Margaret’s desk was where lives officially ended – at least on paper. Each death certificate she processed represented not just a person but all they left behind. The unclaimed possessions would pile up in storage: watches that still kept time, rings that sparkled, photographs whose stories no one remembered.
It started with one watch. The janitor, Carlos, had been mopping near her desk when the gold glint caught his eye. “My father had one just like it,” he said softly, more to himself than to her. She looked at the inventory sheet – no next of kin, just another item bound for state auction.
“It’s just going to sit in storage anyway,” she said. His face lit up with such genuine gratitude that her understanding of power and kindness shifted forever.
Her office became a hub of whispered favors and careful arrangements. Every morning, hot coffee appeared on her desk. Someone always held the elevator. When her car wouldn’t start, three people offered rides before she could reach for her phone.
Then the whispers started. “Old Mr. Johnson in 304 isn’t doing well,” a nurse would mention casually. “He has the most beautiful collection of vintage cufflinks.” Or “That terminal patient in 512 – did you see her designer handbags?”
Soon, she had a system. The nurses who helped process paperwork would get the first choice of jewelry—the security guards aimed at the electronics. The maintenance staff had their pick of tools and practical items. She kept a careful mental track,ensuring everything seemed fair and reasonable – at least by her measure of utility.
People began dropping by to update her on declining patients, each mention dripping heavily with expectation. Her desk became a reservation system for the not-yet-dead, with subtle claims being staked before the certificates were even typed.
Then came Ms. Chen’s antique jade collection. Margaret had already distributed the pieces among her favorite nurses when a woman appeared at her desk – Ms. Chen’s daughter, who lived across town. She wanted her mother’s things.
The appearance sent a jolt of fear through Margaret’s carefully constructed world of generous authority. Her fiefdom stood publicly revealed. But instead of making it right, she did what people often do when power begins to slip—she grabbed for more. She made calls, pulled strings, and used the system she’d corrupted to mark the daughter as problematic, redirecting her complaints into administrative dead ends.
The ease with which she silenced Ms. Chen’s daughter awakened something darker in Margaret. Each act of bureaucratic cruelty became easier than the last, more justified in her mind. She began to see kindness as weakness and conscience as hesitation. The system she’d corrupted now corrupted her in return.
She thought strength meant wearing their armor, fighting their battles, and playing by their unwritten rules. Each victory in their arena cost a piece of her heart, but she called it a success. In boardrooms and backroom deals, she learned to strike first, speak loudest, and push hardest. “This is power,” she told herself as she built a fortress of influence through fear and favor.
At first, she would dream of all those objects—the watches still ticking, the rings still catching light, all those unclaimed stories seeking their next chapter. But those dreams faded quickly, replaced by the cold clarity of opportunity. The hospital’s pawn shops and casino exchanges became her education in a different kind of accounting. Each transaction taught her something new: which shops would take items without paperwork, which casino managers could convert jewels into chips without questions.
She learned to speak in code—” estate liquidation” meant one thing to the day shift and something else entirely to the night manager. Margaret didn’t understand then that these weren’t just business relationships but auditions. The pawn brokers and casino managers weren’t just clients; they were gatekeepers, evaluating her worth to the machinery of corruption that hummed beneath the city’s surface.
Her network expanded beyond hospital walls, bringing darker connections. Men in expensive suits began appearing at her desk, their whispered requests extending beyond mere valuables. “Just a small favor,” they would say, and she would nod. She developed an elaborate pricing system: basic information about incoming valuables for one rate, first pick of items for another, exclusive access to estates for premium prices, and for those notable clients who knew the right words, services that never touched paper.
What started with small indulgences – a designer bag here, a weekend getaway there – grew into conspicuous displays of wealth throughout the hospital. Designer suits replaced her modest office wear, a Mercedes took the spot of her old Honda, and her “medical leave” days were spent in private villas across Europe. The staff didn’t question; they were too busy calculating their cuts, too eager for their next favor. Her prosperity became their aspiration, a glimpse of what loyalty to her system could provide.
The whispers in the halls were no longer about the belongings of the dying but about who was rising in Margaret’s favor, who had fallen, and who might be trusted with the more delicate transactions. Her office had become its economy of influence, where every glance carried ledgers of obligation, and every smile was a promissory note. Each day, the web of favors and fear grew more complex, more inescapable.
She found herself standing alone when the game changed—as games always do. The people who’d praised her audaciousness now watched silently as she fell. All those years of building influence had created nothing that could catch her.
It was one of her most trusted dealers who finally turned on her. Caught in his legal troubles, he saw an opportunity to bargain with more than just information about missing items. He had details about falsified death certificates and convenient record disappearances. The following investigation pulled at every careful thread she’d woven, exposing not just years of theft but a sprawling network of corruption that reached the city’s darkest corners.
>Only then, watching each lie unravel like pulled threads, did she understand the obvious: truth was the only currency that held its value in a world of paper trails and coded ledgers. Every careful fabrication she’d created left a shadow of evidence, every false death leaked life, and every corrupt deal contained the seeds of its exposure.
The scandal exploded beyond missing heirlooms into a nightmare of intersecting crimes. Each seized ledger entry, each decoded note, revealed threads of horror: missing persons whose deaths she had certified without bodies, criminals whose records she had scrubbed clean, identities she had helped resurrect from her repository of the dead. Margaret had imagined herself a clever manipulator of the system. Still, now she saw the truth – she was just a bookkeeper of atrocities, a clerk who had sold her soul in installments and kept meticulous records of each transaction.
On her last day, Margaret sat alone in her office, watching her reflection fade in the darkening window. She had always seen herself as the spider in this dark corner of the hospital, patient and lethal, weaving her web of influence. The face staring back now wasn’t haunted by the trinkets she’d stolen but by a more profound theft – the slow, steady robbery of her soul. Only now did she understand – she’d never been the spider. She was simply another fly, wrapping herself so carefully in silk that she couldn’t feel the threads tightening until it was too late to escape.
As they led her away from her desk – where lives officially ended and where her own life had taken its dark turn – she finally understood that there was no peace in any of the answers she’d given herself over the years. The watches in evidence storage still kept their own time, and the rings still held their truth, and justice, it seemed, had its way of finding their rightful owners.
If you’ve journeyed with Margaret through The Death Clerk’s Gifts and wondered about the subtle magic hiding in bureaucratic corners, then you’ll want to follow Ms. Chen’s daughter as she uncovers why people who move to Pine Valley Court never quite manage to leave. Here, in The Neighborhood of Eternal Afternoons, the fire hydrants multiply like secrets, and the water knows things it shouldn’t…”
This connects the bureaucratic magic of Margaret’s world with the infrastructure oddities of Ms. Chen’s neighborhood, while hinting at similar themes of hidden knowledge and everyday mysteries. It suggests both stories share a universe where ordinary things (death certificates, plumbing) hold extraordinary secrets.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, insects, or cats, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
