thisgrimfandango | the other side of the world

On November 2, he always told the others that there was no one back there he wanted to see. But the truth was Manny Calavera got enough of the living when he brought in the dead.

That makes it sound more dramatic than it is. When it comes down to it, unlike many of the souls that have recently arrived in El Marrow, Manny isn't too preoccupied with his mortal life. He hadn't thought much about death when he was alive, but on the other side of it, his life just seemed like a brief detour that inevitably led him here. To El Marrow, the first stop in the Land of the Dead.

And right now, his only stop. There was no leaving this city, not if you weren't meant to. They didn't say what happened if you tried to walk out on foot, just that you wouldn't make it farther than the city limits. Not even to the Petrified Forest eight kilometers away. And there was no point in trying a car, not when most of them could only be driven by demons.

So there was just El Marrow, a dead-end city full of dead-end souls. (Unfortunately, Manny is the only one of them who never gets tired of a good dead pun.) Anyone who stuck around did so for only one of two reasons: because the Powers That Be decreed they had to, or because they were afraid. Afraid of the journey, or afraid of the end. Manny is here because it was decreed. He had committed some sin in his life, and so had to spend at least some part of eternity handing out glossy brochures and golden tickets to the ones lucky enough to move on.

While he hadn't been a saint, Manny doesn't know what he'd done to receive the sentence of being death's salesman. But even though he wants to leave this city more than anything, there was one thing he has to admit – he likes his job.

He's really good at it.

They may not have eyes or flesh or even breath anymore, but the dead were just as easy for him to read as the living had been. The newly dead were also the simplest customers, as they were the closest you could get to being "born yesterday." Just a few hints of the dangers of the four year journey and most were willing to ante up their entire burial plot just to avoid having to cross the world on foot. It was the fact that Manny could get these souls to like him while he sold them the trips to their hereafters that made him so popular on the sales team. And gave him the biggest office, with the geometric-patterned blue-and-purple stained glass door and the best view this building could offer of the El Marrow skyline, at least for anyone who wasn't the boss.

(If it weren't the fact that he didn't want to stick around that long, that view is the one he'd be gunning for.)

But his work also provides the best distraction – from the fact that no matter how he's doing in this job, he's not moving forward. That it's been years and he's still just stuck. That others walk out the front door of the Department of Death and head toward the train station or garage or at least the exit, and Manny just heads back to his place, a small room two floors above a bar in the southern quarter. Quaint little rusty red and night blue townhouses, compared to the terra cotta-red-and-brown sky scrapers of the city's center – though those towers, topped with setbacks that wove up like pyramids, were always readily visible in the distance.

It's really a beautiful place, for a prison.