Shadow:It was a Monday. Monday was the day grandma got her medicine. She took some pill that some white-coated doctor told us would keep her alive, if only for a little while. I walked to the pharmacy a couple of blocks away through the rain. Careful to avoid the divots and dips in the beat-up sidewalk where puddles were beginning to form. There's an old store that sells rugs and carpets between Grandma's and the pharmacy. I wove through a small crowd of disappointed people exiting the store, beneath the broken neon red sign that read Jackson pet instead of Jackson Carpet, leading would-be pet owners astray. The red luminescent glow of the misnomer blurred on its edges through the drizzle and fog. One customer had brought her dog along with her. A young, well dressed and well-accessorized woman was knocking in quick bursts on the wood-framed glass door of the shop. Seemingly not understanding the miscommunication the sign had presented, even after seeing a stockpile of rolled-up rugs waiting in the store beyond. Her white-knuckle fist gripped a long, fuzzy velvet leash that strangled a fat, wrinkly old Rottweiler. The ancient beast struggling to keep up, letting itself be dragged behind along the wet pavement like a sack of old potatoes. Cord: The Reaper did not speak. He did not even move, for what need did he have to chase anyone? Everyone comes to him eventually. Men, women and gods all are consumed in his ever waiting black. Clive, sighing deeply, turned to look Death in the face. In the form he took for Clive, Death stood around seven feet tall. The hood of his monk's cowl falling to just above the bridge of the nose, had there been a nose to speak of. Instead, there was simply a hole, a cavernous nothing, like death itself, that hung like a cave above the fixed death's head smile. The unmoving, unflappable grin of the skull, never to be bargained with, never to be moved.
