Scythe and Syllabus

Nobody died on Tuesday.

At first, humanity considers this excellent news.

Cancer patients survive the night. Fatal accidents stop being fatal. The dying simply... don't. Governments celebrate. Markets react. Religious leaders reconsider a few things.

Then everyone discovers the problem.

People can still get sick. They can still grow old. They can still be terribly injured. They can suffer.

They just can't die.

Hospitals fill. Families buckle. Governments form committees. Committees create departments. Departments create forms. And somewhere, inevitably, someone decides the whole thing needs a rubric.

Meanwhile, Death is drinking coffee in Geraldine Look's kitchen.

Geraldine has spent twenty-three years as a special education teacher. She loves teaching. She loves her students. She is considerably less enthusiastic about meetings, compliance reports, changing initiatives, progress monitoring, professional-development webinars, and the increasingly elaborate documentation required to prove that she has done the job she was too busy documenting to actually do.

Death understands more than she expected.

After millennia of accompanying humanity through its final moments, he has walked away from his own profession, exhausted by the cruelty of people and by the bureaucracy that slowly transformed a deeply human responsibility into a system of schedules, classifications, performance standards, and successful-transition metrics.

Now Death is retired.

And he would like to rent Geraldine's spare bedroom.

As the world outside begins discovering why endings matter, an exhausted teacher and an exhausted cosmic functionary find themselves arguing over coffee about work, burnout, children, bureaucracy, suffering, success, failure, and whether knowing how a story ends tells you anything about what the story meant.

Scythe and Syllabus is a darkly funny, deeply human novel about the work that matters, the systems we build around it, and the dangerous assumption that caring about something means you must allow it to consume you.

It is a story about teachers.

It is a story about Death.

Mostly, it is a story about what we do while we're here.