1.

“The choice is all yours,” he said, holding the Hourglass just inches in front of her frightened face. It didn’t help the matter that his hand was trembling and the sand seemed to be falling to the bottom chamber at an alarming rate. “It doesn’t matter to me!”

“It doesn’t matter to me either!” she shot back to him with eyes narrowed to mere slits. She knew that he was lying. Even if his grinning skull of a face could bear no true expression. The Grim Reaper did absolutely care if she accepted the flowing hourglass from him. “If I take this thing away from you then you go free, and I…”

She had no idea what came after “…and I…” her hesitation meant that she was considering what could be worse than death. That, being the cessation of life more than the personification of death towering over her.

With both hands, she grabbed the Hourglass…

…and he disappeared in a blinding light.

Immediately she could feel the transformation. Her already thin frail hands were mere twigs of bone. Her flesh no longer apparent. And in the crook of her arm rests the powerful Scythe. She has now become a Grim Reaper.

2.

Afterwards they'd call him "Road Kill", he called himself Bob. He woke up back in his body, laying on his side twisted and tangled, not being able to move his left arm, it was pinned underneath him.

A swift breeze blew a fine black dust into his blurry eyes, the worn remnants of a thousand tires. The smell of carbon monoxide, tar, old motor oil slammed the back of his nostrils like getting poked in the brain with an auto shop rag...he could also taste...blood.

Another hot breeze, and another, accompanied by the sound of a car horn and screeching breaks tearing through the ringing in his ears.

He rocked himself over and propped himself up with his good arm...

"I'm back." he said, "Oh lord thank you!" to no-one there.

...and he would never know about the speeding red pickup truck that rushed up behind him and plowed over him. Crumpling and contorting his broken body beyond recognition. A silver cord materializes from the center of the pile of steaming guts that used to be his body.

Hesitantly, a rusty hand sickel reaches towards the silver cord and snaggs it...yanks it, but the cord does not break. A couple of feeble but swift tuggs...and the silver cord pulls back against the force.

The small childlike bony hands grasp the blade itself, raking it side to side...the sand in the hourglass on the ground next to Bob's smashed in head will likely run out before the young reaper releases the road killed soul.

3.

Willow hadn't even noticed that the same flash of light that caused the Grim Reaper which had just been standing before her to disappear, had also transported her.

When she almost tripped over the half-naked body of the drug ravaged woman on the floor with a bloody syringe hanging from her arm, she first had thought it was her own dead body which she had just escaped from. But the unfamiliar decor and cockroach effluvium of the skid row flat quickly tipped her off that she was not in Kansas anymore.

Her wrist twisted as the top heavy Hourglass in her hand almost toppled over. She vaguely recalled that before she had touched the old fashioned time keeper, most of the sand was in the bottom chamber. Now it was all in the upper chamber. With the transition, the countdown was restarted. And somehow she knew, the realization washed over her like a seawater wave. She has only one hour to do something. One hour to either use the hefty Scythe which she just noticed in the grasp of her other hand, or to pass on the draining Hourglass to someone.

And it all has something to do with the dead junky on the floor in front of her. And with that realization a beam of silver blue plasma manifested from the addicts chest and shot straight up into infinity.

Willow's first impression, bracing her eyes against the brilliant reflection of the silver beam in the elegant curved blade of the Scythe...

"Cut it." she thought, "Cut the line."

"Cut the crap!" The wasted junky on the floor murmured, "Cut the fuck'n crap!" and stirred.

"You're not dead?"

"Hunh? Wah?" junky Lucy blinked her sleep snot encrusted eyes at the slightly feminine skeleton in a black cape like thing, "Who the fuck are you?!"

Thinking that she should stand on ceremony as the Grim Reaper, Willow announced "I am the personification of Death and I have arrived to harvest your weary soul."

"Pfffft" was Lucy's response as she struggled to sit herself up. "OUCH! PfffffucK!!" finally noticing the bent needle of the filthy syringe dangling from her forearm. She gave it a tug and let it drop to the floor, yet not a drop of blood oozed from the ragged puncture hole.

The Reaper, Willow, had already decided what she was about to do. She just hadn't realized it yet.

"Why?" Reaper Willow asked.

"Why what?" answered Junky Lucy.

To herself, "Just why?"

Annoyed Lucy, "Just Why What?!"

Still, sotto voce, Willow, "Why are you always fucked up one way or the other?'

...