The Puzzle Builder

For the most part, I used to love building puzzles, but now that it’s my job, I have lost the joy in doing them. I sit at my large white desk. The room is dark, almost black, with a bright light above me like the rest of the puzzle builders. They keep us separate from each other so that there are no distractions from building the puzzles. Some days I will build 5 a day depending on how many pieces there are and the difficulty.

Staring at the box in front of me, I let out a sigh. The picture is of the scene from Pocahontas where she is standing on the cliff staring out into the ocean with the wind blowing. I let out another sigh as I see the number of pieces, 150. It’s a short one; I thought sadly.

Opening the box, I gently empty the contents onto my table and start sorting through them. I take out all the border pieces and turn all the upside-down pieces upright. I find the corners pieces and place them at their corners as in the picture on the box. Once I have all my pieces separated, I begin working on the border, glancing at the picture now and then.

There is a lot of blue going from light to dark, with trees in the shadows. There is also a lot of orange, pink and purple as the scene is a sunset. The puzzle takes me an hour to complete due to all the colors. I sit back and admire the puzzle before my door opens.

I look up as the Cleaner comes in. They dressed him all in black with a mask covering his entire face except the eyes. He has dark eyes. He takes a large rectangle steel bin from his cart marked 10–my room number. I reach out, stopping him from destroying the puzzle. He frowns at this, but with my pleading eyes, he allows me to have a minute to say goodbye to the puzzle.

He lightly clears his throat; I nod, and he begins breaking the puzzle up into pieces and throws it into the bin. This is a beautiful puzzle and I watch him destroy it. I can’t bear it anymore, turning my face away, yet I can’t drown out the sound the pieces make as it hits the bottom of a hollow bin. The silence makes it worse in the room.

After he leaves, the Puzzle Bringer brings me another puzzle. They dressed her in the same outfit, but in red. My clothes are the same except they are green and without the mask. She lays the puzzle box in front of me, then leaves, closing the door. None of us may speak to each other. It’s forbidden.

A quiver slips my lips as I mourn for my puzzle that was just destroyed. I quickly pull myself together and pick up the fresh box in front of me. It’s 1000 pieces of a dolphin and water fairy-mermaid sitting in the middle of the ocean on a rock. This is going to take a lot longer than the 150 pieces. It’s all different shades of blue, from dark to light, with puffs of white and maroon and purple with a bit of green. There is also gold in it, from the fairy-mermaid’s wings, tail and headpiece to the waves to the sky.

I smiled a little. This will take at least a few days. That means the person who this belongs to will have a year to live, I thought happily. I just wish the child’s life was a little longer. She only has a week left. The bigger the puzzle, the longer the life.

I still didn’t understand the whole-time algorithm process, but I had a rough idea of the life span. Like I know 150-piece equals to a week as it took an hour to build. If it had taken 3 hours to build, then the soul will live 10 days. And if it was like this one, now 1000 piece and takes a few days, then that equals to the soul living for a year. And a 2000-piece puzzle would equal to almost two years of life.

I wish I could have taken longer on the Pocahontas puzzle, but if I lingered too long, they would come in and destroy the puzzle before it was complete. As a result, the soul’s life will then continue for the same amount of time it took to build the puzzle right up until the moment that it is destroyed. So basically, if you take 3 hours instead of 1 hour, then the soul will have 3 hours to live instead of a week, or month. You are essentially cutting the soul’s life shorter than the great divine fated them.

I’m a Reaper, but not in the sense of a Grim Reaper walking around with a scythe and leading those who die to the underworld or to the light. No, a human’s life, soul is connected to a puzzle, like the golden thread of the fates, only its puzzles.

I tried to fight it in the beginning by not building the puzzles after being told what I was and how things would work. I begged to be released into the light or sent to the underworld, whichever they preferred just so long as they released me, but my pleas and rants fell on deaf ears. And every puzzle that I refused to build, the life of that soul, was cut short.

After a what felt like eternity, I gave up feeling guilty for those souls that died earlier than their time and spared the rest of the souls suffering the same fate all because I could not accept mine. I almost scoffed at the thought.

In my past life, I loved building puzzles as a hobby and let the world pass me by. So, when my time came instead of being sent to the underworld or to the light, they reaped me to be a Reaper because hey that’s what happens to those who love building puzzles and whose lives suck. They reaped us to exist for eternity in solitary to reap other souls.

I opened the box quickly as I had already taken longer than necessary and emptied the contents and proceeded as before by separating the pieces. Even though we don’t really know the age and sometimes the sex of the soul. But I can still sort of tell by the picture.

Like the Pocahontas puzzle, I know it’s a girl, and she’s probably around the age of 7 to 10 years old. Yesterday I had Car’s puzzle, so that is a no-brainer. It’s a boy, it was a 20-piece puzzle, so he was about 3 years old. I stopped mid-way sorting the border pieces, trying not to get teary-eyed at the thought of two young children in 2 days.

I try to remind myself that they would have died regardless of whether I am a Reaper or not. The only peaceful thing about children being reaped is that they go straight into the light. I smile with that in mind and continue to build my puzzle, wondering what my puzzle had been.