town, and always makes a point to drive in a caravan if he goes down the highway through the town. Apparently, and she tells me that she looked all of this up in the newspaper archives at the library, there has been quite a few sightings over the years in and around Kings’ Town.
“Not quite like Big Foot,” she says, “more like the Devil.”
She tells me that the reaper over travelers seems to inhabit the area around this town. She doesn’t know why, but that it is particularly fond of the back roads. Not that it ever kills anyone; it just waits for them to make a fatal mistake. Or maybe it sets up traps. Scares a deer into crossing the road at just the wrong time, or spooks horses into careening down an embankment. I smile real wide and tell her that she is being ridiculous. She looks me dead in the eyes and tells me that she is being as serious as a heart attack.
“I think it has something to do with the town. I’ve lived there all my life, and I love it, but sometimes I just get the feeling that there is something evil. Not just one thing evil. A whole town full of evil, living and breathing and waiting just underneath the surface of the town,” she says with fear in her voice.
She tells me that in a lot of the reports in the newspapers, which went all the way back to the horse and carriage days when King first founded the town, someone would come across a minor accident. A horse run off the road, or stopped suddenly to avoid an animal that had run across the path. Only the people in the carriage wouldn’t be alone. There would be a rider dressed in all black, looking in the carriage. When someone happened across the wreck, the rider would take off on his horse, riding faster than it seemed was possible. The people inside the carriage wouldn’t really be injured, but they would die just the same. A few hours later, or maybe a week, but they would die. It was as if they gave up on living.
“I told this to the trucker the next time he came through the diner, and he went pale in the face,” she said. “And he started asking me all these really weird questions about what the rider was supposed to look like.”
She told him the same that she told me, everything she had learned from the newspapers, except one other thing. She told him that the rider was on a horse that only had one eye. She told me that this trucker, this giant of a man, jumped up from his stool and took off for the door. She never saw him again. Best as she could figure, she told me, was that something scared him about the rider on a horse with one eye.
I walked her back to her car, and she got behind the wheel. “Far as I can tell, there hasn’t been a sighting of the rider in a long time, probably fifty to a hundred years. Right around the time that people stopped riding horses everywhere. God knows what it’s riding now,” she said. She started her car, and drove away.
God knows, and I do too.
I wish my story ended there. I wish I could say that I drove home, woke up for work too late for breakfast and had to work on an empty stomach all day. I wish I could say that I married either Clayre or Cindy, but I haven’t lied too much in my life and I’m too old to start now.
This is what actually happened.
I started my car and drove off. It was running fine now, and I kept to my course. I did the math in my head, and I figured that I could get at least four hours of sleep before I had to be at work. By the time I got up to speed, I had completely lost Clayre’s break lights in the distance. The road was really hilly, and she was driving really fast. I had my windows down, and the cool night air felt great on my skin. I started to think about Cindy, and started wondering if I would ever be able to convince her to move in with me. I knew her parents wouldn’t approve, but I needed her help to get out of my parents place. I started wondering if Clayre would like to leave her job at the diner and move in with me. My thoughts were straying, but I told myself that I would never do something like that to any girl, especially not Cindy. Then I heard something that wrenched me from my daydreaming. I recognized the sound, and my blood turned to ice in my veins. The screeching metal and crashing sound of a car accident; I slowed down for a second, then flipped on my brights and sped up. I got a sick feeling in my gut. To this day, I don’t know what got into me, but I was sure that it was Clayre and that she needed my help.
I saw two pairs of brake lights in the distance, at the top of a hill. One set was upside down and far too high up in the air for everything to be normal. The other pair stared back at me in the dark. I let off the gas, and turned off my headlights. I was scared. I crept up to the scene of the accident, and saw something that I will never forget until the day I die. I’m ashamed to say that I drove past the wreck without stopping, but I did, I think you would have too. In between the two cars, there was nothing, but not the conventional kind of nothing. There was something inhabiting the empty space between the two cars, but I couldn’t see it. Whatever it was, it sucked in all of the light around it. I pulled next two the two cars, and crawled past. The car that was between Clayre and me revved it’s engine, only it sounded more like a horse whinnying. The nothingness turned and looked at me, and I saw that it had a face. I saw Clayre’s face looking back at me, pale and with blood red eyes. It spoke my name, and I felt it raise a hand and touch my forehead. The black mark seeped into my skin and disappeared, but I could feel it for days. I hammered on the gas and sped down the road away from the accident. I kept looking in the rearview mirror, hoping that I could get as much distance between me and whatever that was, and I noticed something peculiar. Only three head lights were looking back at me. The car to the left, the car that sounded like a horse, only had one head light.
I didn’t sleep at all that night, and I didn’t go into work in the morning. For three weeks, I was only able to sleep during the light of day. I washed my forehead religiously, but the black mark that I felt just above my eyes only faded with time. I developed a theory, behind why the car only had one headlight. It was because it wasn’t a car at all, just like the horse with one eye wasn’t really a horse. Whatever it was, it was half in this world, and half in wherever the reaper’s come from. Call it the spirit world, call it hell, or call it another dimension. Wherever they are from, it is under and in everything. The reaper’s can’t be outrun, or hidden from. They belong to a world much larger and more dangerous than our own. We’re easy prey to them, that’s why they hunt us. The car only had one head light because the other head light was shining in the ether.
I know I don’t have much time left. I’ve tried to live a good life. I’ve stayed away from gambling, alcohol, whores, and drugs. I’ve kept my words to myself when others would lie to get their way. I haven’t been religious, because I’ve never been able to find any god that would fit the things I’ve seen. I’ve tried to travel as little as possible, but everything I’ve done with my life has centered on the road. From making tires to building cars, owning a delivery service to getting great deals on airline stock, my whole life has been tied up with travel. I wonder if that had something to do with the mark on my forehead. I wonder if the reaper was somehow calling dibs on my soul, and has orchestrated my life to make sure that its claim rings true. Have I lived my own life? I hope that I have, and I hope that I left this world a little better in spite of me. Because the mark has started to resurface, just above the eyes, in between the eyebrows; every new day is a blessing and a curse. It means I have one more day to live, but that I am one more day closer to meeting Death again.