When you are dead, cling on to it, cherish it.

Don’t listen to any of that mealy mouthed crap about the “gift of life” that some snivelling little mother/father figure peddles, meaninglessly, to justify the damage their hormones wrought and to disguise the fact that they were either:

a) Too cretinous not to conceive/impregnate

b) Too feeble-minded to face up to the pointless vacuity of their own shambling existence and so sought to foist the same on some poxy foetus, i.e. you, as if a simple multiplication of pointless vacuities was an answer in itself that supplied meaning and comfort and grace

There was half-an-eternity of void, which you unaccountably slipped out of; then there was a brief opportunity to become fertilizer; then there was another half-an-eternity of void.

Existence was a blip, an easily erased embarrassment.

Death is your natural state, never overlook that fact.

Signed with a scythe,

Your grim and loyal servant.

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This piece of flash fiction was written in response to Prompt #81 “Instruction Manual for the Dead” at Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie, in which we were asked to write an Instruction Manual for the Dead. The instructions here are as bleakly matter-of-fact as I could imagine the Grim Reaper writing, so let’s end on a pretty tune from the Blue Oyster Cult.