Gabriel Jeroschewitz, September 15th, 2025. With MR. Reaper and MS. Reaper, helping with some editing, their friend, the Garden Noam, is sunbathing outside, we think
Reaper’s Phone Book
It was not the first time I had a conversation with Death, but it was the first time she showed up looking like she had just stepped out of a Vogue cover shoot. Towering legs, fiery red heels, nails that could double as scythes, and a face that seemed equal parts angel and predator. She adjusted the strap on her shoe as if she had all the time in the world—which, to be fair, she did.
“You people always think I was invented in the 14th century,” she said, not looking up from her buckle. “Bubonic plague, skeleton illustrations, all of that. Cute, really. Like I didn’t exist before your medieval doodles, let me tell you something: I was around long before Homer thought to have Patroclus sneak into Achilles’ dreams and ask for a proper burial. They were late to the party. The Greeks thought they invented dream-ghosts, but I was already booking appearances in Sumer.”
She finally looked up at me, her red lips curving into something that was not a smile.
I didn’t ask how she got into my living room. That would have been silly. Death doesn’t knock. Besides, my cat had already bolted under the couch, which told me this wasn’t a wine-induced hallucination.
“You mean ghosts dreamed before the Greeks dreamt about them?” I asked, trying to sound casual.
“Of course. The Mesopotamians had entire catalogues of dream omens, scribbled meticulously into clay tablets. The difference is—” she tapped one of her nails against her heel for emphasis, click, click, click—“they didn’t confuse context with symbol. They knew a dream wasn’t a riddle-book with one answer. It was about who you were, what you had done, and what would come for you. Homer got it; that’s why Patroclus didn’t just haunt anyone; he haunted Achilles. Context, darling. Always context.”
I nodded like someone who had never spent half his life ignoring phone calls from his mother. The thought that she—Death, not my mother, though the two were suddenly tangled in my mind—might measure me by context was unsettling.
“Which brings me to the point,” she said, crossing her legs with elegance that made the air around her shimmer. “Dreams are inefficient. Ghosts straining themselves to crawl into the skulls of the half-asleep—it’s outdated. Besides, poor Cynthia has been complaining about Propertius for two thousand years. Do you have any idea how exhausting that is? A perpetual loop of spectral nagging.”
“Well,” I said, “to be fair, he deserved it.”
“Oh, we all deserve it,” Death said, smiling. “But it doesn’t change the fact that the system is clunky. Which is why we’ve been brainstorming a new project.”
Like a corporate executive, she produced a red leather folder from thin air and flipped it open. Inside was a design mock-up of what looked suspiciously like an old phone book—except the cover was embossed in silver letters: Directory of the Departed.
“It’s simple,” she said. “If the dead want to talk to you, they should call. No more dream hauntings. No more allegorical headaches about whether the ghost of your second cousin standing next to a whale in your dream means financial trouble or indigestion. Just a call. Direct. Efficient.”
I blinked. “You mean like… a ghostly Yellow Pages?”
“Exactly.” She beamed. “My colleague is especially enthusiastic about it.”
On cue, another figure materialized in the room. He was tall, dark, unbearably handsome, the sort of man who could make even the devoutly celibate rethink their vows. His aura was warmth and worship, the gaze of someone who saw you—every wrinkle, every flaw—and adored you for it. If she were Vogue, he would be something sculpted by Michelangelo, but only with better hair.
“This is the other Reaper,” she said casually.
He took my hand. Warmth flooded me; for a terrifying moment, I felt as if I might weep out of sheer gratitude for being alive long enough to meet him.
“Hello,” he said. His voice was a velvet blanket at midnight. “We’re working together on this… initiative.”
“Phone book for the dead,” I muttered. “Right.”
“It’s practical,” he said sweetly. “Ghosts wouldn’t have to expend so much energy trying to push through dreams. And humans wouldn’t sit around misinterpreting them. Think of all the misunderstandings it would save.”
“That does seem… efficient,” I admitted. “Though I suppose it also means the dead could just… phone me whenever they like?”
“Exactly.”
“Which sounds like hell.”
The female Reaper laughed, clapping her hands. “He gets it! Imagine: every ex, every ancient lover, every ancestor who never forgave you for selling the family silver. All with your number.”The thought made my stomach drop. Petrarch’s Laura wouldn’t stop calling him, Propertius would have blocked Cynthia by week two, and Jaime Gil de Biedma would still be ignoring voicemails from Bel.
“So…” I hesitated. “Why are you telling me all this?”
“Because,” she said, “you’re part of our beta test.”
I should have known something was wrong the next morning when my phone buzzed at 3 a.m. The screen displayed a number that should not have existed: +000-000-0000.
Against all survival instinct, I answered.
“Hello?”
There was silence, then a voice I hadn’t heard in twenty years.
“Why didn’t you come to my funeral?”
My blood froze. It was Martin—my college roommate, who’d died young in a car accident. We’d been close once, before we drifted apart. I hadn’t gone to his funeral. The shame hit me anew, raw as it had in my twenties.
“I—I was—”
“Busy?” he said, with an edge that sliced through the static. “Too busy to say goodbye? Too busy to bury me properly, like Patroclus asked of Achilles?”
The line went dead.
I sat there in the darkness, trembling.
The next night: another call. This time, my grandmother. She didn’t nag; she just told me, quietly, that she’d be waiting.
The third night, it was someone I hadn’t even met—a great-great-aunt I only knew from a faded photograph. She had instructions. Something about a locket hidden in the attic and debts unpaid: the specificity was terrifying.
By the fifth night, when an ex-girlfriend called to reproach me for “that thing you said in Lisbon in 1991,” I was ready to throw my phone into the sea.
I marched back into my living room and shouted into the shadows: “This is unbearable!”
She appeared instantly, rolling her eyes like a model caught at the wrong angle in a photoshoot.
“Already?” she said. “Darling, you’ve barely begun! Some of these people have been waiting centuries.”
“It’s too much,” I said. “Humans weren’t meant to carry this many reproaches.”
Her male counterpart appeared beside her, looking wounded but still loving. “But isn’t it beautiful? You’re seen. You’re remembered. You matter.”
“It’s exhausting!” I snapped. “Even the dead won’t leave me alone. Don’t you see? There’s no peace in this. Only endless loops of guilt and instruction.”
The female Reaper studied me, tapping her chin with one crimson nail. “So you prefer dreams, then? Messy allegories? Fumbling interpreters scribbling dream-books?”
“Yes!” I said. “At least in dreams there’s ambiguity. Meaning shifts with context. You can argue with yourself that maybe the whale was just indigestion.”
A slow smile spread across her face. “Fascinating. You prefer uncertainty to truth.”
“Of course I do,” I said. “We all do. Certainty is death.”
At this, both Reapers exchanged glances, some ancient secret flickering between them.
Finally, she leaned toward me, her perfume of smoke and roses almost overwhelming.
“Then perhaps we’ll shelve the phone book for now. Consider this… market research.”
And just like that, they were gone.
For weeks afterward, my phone remained silent—no whispered reproaches, no spectral demands for burial rites or apologies. Yet I found myself almost missing it—the sheer weight of being remembered, however painfully.
One night, as I lay half-asleep, I dreamed. My grandmother stood there, holding her locket. She didn’t speak. She only smiled.
And I woke with the strangest thought: maybe the Reapers were right. The phone book may. Come eventually. But for now, ambiguity was mercy.
Until then, I keep my phone on silent at night. Just in case.
