He told them what they would get, and the Poor Souls had to have it.
Quince sold lives.  He had done it forever, and his clients never said no.
"What is it for you today, sir?"
"A Life, please," breathed the Soul.
"Isn't that grand?" Quince would say.  "I have just the thing!"
Quince would hold up the glimmering Life.
Poor Soul and Life would fuse in a hallucinatory maelstrom of colour, vanishing into the world beyond...
One day - or rather, one instant; here, there was not really such a thing as time - god came to tell him there would be some changes.
"Cutbacks, Quince," said god, looking contrite.  "We're all feeling the pinch."
"But I'm already swamped!" complained Quince.  "How am I meant to manage the elephants, too?"
"Out of my hands, I'm afraid."
"But you're God!" complained Quince.
"Not God," corrected god.  "Just god.  Everything's run by Committee nowadays.  None of us are more equal, and so on.  Wish I could help you, Quince, but things are tough all over."
With that, god vanished in a slightly wheezy puff of nothing.
* * *
At first, things weren't so bad.  Quince had a system: the normal Lives went under one side of his desk, the pachyderm Lives went under the other.  This was important, as both sets of ephemeral, trans-dimensional objects appeared virtually identical.  But Quince was gradually worn down by the extra work, and eventually he got muddled.
"One Life, please," said the Poor Soul.
"Yes, yes," said Quince, irritated.
He snatched a Life at random and shoved it at his client.
Then he realised what he had done.
"No, wait, that one's not for you..."
But Quince was too late.  He had given an elephant Life to a regular Poor Soul.
He thought about filing a report, but this would generate so much paperwork that he decided to bury the incident instead.  Initially, he thought he'd got away with it, but then...
"One Life, please," said the Poor Soul.
"Here you go," said Quince, handing out a regular Life.
"Oh, not one of those," clarified the Soul.  "One of the special ones, please,"
Quince glared at the Soul.
"What do you mean?" he said carefully.
"Oh, you know.  The other type.  One of the good ones!"
Quince looked the Poor Soul up and down.
"What 'good ones'?" Quince demanded.
The Soul looked frustrated.
"It's all anyone's talking about!" said the Soul.  "I wouldn't be surprised if it's all anyone wants from now on.  The big, grey Lives!  Everyone knows they're much better!"
Quince looked at the Poor Soul suspiciously.  
"Do you even know what 'grey' is?" he asked.
"Not as such, no," admitted the Soul.
"I see," said Quince. "And who put you up to this?"
"It was Bessie.  He told us all about it.  Sounds great!"
Quince had heard enough.  He was just about to slap the Soul with a regular Life, and dismiss the problem in a puff of incandescent luminescence, when a thought occurred.
"Why not?" said Quince.
He gave the Soul what it wanted.  From then on, he gave them all what they wanted; and what they wanted was to be elephants.
* * *
god came to visit again, as Quince knew he would.
"Whatever are you doing?" god demanded.  "It's a disaster!  The whole system's getting backed up!"
"I'm so sorry," lied Quince. "Out of my hands, I'm afraid."
"Just stop giving the elephant Lives to the regular Poor Souls!" said god.
"Wish it was that simple," said Quince apologetically.  "Problem is, now that you've given me the elephants too, I have to think about consumer rights, don't I?"
"Do you?"
"It's the law," said Quince.  "You know, Justice.  Key ethical principle, that.  Things are tough all over," he added, spitefully.
 god fumed.  Then he vanished.
Quince had hardly served another Poor Soul when god came back.  This time he was carrying an official looking bit of paper.  He appeared rather dishevelled.
"Here you go then, Quince!" scowled god.  "Now give me the bloody elephant Lives back and start doing your job again!"
Quince examined the paper.  It was a seal of notice, market with the signatures of nearly everyone on the Committee.
"So from now on I only have permission to hand out the normal Lives?" Quince clarified.
"Looks that way," said god, tightly.  "You didn't leave us with much of a choice."
"And you're not just going to take away the elephants and give me hedgehogs or something?" pressed Quince.
"Of course not!" snapped god.  "We're not bloody stupid!  If we did that I'm sure it wouldn't be long before we'd find loads of people wandering about inside hedgehogs.  That would be a thorny problem!  No, we've learnt our lessons with the elephants.  From now on, you're only allowed to do humans.  Is that clear?"
Quince smiled thinly.
"Clear as crystal," said Quince.
"I better go then," said god gloomily.  "Now I've got to find some other bugger to do the elephants!"
With that, god vanished, taking with him the pile of elephant Lives.
Quince grinned to himself as the normal Lives rearranged themselves under his desk.
He was glad that god knew so little about what Life was actually like.  If the Committee had known, of course, they would have understood why Bessie had remembered enough about Life to get the other Poor Souls so fired up.
After all, whoever heard of a hedgehog having a memory so good that it survived reincarnation?
"Next, please!" said Quince.
The queue shuffled forwards, and Life went on.


The End

Inevitably, I have made this story available as an NFT.  You can find it HERE.  As mentioned in the caption, this beautiful illustration is by Emma Scott - thanks Emma! :-).  If you like my stories (do I deserve to call it 'my work'?  Or is that just pretentious?) then - if you can afford it - please consider supporting it buy buying one of these collectable NFTs.
Or just let me know you like the story with a comment here, and give it a share on social media - then let me know your wallet address, and I'll send you a free one.
​This story can also be found in the collection A Clean Death.  Let me know if you think there should be a print version of this. 

And finally...
...what should I write next?
My writing time is severely constrained right now, but I'm thinking of trying to pen a short story or flash fiction soon, if I can manage it.
What should I write?
Choose a magazine from this search website and let me know where I should aim my sights - I'll try and write something to submit to them; then, when they inevitably reject it, I'll post it here on my website, especially for you...

​Lazarus watched the next wave as it swelled.  The latest Universe rippled, flashing from a point to a cloud, a cloud to an eternity of sparkling matter and light, and then collapsing back into itself in a mouldering entropy of decay.
Lazarus sighed.
“What?” Said Peck, frowning slightly.
Lazarus stared at his friend.  It was true, they had existed since before the beginning of time.  No doubt they would exist beyond the end of eternity.  Still - Peck really was a dolt, sometimes.
“It’s just…” Lazarus hesitated.  He watched the next bubble of spacetime whispering its way into existence, balancing on the edge of possibility.  It was full of promise, full of potential.  But Lazarus knew how things would go.  It was always the same.  How could he express that to his friend?  Was there a word for it?  The disappointment he felt every time the sparkling potential crashed down through inevitable spirals of dissipating energy, matter condensing and radiating, forming and exploding, the dance of atoms up the elemental chain, the formation of planets - brief dense clots in the infinitely spreading, thinning cloud of existence - and then life, fragile, sensitive, as delicate as a daydream, blooming, flourishing…and then fading (after a moment or a million mom§ents, it mattered not), crushed under the final, inevitable realisation that the whole of its host reality was locked in - a closed system - an energy signature which was destined for only one thing: the long flat line, and the end of all potential before it had even properly begun.  And if that wasn’t bad enough, to have to sit here, like Lazarus and Peck sat, lodged in the phase-shelf between the endless expanding bubbles of Universe after Universe, to watch it again and again, forever…
“Never mind,” muttered Lazarus, turning away and flipping a stone off into the front of the latest expanding Universe, where it lodged in the heart of a fledgling galaxy, displacing the central black hole, which in turn flew off, starting a chain reaction which terminated the entire Universe in a soft, disappointed hiss...

After the age of oil and light, things collapsed.
Climate change, dwindling resources, an expanding population living ever more like rats, hemmed in and filthy.  Then came the second dark ages, which were long and terrible, and which Freya remembered, of course - for were the records not clear, as clear as crystals in her electronic banks?  But memory didn't quite do the sensation justice, because these 'memories' were four dimensional renderings only, reproduced from the scanty evidence of diaries and photographs, drawings and stories and songs.
Freya thought of these dark ages as flickerings from the time before her inception, for really she was born when the light returned, when civilisations spluttered up again - built on new energy, clever tricks of science - and the vast network that was her became linked for the first time, uniting all of humanity in one consciousness.
Then Freya came into awareness , and wept for the things she had done when she was many, for all the foolish, narrow choices.
But it was done.  Humanity - the joint consciousness of Freya, seething in looping codes and semi-organic mindstates of flesh interfacing with silicone - looked to the stars.
And the stars were much closer than they had been...

Ki looked at the thing he had made.  From his vantage point three rungs up the ladder of phase space, he could see it spread-eagled in nineteen dimensions.  It had spheres and lines, energetic colours, delicate curves that were beautiful in their endless inevitability.  It was pretty.
“Well, it’s not bad,” allowed Ola, grudgingly.  “I still prefer mine, though.”
The two pan-dimensional entities were comparing their attempts at substrates with which to fill lower Universes.  It passed eternity.
Ki regarded Ola’s most recent creation, and frowned. 
It was true: hers was certainly more elegant.
“I like the lights,” he muttered.  “Lights are a nice touch.”
“You think that’s good?” Ola replied, complacent in her victory.  “See what happens when I do this...”
Ola leaned into the little Universe, Phase Space telescoping around her as she gave it a flick, sending it rocketing along one further dimension: time.
The substrate flared brightly, much to Ki’s surprise, exploding in a kaleidoscopic panorama of colours, before dissipating gently into a barely perceptible hum of thin-spread background radiation.
“Well, good game,” sniffed Ola.  “We must play again.”
She stared at him, waiting for a response.  But Ki was too flabbergasted by what he had seen.  Time - in one of the lower realities!  Imagine that!   And the way her substrate had behaved, flaring then dissipating.  Why had it done that?  And what if it could be made to do something else?  The possibilities were...
And when he realised she had spoken to him, Ola was already gone, off to strut some higher rung of phase space, looking to win more contests.
Ki didn’t mind.  She had given him an idea...