Okay, I remember exactly when I wrote this one. November of 2001, and I got a cold. And it was the sort of cold we males get, where we act like great big babies and think we're going to die. And at one point, the thought crossed my mind, "Geez, I'm so gross right now even DEATH wouldn't want to touch me." And that's there this story came from. This was first published in "December in St. Charles 2001" magazine, the publication of the St. Charles Herald-Guide that later became our "Jambalaya" special. The publishers had an idea that we could get new fiction from local artists to present each month. Unfortunately, the well of stories ran dry in about a minute, so I brought in this thing I'd just finished writing to drop in. Since we didn't want it to look like staffers were writing the pieces, this was published under the pseudonym "Walter J. Robichaux." Ten cool points to the first Evernaut who knows where that pen name originated.

Kevin was sick. He’d been sick for either two weeks, (normal time) or one trillion years (as time is reckoned when one is sick enough that he wants to throw up his own eyeballs). Outside his window the world moved on in the same fashion as always -- traffic and crime, love and loss and quite a bit of action on the Internet -- but in his apartment the only thing he seemed capable of tracking was his own rasping breathing, the rise and fall of his chest and the growing pile of used tissues by his bed that he believed resembled Delta Burke, if you’d just squint and tilt your head a bit to the left.

With each breath he felt the build-up in his nostrils, the congestion in his lungs and the pressure in his sinuses. He’d tried watching television earlier, but when turned the set on he saw three Jerry Springers giving him their “Final Thoughts.” He tried a book, but Garfield Loses His Feet began hurting his head on the third page. He turned on the radio, but after twenty minutes of tuning what turned out to be his toaster oven, he surrendered.

Kevin’s options were exhausted. He lay down, ingesting any over-the-counter medicine with the words “cold” or “sinus” on the box and hoping they’d either team up and strangle the virus or at least start fighting amongst themselves, the resulting scuffle driving his illness into hiding.

His fever was rising again when he noticed the shimmering effect on the wall opposite his bed, like waves of heat coming off hot asphalt. He briefly wondered what on Earth George Lucas was doing in his apartment.

Then a man appeared.

Well, man isn’t so much an accurate term -- it was more a seven-foot-tall skeleton in a black cloak carrying an impressive scythe. With him was a smaller figure, a studious-looking fellow with a clipboard and pen, his soda-bottle glasses perched neatly on the end of his nose.

“Great,” he moaned. “I’m seeing things again.”

“You are not hallucinating, Kevin Barnister,” said the Skeleton. “I am Death. I have come for you.”

“Oh,” said Kevin. He lifted his head for a moment to examine the apparition, looking him up and down as if he were a new car and Kevin were trying to determine how long it had been since his femurs were rotated. Finally, he looked up into the pair of cold, empty eye sockets.

“You’re Death, then?”

“I am.”

“And I’m about to die?”

“You are.”

Kevin considered this for a moment. “Thank God,” he decided, snapping his head against his pillow and falling asleep.

Death looked down at his associate. His voice jumped up about three octaves and lost the unique quality it had before -- something like a soft, fluffy kitty being thrown into a wheat thresher with a crate full of broken glass. “You didn’t tell me it was another one of these, Frank.”

“I was hoping you’d be used to it by now, sir. -- we get so many this time of year. Flu season and all.”

“And look at how I manifested this time -- skeleton, robe, scythe -- how clichéd. Just once I’d like to show up to rip someone’s soul from this mortal coil and have them imagine me as the musclebound Nordic type.”

“I suppose mortals don’t generally picture He Whose Coming Heralds the End of Their Existence as being quite so pleasant, sir.”

“Or as Tom Hanks,” Death continued. “I like that Tom Hanks -- remember that scene from ‘Forrest Gump’--”

“Sir? The job?”

“Oh. Right.” Death straightened himself and lowered his voice again, extending a bony arm down to Kevin.

“Now, Kevin Barnister, prepare to meet thy fate.”

Before he made contact, though, Kevin convulsed and coughed. His nose flared and a thick stream of green viscous fluid spurted out, spattering his lips and chin. One tendril got just enough altitude to latch onto Death’s index finger where it began to clot.

“Eeeeeeew...”

Frank sighed. “You know, I just don’t get you, sir. You’ve been present for the bloodiest disasters in history -- the Titanic, the Hindenberg, the Hale-Bopp... You preside over eviscerations. Sores and festering lesions don’t faze you in the least. You have a front row seat for electrocutions, but you get squeamish whenever you’ve got to deal with a little snot.”

“Well really, Frank, do you want to touch it?”

Kevin coughed and glanced up. “Are you really Death?”

“Yes, I’m really Death. Why does everyone ask that?”

“Then I’m sicker than I thought? I’ve got the flu or pneumonia or something?”

“No,” Frank said. “Just a cold.”

“A cold?” Kevin sputtered. “Who dies of a cold?”

“Many people, actually,” Frank said. “You see the common cold is, in fact, quite often a very fatal disease. You lie there aching, moaning, writing in your own... stuff...”

“Mucous,” said Death. “It’s all that mucous.”

“And, although apparently spontaneous human combustion and festering pus is just hunky-dory with him,” Frank continued, “once your nose starts bubbling a little Death here gets all squeamish.”

Death frowned (or, at least, did the closest thing one can do when one’s face consists of a few bones fused together into a spheroid configuration). “Listen,” he said, “would you mind terribly if I let you live?”

“Not again,” Frank muttered.

“You know I’m permitted so many mulligans a day,” Death said. “I’ve still got a few left. Listen, I try not to deal with your particular brand of... termination... unless the circumstances are so dire that the patient will just start choking on his own excretions or something and start dying over and over again until I finally work up the nerve to take him, and that really isn’t pleasant for anybody.”

“What?” Kevin wheezed, quite certain that he had gone mad.

“So if you don’t make me touch you now -- it’s nothing personal, I’m certain that if I had a gender and it was female or whatever you prefer, it’s really none of my business, I think I’d find you quite the fetching chap--”

“What?” Kevin repeated, feeling a variety of disorientation that is impossible to describe unless you have had the pleasure of Death making a pass at you while you run a 102-degree fever.

“What I’m trying to get across here is that if you agree not to die tonight I’ll be quite happy to go away and leave you a productive life and not pop in again until you’re hit by a bus. Deal?”

Kevin thought for a long moment, then decided to go with a question that was working for him at the moment. “What?”

Frank studied his clipboard. “Are you sure you want to do this, sir?”

“Is he going up or down?”

“Up,” Frank said, glaring at Kevin. “Barely.”

“Well you see, then? If I bring him up in this condition he’ll be in a nasty mood and you know how infectious those are and soon everybody there will be all cross and start slapping each other with wings and the harp music will grow sour and sooner or later somebody will blame me for bringing him there and it’ll be the Black Plague all over again. This way our friend Kevin gets another chance to get on the really good list -- I highly recommend that, Kevin, you get bigger wings and a little mint on your pillow.”

It was now dawning on Kevin that this skeleton who came to kill him was now saying he might not die after all. He wasn’t sure he approved.

“This is your last freebie tonight, sir,” Frank said, “What if we find a little puppy freezing in the road? You know you always feel guilty about freezing puppies.”

“I’ll take that chance. Well, then, I’ll see you later, Kevin. Much later, I assure you.” Death turned around and Kevin felt galvanized. He had resigned himself to his death so quickly that it was taking a considerably longer time for the fact that he was probably going to live to register than it would under better circumstances.

“No!” he shouted. “Please, no! Take me! I don’t want to live like this!”

“Oh don’t worry, Kevin, colds don’t last forever. Take some chicken soup, I’ve got it on good authority from millions of mothers that chicken soup will cure anything. Of course, it didn’t work for them, but... Oh, and some of those zinc drops, I know they taste absolutely dreadful, but they really work. Ta!”

Death and Frank headed into the wall and the shimmering effect returned. Soon the only sign of their existence a lingering voice in Kevin’s ear saying, “Ta? Really, this is so embarrassing, sir, I do wish you’d just buck up for a change...”

Kevin watched them go. Once he was quite certain they were gone and he was again alone, he rolled over and began making disparaging remarks about Death’s mother. Then he grabbed the NyQuil. He was going to get rid of this cold if it killed him. Either way was fine.