Choices of the Heart

A doctor puts his hand on his patient's arm, her face fixed with pain, eyes darting between her swollen stomach and the doctor, who sits beside her gently with a face full of sadness and says, "You or the baby will survive. Not both. I'm sorry."

The Grim Reaper stood in the room, his eyeless sockets fixated on the woman who lay on the hospital bed, her face distorted with birthing pains. The husband looked at the doctor tears in his eyes, then, his face set like steel.

"Save her," He whispered before walking out of the room

Everyone was astonished with his decision, it was swift and striking, he wanted to sacrifice his own child. The woman grabbed the arm of the doctor, her grip painful, desperate. The Reaper merely stared, his pocketwatch dangling from his skeletal fingers, the hands ticking slowly.

"Save my child," The woman pleaded weakly, her body was failing and she knew it. There was no turning back, not for her, but the child. The child only has one chance.

The doctor looked back towards the door where her husband had left in his grieving wake and then towards the woman, he held onto her hand tightly, tears streaming down his face, making a promise he would soon regret,

"I will save the child," He whispered, his fingertips brushing her cheek.

She smiled, a gesture of gratefulness. The Reaper's attention shifted from the woman's irrecoverable short span of life to the husband, who has outside his head in his hands. The Reaper walked slowly towards him, the chain of the pocketwatch rattling as he moved, the only sound that could be heard in the quiet hospital.

The husband found himself looking up, The Grim Reaper making himself known to the man. To even the Reaper's surprise, the man didn't yell or scream, he just stared at the other worldly being, more tears filling his eyes.

The man understood why he was here. With a sympathetic look on the skull of The Reaper, he tapped the shoulder of the man and showed him the pocketwatch. It showed two different times, one was a time of death. And the other, was a time 30 minutes later, unlabelled. The Reaper pointed at the extra time before pointing to his dying wife who was now in the ending stages of her labour, her death staggering closer and closer.

The man looked at dark hooded being and nodded, his own hand wrapping around the hand of the skeleton. The pocketwatch left from their joined hands and made it's way to the newfound mother, hovering, waiting to fulfill its final task.

"Jonathan, would you like to see your son?" The doctor asked as the man entered the room with The Reaper trailing behind, who returned to his original position. The man stared in awe, his wife awake, smiling, and in her arms, his son. Their son.

The tiny human wrapped in blue, gentle noises coming from the newborn. The man glanced at the watch above the head of his wife, and as the time of her death approached, it moved to a time 30 minutes later before vanishing.

A sad low growl came from an empty space below the hospital bed but Jonathan, saw nothing. He did not see The Reaper nor any traces of him. The couple celebrated their new born life, spending the rest of the time Jonathan knew they had together.

And yet, that time came too fast, the woman's breathing slowed as she placed a last kiss to the forehead of a child she would never know, her eyes closing slowly as she took one last look at her husband, with a final, happy, grateful smile. She died.

The husband knew but nonetheless, he couldn't stop the tears as he took his child, the only thing that would keep him, in his arms. The child cried, for the very first time, for his now gone mother.

The woman from afar, looked at her own dead body, but what really caught her attention was the hooded figure hunched over on the ground. She touched it's shoulder, The Reaper looked at her with a sad smile, a pocketwatch in his bony fingers, the glass cracked, it's light dim. The spirit of the woman had finally realized that the Reaper gave up his remaining time for her own.

The true sacrifice was not the woman, but The Grim Reaper who gave his own time to the woman whose death was inevitable.

And so, The Grim Reaper also fell still.