The Books of Death

     

    

     The Grim Reaper, wearing a three-piece suit and a laptop bag on his shoulder, led him into a room, which turned out to be a library with huge, endless shelves of books. The books were piled backwards at the shelves, meaning, you could not see their spine which contained the title and the authors. It was weird, who would stack books like that in a shelf? Book spines are beautiful, unless you want to give yourself a constant headache finding the books you wanted.

     “This is the Library of Death, Stephen,” Grim Reaper said in his baritone, DJ-like voice. “And these,” he faced the clandestine books, “are the Books of Death.” The Grim Reaper turned to face him again and said, “You will die today and you will choose how you will die.” Mister Reaper paused and gently shook his head and smiled. “No, not really choose but randomly pick how your life will end. You will pick a book from these shelves and there, written, is the way you will die.

     Stephen knew he was just in a dream, so there really was no need to engage the Grim Reaper in an argument or conversation. He walked towards a shelf and picked a book and opened it. It only had one, really thick page and there on the page written were the words: Train wreck. He looked at the spine of the book and those two words were also written there.

     Stephen woke up with a gasp, and smiled when he remembered his dream. And that vivid dream happening in real life would be far-fetched. He didn’t ride trains and the nearest railroad was miles away. He still was in bed when his house rumbled. Earthquake, he thought and looked out a window.

     And his eyes went wide open as he realized that the ground rumbling wasn’t caused by an earthquake.

     A train was about to hit his house.

     Unbelievable, said the reporter on TV, a train got derailed and hit a house five miles away. Fortunately, all the passengers were safe, but there was one casualty, the owner of the house named Stephen…”