The Pause Button

Death has a day off

In the quiet, fog-shrouded town of Wraithmoor, where the church bells tolled with a rusted wheeze, Death took a day off. Not the personified skeleton of folklore, but a weary entity with sand in his bones and a ledger frayed at the edges. For eons, he’d collected souls with robotic diligence, but today, he craved stillness. A single day, he reasoned, to linger in the mortal world, to feel the weight of not ending things.



The town awoke to an odd serenity. Hospitals reported no deaths. Ambulances sat idle. A 911 operator hung up a call from a heart attack victim�"only to find the man sputtering on the floor, alive, his pupils returning to normal. Social media erupted with #DayOfMiracles. The local priest, Father Colin, skipped his morning communion, unaware that his leukemia had inexplicably gone into remission. Life, it seemed, had hit pause on its grim reaper.



But by noon, the air thickened.



Morgue technicians noticed the first anomaly: Eleanor Voss, a 78-year-old whose soul Death had scheduled to collect at 10 a.m., sat upright in her casket, her skin a waxy gray, eyes milky and unblinking. She didn’t speak, didn’t move beyond that eerie rise and fall. Then, one by one, others followed. Corpses in funeral parlors, mass graves, even the town’s forgotten paupers in the abandoned asylum�"they all stirred.



The dead weren’t alive. Not exactly. They lacked the fluid grace of the living, their movements jerky, as though their souls were caught in a buffer, looping between life and death. But they hungered.



Lila, the town’s young mortician, was the first to connect the dots. A skeptic of most things, she’d seen enough of death’s handiwork to recognize its absence. “It’s like they’re… stuck,” she whispered, watching a zombified Eleanor crawl from her casket, her fingers clutching at the air. Lila locked herself in her office, only to find the door rattling as more corpses piled against it�"dozens, drawn by the scent of breath, of warmth.



By dusk, Wraithmoor was a quarantine zone. Survivors barricaded themselves in the community center as the undead swarmed the streets, moaning not with anguish but frustration, their souls trapped in a limbo Death’s absence had created. The priest, now feverish, rambled about “a balance” and “doors left unlocked.”



Desperate, Lila drove to the one place she’d never gone: Death’s crossroads. She found him there, sitting on a rusted gate, sipping coffee from a chipped mug, watching the chaos unfold on a floating screen. “You’re killing them,” she hissed. “The dead can’t pass without you! They’re… backlogging.”



Death blinked, his form flickering like a dying bulb. “I’m tired, girl. One day. I needed one day.”



Lila didn’t understand the weight of his exhaustion�"how mortality’s gears grind eternal, how a pause warps the cosmic clockwork. But she saw the town, the priest clutching a bleeding arm as a corpse gnashed at him, the way the air reeked of rot and static.



“Fix this,” she begged.



Death sighed, standing. The screen died. His scythe materialized, not as a weapon, but as a conductor’s baton. With a sweep, he cut through the backlog, sending souls screaming into the void�"a sound like tearing silk. The dead crumpled, returning to their caskets, their graves.



But as the gates of the afterlife resealed, Lila noticed something. Death’s eyes, briefly, were not hollow but human. And in them, a flicker of guilt.



He left her a parting gift: a single, withered black rose.



The next day, Wraithmoor’s church bells rang clear. No one mentioned the dead who’d walked, though some left flowers at their loved ones’ graves�"just in case. And Death? He didn’t take another day off for 364 years.



But every midnight, Lila’s descendants report a cold wind at the crossroads. And the smell of coffee.

Reviews

[RKB]

Oh wow, I love the structure of this, and I was definitely pulled in. Had a neat horror, speculative vibe that I really enjoyed and kept me going til the end. Great job!