One time, I found a dead baby on the side of the road. I was walking home from visiting a ‘friend’ and there it was, a little cardboard bow with an old blanket inside and a dead baby on top. The poor thing still looked almost alive and must have died sometime in the day before. I’ve always been good with kids, including dead ones, so I took the baby home.

When I got back home, they wouldn’t stop crying. I was the only one who could hear it, which was a blessing and a curse. I’m pretty used to the cries of the dead, but hearing it from a baby is more sad than anything else. Have you ever heard that stuff? It can break you. I used to wonder if I was hallucinating, since nobody else heard it. But that’s silly. I did the best I could to get the little baby re-situated.

I gave them a bottle, an empty one of course, just to calm them down. Even dead children like to at least pretend to eat. Then I took out an old purple blanket from when I was little (the one from the box smelled like rot) and warmed the poor thing up. The cries stopped, and it was nice to know I hadn’t lost my knack for babysitting.

With the kid finally quiet, I wasn’t sure what to do next. I couldn’t call CPS as they don’t deal with dead kids. I couldn’t call anyone, really. Not a lot of people understand that dead folks are still people. And dead babies, like the one I was holding, are still babies. I was still thinking about it when I went to dump the box and its contents in the trash outside before my whole place started smelling like rot.

That was when I spotted a familiar sight. Someone in a long, black robe was piloting an old-fashioned boat down the street as if it were a river. That’s the one type of person who can take care of a dead baby properly. A reaper, someone whose whole job is caring for the dead.

Apparently, he was on his way to another job, but not in a hurry. Though, I don’t know how one can not be in a hurry when there are afterlives at stake, ya know? Despite that, this kind of thing is actually pretty common for me, so I know how that system works. I entrusted the ghost baby to him immediately, knowing that they would be well cared for.

What? Yeah, I said ‘ghost baby’! What did you think, I was trying to take care of a corpse? That’s disgusting!