Tree

I became a tree for a week. It was an unpaid internship. I'd applied to the local Tree Bureau. They said they did have one position available but were not able to pay me at this time, was that OK?

I said yeah.

They sent over a map of a forest on the edge of town. There was a little green X in felt-tip pen, in the middle of a cluster of trees by the river. This was my spot. I learned that the woman who was usually the tree in that spot had temporarily stopped being a tree for medical reasons.

I said OK. That made sense. I wondered how serious it was, if she was only taking a week off, but I didn't mention it. Maybe she just really loved being a tree and was keen to get back to it as soon as possible.

I asked if there was a dress code. They said, no, not exactly, but I shouldn't bring any pencils or paper. No magazines or newspapers either. Trees don't like it when we use paper near them, because it's their skin.

I suppose if someone showed up at my office building and started writing with a pencil made from a human finger, on parchment made from human flesh, I'd be upset too.

They said, any more questions?

I said no, and thanked them for the opportunity.

Monday rolled around and I hiked my way over to the park for 8 o'clock sharp. I hadn't printed out a map, so as not to offend my new colleagues with the sight of paper so early on. After all, I wanted to make a good impression. But I had a picture of the map on my phone. I figured that would be OK.

Arriving at the spot, I double- and triple-checked my phone. Yup, this was the place. Right by the tepid green river. I gave a curt nod to the tree to my left, and a half-smile to the tree to my right. This cluster seemed fine. They seemed like OK people. Hopefully neither of them was a noisy eater.

It was not yet raining, but there was a slight dampness in the air. The sun wasn't fully up yet.

I crouched down and unlaced my boots, kicked them off, and removed my socks. I placed the rolled-up, dry socks inside the boots, and sealed the boots inside a medium-sized ziploc bag. This went inside my rucksack, which I zipped firmly closed. I locked my padlock around the zipper, and then stowed the rucksack under a nearby bush.

My bare feet felt cold in the damp grass. I wriggled my toes, allowing the pointed leaves to pass in between them, tickling me. It felt like stepping through a kids' paddling pool.

Certain I was in the right spot, in the cluster of trees by the river, I began the day's work. I pushed my bare feet down into the soil, softly scraping and digging. Planting myself. I kept the movement going, left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, until the dirt was up past my ankles. That felt right. Though the earth was cold, my feet felt comfortably encapsulated, like the whole ground was a particularly well-fitting pair of shoes I could wear.

Satisfied that my roots were in place, I raised my arms up at my sides, spreading out my fingers as branches, and waited for a wind to come. A wind that would gently rock me from side to side, and lull me into that deep, restorative sleep that only the trees can achieve.

But, as I discovered, from a tree's perspective a week is an incredibly short period of time – less than a human minute. So I wish I'd stayed awake for more of that week, my week as a tree. I could have learned so much more.

At the end of my allotted time, I shook off the dirt and rain from my body, removed my feet from the soil, and replaced my shoes and boots. They felt unnatural on my feet. It felt like walking on the surface of an alien planet, in a strange gravitational field.

I took a deep breath of forest air, and headed for home. But for the first hour or so I couldn't remember which way I was supposed to go.

Every Respectable Home

I've heard it said that everything grows on trees, if you look hard enough. There's a place in Austria where human tongues flail in the leafy branches, flapping like birds' wings. Somewhere near Inverness sits a great oak whose bark peels off into cardboard tubing – the resultant produce is used to house our toilet tissue. And in this place where you and I now sit, our primary import and export is fire. 

It is not clear to me where, and by whom, the harvest is carried out. Many mysteries remain in this world. But it is generally agreed that there are fields. Fields, aflush with roots and branches – wooden sculptures which have always burned and will burn to near eternity. The fire grows with rapid efficacy, and it's someone's job to traverse the fields, breaking the flames off into small chunks and stuffing them into a sack. 

These flame-proof sacks are supposedly made from the skin of bears but, again, that might just be another rumour. Mind you, I've never seen a bear catch fire. Have you? 

The harvest, when it takes place, is kept quite separate from our day-to-day lives. Certainly, I've never seen it with my own eyes. All I impart to you is second-hand – perhaps third-hand, given that, to be honest, the trustworthiness of those I swap stories with is, at best, questionable. No offence to yourselves. It's just that I tend to take everything I hear with a grain of salt. 

It is truly best to keep a grain of salt on your person at all times, where flame is concerned. Salt is the only absolute cure for flames. If you are subject to unwanted contact with a burning artefact, you must simply rub salt into the affected flesh-area until either the flames crack off into dust, or the unbearable pain shocks you into an altered state of consciousness where you no longer mind being on fire and, in fact, grow to rather like it. 

It is vital that the harvest takes place at regular intervals, otherwise the flames would grow too quickly and devour our world. Such is the way of anything that we, as humans, love – it must be tenderly cared for, feared, and controlled, so that it does not consume us.

The fire is carried to the mainland by boat. On early mornings, before the sun rises, you can stand on the grey beach pebbles and watch the burning boats roll in. The flames are conveniently stored in ornate patterns, inscribed on the white sails. In transit, the flames appear to be in motion, but that's a trick of the light. The flames become static, while the cloth billows back and forth, caressed by wind. Chalk it up as another illusion next to the glittering waves, whose glitter speckles are affixed to each wet surface with old sellotape. 

No, the boats move, but the flames stay perfectly still. It hurts to hold a piece of fire, but no more than carrying a heavy weight. The boats' wooden planks creak and strain, but they do not burst into flame or fall beneath the waves. 

To shield oneself from the flames, it is wise to place a dandelion in your mouth, but not swallow it, and hold your breath for as long as possible. Fire cannot penetrate a dandelion's oily flesh. The lack of oxygen in your body will disincentivise the fire's decision to grow into your lungs and blossom like fruit.

Failing this, grab a fistful of the salt from your back pocket it and shove it down your throat, flexing the muscles of your glottal pathway to better spread the salt out into a fine, consistent layer. If all goes well, the fire will choke before you do. 

It goes without saying that the dandelion method is infinitely preferable.* Still, it's better to come prepared. Never leave the house without a cluster of salt, a set of keys (to your own home and/or someone else's), a small bag of rice, three dandelion heads (in case the first two fail), a refrigerated £1 coin, two dead bluebottle flies, and a strong memory of where your house is located relative to other landmarks. Once these items are gathered, you can commence the day. 

If you are leaving any life-forms in the house when you venture outside – dog, cat, child, bird, or otherwise – there are various additional protocol to complete. Firstly, you must not leave until you are fully comfortable with the prospect of returning home to discover one or more of your favoured life-forms – loved ones [sic] – dead. The natural consequence of this is an overwhelming flood of emotion when you return to find them, instead, surprisingly alive. You will shower them with love and praise. You will appreciate them all the more. 

You will swear never to leave them alone again until, naturally, the next time you must. 

Secondly, you must establish a deputy, to stand in your stead as you go about your business. Assign the role to the most qualified, suitable and trustworthy of your life-form accomplices. A husband or wife is ideal for this role. Failing that, dogs are more trustworthy than cats, cats more trustworthy than child-humans, child-humans more trustworthy than ants, and so on. Use your discretion. Just know that, should you return home to discover some or all of your loved ones dead, or worse, your entire stock of fire stolen, you yourself will be solely responsible for having chosen the wrong deputy. 

And if you can't handle that, don't leave the house. 

* Every respectable home has a dandelion crop in the front or back garden or, failing that, in a box on the windowsill. If you have neither garden nor windows, it is suggested that you plant several fertile dandelion seeds in the spongy flesh of your left wrist – or your right wrist, if that is your preferred watch-bearing limb. This has the obvious benefit of allowing you to cultivate your own fire-prevention and fire-attraction mechanisms, plus the less obvious benefit of being able to tell the time via dandelion clock. If you live in an area where time is forbidden, disregard the last statement. 

Curtain

I wrapped myself in a curtain and stood by the window so that when the light became unbearable for the people indoors, I could spread my arms wide and dilute the light. This way, they would receive only a fraction of the glare. This was welcomed by all, as they had sensitive eyes. They did not enjoy light. 

I was not a paid employee. This role as human-curtain was voluntary.  But I had no intention of ever using this experience to get access to another, more favourable position. This was it, for me. 

I had never been hired, as such. I was not invited inside the house. I simply wandered indoors one day, out of the rain, saw the limp, lifeless curtain-rags by the window and opted to fuse them with my flesh. As it turned out, it was much preferred by all to have a human-curtain than a ragged non-curtain – a failure curtain. I made it my business never to fail at being a curtain. 

If I were to disappear, or be burned up in a house fire, the house's inhabitants would have to suffer the painful daylight once more. But they would survive, probably. Uncomfortable, but alive. 

And speaking of discomfort – the act of being a human-curtain was utterly painless for me. You would think it would feel strange, at least, to seamlessly join flesh to fabric, becoming part-skin part-material – but it felt familiar instead. Comforting. 

I had never been fabric before I started always being fabric. 

Now that I'd become fabric, I could not imagine any other way of life. 

I could not easily recommend the lifestyle to you, because you are not me, so I have no way of knowing if it would suit you or not. Also I have no direct means of communication with the world outside my head. Even this communication you read now is not written down, but composed inside my head. And you, reader, probably do not exist. 

No-one will read this inner monologue, this train of thought. I compose it in my head only for myself, to better understand myself – to better understand what it means to be a human-curtain. Unless they have found a way to transcribe thoughts. In that case, a machine could be pointed at me, revealing each word as I think it, which could be written down and distributed among the libraries of the world. 

But even if a thought-transcribing machine did exist, why would they point it at me? To all intents and purposes, I look like an ordinary curtain. The people who live in this house will by now have forgotten I was ever human, if they knew in the first place. 

The Man Who Was Rats

The man who was rats was definitely not a man. Or, at least, he was more rat than man. Absolutely not more man than rat. He had an undeniable man-shape, at least from a distance. Two arms, two legs, and so on. 

But up close, something wasn’t right. If you looked right at a particular part of him – the arm for example – you would soon notice that the sleeve rippled and pulsated, quite unlike a sleeve should move. More like a sleeve worn by something other than human flesh. Something which liked to run, and shift, and slip from grasp. And possibly to gnaw. 

His head seemed human enough. He had a strange, glazed look in his eyes – sort of like a person sleeping with their eyes open, if you’ve seen that. You know in movies, where someone dies with their eyes open, and whoever else is in the room feels obligated to close the corpse’s eyelids on their behalf, because the dead person can’t? Kind of like that. But also like an open-eyed sleeper. 

You’d see no discernible traces of recognition, looking into those eyes. You couldn’t tell for sure whether your gaze was being returned, or simply eaten up. 
So there was the head, with dirty dark-brown hair, pale skin, and those empty eyes. But then below that… There was a sort of neck. A vague impression of a neck, you might say. The bottom of the head, the chin, etc, it joined onto the body somehow. After all, it couldn’t simply be floating there. If there was one body and one head, it stood to reason that they belonged to each other, and had some kind of coupling point – a neck – but it was difficult to pinpoint with the naked eye. No matter how hard you squinted. 

He didn’t respond when you called his name. Or, at least, he gave me the impression that he wouldn’t have responded, if any of us knew his name. Someone said they’d gone through his pockets and found a wallet, but no ID. A few coins, and a photograph of a dog. A really old photograph. It looked like memorabilia from the ‘40s. He certainly wasn’t old enough for that, but maybe he was into that kind of thing. A collector. A collector of something.... 

He walked from place to place with a peculiar, scrambling gait, quite unlike the rest of us. As if his limbs were being controlled by many different people, each of whom had a totally different idea of what human walking was supposed to look like. Needless to say, he didn’t walk fast, or far. 

It eventually became clear that he was just a set of clothing, filled with rats to approximate the human-shape within. The head perched on top was probably dead – or, worse, still alive somehow – and controlled by the colony of rats inside the false body. 

But this notion only came to me years later, long after I’d moved away from the area. I’d lost contact with everyone I knew from back there. Had half a mind to ask around, get a phone number, find out the truth. 

But truth is uncertain at best, invisible at worst, and usually somewhere in between. Foggy. And who says a bunch of rats wearing a human-costume don’t deserve to participate in human society, if they really, truly want to? They aren’t hurting anyone. At least, no more than we’re hurting ourselves. 

His Many Eyes

For every inch of hair he grew, a new eye appeared somewhere on his body. The first few hadn't been that noticeable. They'd shown up in places of himself he wouldn't ordinarily look: the back of his head; the base of his left foot; the small of his back.

He was growing his hair out to see how long it could get, and it seemed that past the threshold of the number 5 on his hair-clipping device, for each additional inch of hair he grew, one more eye appeared.

As you'd expect, he soon found the problem could be solved with more frequent, and shorter, haircuts. But it wasn't a problem, entirely. It had benefits.

The first few eyes were in places obscured by hair or clothing. As such, he saw nothing through them. That is, unless he stripped naked and shaved the impeding hair out of the way.

He found that it did not help his new eyes to simply remove all of the hair from his head and body. He shaved his head bald at one point, only to find this made all his new eyes disappear. Not disappear, exactly, but retract into his body, ready to re-emerge at such time that sufficient hair had been regrown.

He thought of himself as a tree – a tree which would not grow until it had enough leaves to catch the rain and sunlight needed for sustenance. And so would stand waiting through winter, skinny and malnourished, until the leaves returned in spring.

He dreaded a future of permanent baldness, when ageing would remove the capacity for hair growth from his body, and thus remove his many eyes forever. Between perma-baldness and death, no longer would he be able to see the world from many perspectives. Only the one perspective, borne of two eyes in the centre of a human face, endlessly calculating and recalculating the distance between himself and death. And, unaided by additional perspectives, getting it wrong. And usually missing the point.

Spurred into action by this fear of the future, he abstained from haircuts for two years. By the end of this time, he was transformed. The hair reached down to his ankles. First off, this provided a constant tripping hazard. But more importantly, almost every square inch of his skin was covered in eyeballs. He could see in all directions at once. The human brain is only designed to handle two eyes at once – three at a push – but his brain handled the additional strain pretty well.

However, it did cause his head to grow slightly larger, in order to house his muscular brain.

After the first year or thereabouts, he'd given up on wearing clothes. They impeded his view. Eyes on his knees, his elbows, his torso, his buttocks... And besides, modesty no longer seemed important. People mostly stayed away from him. This was infuriating at first, but he soon got used to it.

He found that people no longer wanted to look at him. A six-foot tall naked man with hair down to his ankles, his whole body covered in pulsating eyeballs. Granted, it was distracting. He did not go on any dates during this time. What few friends he had, they soon disappeared after he stopped wearing clothes.

But it was weird. Nobody wanted to look at him, but he, of course, still wanted to look at them. Or anything. With all these eyes, he could look at anything and be fascinated by the multifaceted, kaleidoscopic images. Bins, bus stops, pigeons, trees, puddles, cobblestones, toilets and, oh God, the sea... He could gaze at any mundane object and be transfixed.

So while he did miss human contact, conversation, eyes and mouths, smiles and voices, he found plenty to be getting on with. He went for long walks in the woods, by the sea, through city streets. He subsisted on wild berries and the abandoned meals of people who's run away when they saw him coming. A lot of picnics.

Once or twice people had got it in their heads that he ought to be eliminated. Maybe they were from the Society for the Protection of Picnics from Many-Eyed Strangers. He wasn't sure. But they'd soon found that, with his eyes in every direction, it was impossible to sneak up on him. Then they'd left him alone. One of the would-be monster-hunters had dropped a pretty great egg-mayo sandwich as he'd run screaming off into the distance, so the “monster” couldn't hold it against them. Lunch was lunch, regardless of who was trying to kill who.

He knew that someday a time may come when he grew tired of the loneliness and the long walks – when he may wish to shave off his hair, removing the many eyes, and rejoin society, like a freshly-shorn sheep rejoining the flock. But until that day, he was content to wander the paths of the world, viewing it all from his many perspectives, taking it all in. His many eyes, after all, were a privilege afforded only to him. He ought to appreciate it. To complain would be to look nature in the eye, and spit.

Coffee Blood

She had coffee instead of blood – and mostly it didn't get in the way. Her body temperature was kinda high. The average person's core temp is somewhere around 37.4 Celsius. She, her veins full of hot coffee, was naturally much hotter. Around 100 C or thereabouts, but usually a little cooler. Especially when she drank cold milk.

She had a special note in her wallet, explaining that she couldn't receive normal blood transfusions. A doctor once told her that blood and coffee mix like oil and water – this had raised more questions than it answered.

Sometimes she felt blessed to have been born into a dimension where vampires didn't exist. They'd probably hunt her constantly, hankering after the coffee in her veins – like americano with a shot of blood syrup, flavoured by its arterial containers.

She had been bitten by mosquitoes a couple of times, though. They didn't survive long. First, buzzing around wildly like tiny insect Aaron Sorkins, hopped up on coke. Then dead.

Then there was that time she'd gone gorge-walking with the girl scouts. Much younger then. Some years ago. Gorge-walking is where you dress in waterproofs and welly boots and wade along a river. It's supposedly a really fun experience, communing with nature. She didn't think so. More like communing with being wet and cold. And communing with leeches.

Back on dry land, at the campsite, she'd peeled seven fat leeches from her legs – each one swollen up with black coffee. She liked to imagine that each one of the leeches had a really good, life-changing, caffeine-fuelled idea right before they died. Probably not, though. Probably just died, like everything.

Leeches sucking coffee from her legs – friends sucking coffee from glasses in some café – the only real difference was the location. The conversation – or lack thereof – was probably the same.

She couldn't donate her blood to the blood bank, obviously. She maybe could have donated coffee-blood to the local Starbucks, but, weirdly, when she went in to suggest it, no-one seemed keen.

The whole coffee-blood thing had definite downsides. For one, she could never sleep more than 90 minutes at a time. This was pretty annoying when it came to sharing a bed with someone.

Useful, though, for working unsociable hours, so that's what she did. A succession of odd jobs in the dead of night, or the light of day, or the weird afternoon quiet. Hotel night manager. Serving food and coffee (not her own!) at the all-night eatery. Trash collector. Parking attendant. Fast food, fast food, fast food. It all bored her to tears, but what else was she going to do? Lie awake at home all night? And besides, she had to eat somehow.

Speaking of food, there was nothing particularly strange about her diet. Certainly not enough to explain the coffee-blood situation. She didn't drink coffee, though; it felt too much like cannibalism.

Her parents had perfectly normal human blood. As such, her genetic aberration was a mystery. She'd checked the family tree at the library, but that was no help. Little to no information. No blood types, and medical records only went back so far.

Her parents were both coffee-drinkers. They refrained from drinking it in front of her, though. But the minute she turned her back... What could they do? People have to stay awake. People have to get through the day. People have to tolerate their jobs, somehow.

It turns out that one-to-two cups of coffee a day help you function in society, while having near 100% caffeine content in your bloodstream just makes you sober and confused. And a little panicky.

Fire In My Diet

In some cases, fire consumes bodies. In this country, bodies consume fire.

For the correct growth and continued survival of the human body, it is important to consume adequate nourishment. Most activities, such as living, require the replenishment of energies. The most efficient energy consumption technique is the eating of fire.

It is vital to prepare yourself for a meal by collecting the necessary equipment. A flamecatching mitt, for the left hand. A two-sided plate, with one side oil-soaked wood, the other side a non-flammable substance like steel. A flame-resistant visor, so one can witness the meal as the face devours it - social psychologists claim that half of taste exists in the idea of taste rather than the tongue, including visual cues. As such, to properly experience the flavour of fire, one must see it.

Once these materials have been collected, we may begin. Now, prior to the actual eating, we utter a prayer. This is not addressed to any specific deity - God does not exist - but a prayer to the vast, uncaring universe, which nonetheless provides us with the glorious opportunity to consume as rare and precious a substance as fire. Not an act of generosity, but an act of random chance.

The prayer generally proceeds as follows:

“Dear Universe, we thank you for all the decisions you do not make, and pledge indifference to all of your infinite forms that our feeble brains do not understand. Our lives ebb and flow at the turn of your careless heel; we live and die at the mercy of your whim. Dear Universe, grant us the power to acknowledge that, like you, we ourselves do not really exist. But also we thank you for the way in which our non-existence is not enough to prevent us from enjoying a delicious meal of the fire you so thoughtlessly provide. Let us bathe our tongues and teeth in flames. Amen.”

Arrange the fire-plate on the table where you will be consuming the meal. Put on your visor and your flamecatching mitt. Remember, left hand. This is important. Then head over to your flame storage unit, and open it up. Reach in and grab a large handful of the fire. Make sure to do this with the gloved hand, otherwise you'll be burnt to a crisp. Carry the flame back to the table. Hold it up to the plate until it’s adequately set alight.

With this accomplished, you may sit and eat.

The first few bites are generally quite painful. Slightly too hot. Liable to set your facial hair afire, if you have any. But persevere. Fire has a complex, deep flavour, once you get past the initial burning and screaming.

If you can't handle it, not to worry. You can always try eating again tomorrow. But bear in mind, all non-fire-related foodstuffs are forbidden. You can snack on some unlit matches if you want, but it won't do you much good.

But the universe isn't disappointed in you. It can't feel disappointment. Couldn't if it wanted to. Maybe it would if it could, if it saw your failure, and was moved to a frown. But the universe does not frown. Not in a way humans can perceive.

But that's beside the point.

I'm disappointed in you. And I don't even know you. You should probably be disappointed in yourself.

But if you did manage to successfully eat the fire, I'd like to wish you congratulations. This will be the shape of all of your future meals. You have proven yourself worthy. I'm proud of you.

But the universe isn't proud of you. The universe does not experience pride, other than vicariously, through us. Be proud of yourself, if you want.

The Scrambled Eggs of Creation

There was a family of gods, trying to decide what to have for breakfast.

Mother Nature said, "I don't care what we have. I just need my coffee so I can get on with the day.

The youngest goddess, Moon, wanted sugary cereal - Marshmallow Divine-O's - but obviously that wasn't going to happen.

"No way," said Mother Nature. "Your teeth will rot and fall out, and crash down to the Earth, where they'll crush thousands of people to death. Sorry, Moon. No sugary junk for you. Not happening."

Grandpa Time demanded that everybody eat a hearty bowlful of tree-bark porridge. "It'll put hairs on your chest," he said.

"No, Dad. Not again. That stuff tastes like garbage," said Mother Nature.

It really did taste like garbage. And Mother Nature knew full well. When she'd been a little girl, her father, then known as Father Time, had fed them either tree-bark soup or actual garbage for breakfast, on alternate days. And both meals were equally ghastly. A lot of damage was done to her taste buds in those formative years.

So, no Marshmallow Divine-O's. And tree-bark porridge was out. What else could the family eat for breakfast?

Mother Nature's pet dog, Cerberus, the three-headed hellhound, loved eating human bones for breakfast. But those also tasted absolutely horrible. Especially lukewarm bones which had been lying out in the dirt all night - and that was the only kind they had. And no way was Mother Nature floating all the way to the store just for another bag of bones. Gross.

So she sifted through the shelves and cupboards, trying to find out what they had to eat that might be slightly nutritious. Split-atom peas? Nah, they took too long to prepare. Furthermore, if prepared wrong, they could destroy the fabric of reality itself, which was too much to deal with this early in the morning.

What about primordial soup? Nah. That was just a bunch of lumpy amoebas and jellied amphibians. The thought of this made Mother Nature nauseous. She was, she had to admit, a bit hungover.

Ah. This might do. She'd found it on the highest shelf, almost but not quite out of her reach. She stood on her tiptoes, and carefully brought the package down.

The label read: "Eggs of Creation". According to some, the world as we know it hatched from one such egg. An egg as big as the universe, from which came all that has been, and all that will be. An egg outside of time.

Mother Nature vaguely remembered creating a universe from an egg a while back. She couldn't be sure if it was our universe or some other one. And anyway, it was a long time ago.

But her family was hungry, and so was she. This morning, they would not dine on sugary cereal, tree-bark soup or the bones of men. They would not dine on split atoms, or primordial soup.

She heated a pan. Into this, she placed a lump of Elysian butter, made from the milk of the goats of the Otherworld. This butter was the finest and saltiest in all creation. It was smooth as silk, and light as a feather.

The butter hissed and crackled, indicating that the pan was hot enough to fry the family's breakfast. Old Grandpa Time, the little Moon, and even the dog Cerberus looked on with hungry eyes, as Mother Nature prepared the meal.

She cracked in five eggs, one after the other, and five universes' worth of potential souls cried out and were suddenly extinguished.

People Who Haven't Killed Me

To the man outside the train station who brushed past my elbow brandishing a lit cigarette, thank you for not burning me. It was hardly a conscious decision, I know, but thank you all the same. That burn which I did not receive thus never grew infected, and then I did not have to have the arm amputated. As a consequence, I did not learn that the amputation had not prevented the spread of the infection to my brain and heart. Thus, I did not die three weeks later. So thank you for your wise decision to not burn me with your lit cigarette as you rushed past, hurrying off to who knows where. Wherever you were going, I hope you made it on time.

To the woman in the scarf at the ticket machine, thank you for not sticking out your leg when I wasn't looking, tripping me, and sending me flying head over heels, landing on my neck, snapping it and instantly killing me. It was very nice of you - an unexpected kindness in a world fraught with unpredictability and danger.

To the old man on Platform 2, thank you for not shoving me from behind as the train approached, crushing the life from my body under the carriage’s unstoppable weight. There would have been no reason for you to push me in this way. But sometimes people snap for no reason - sometimes things just happen - so thank you all the same.

To the group of screaming children at the other end of the train car, thank you for not throwing pebbles in my eyes, blinding me, and feeding me alive to a large, ferocious dog. At that age you cannot possibly understand what this means to me. But from the depths of my heart, thanks.

To the girl sitting opposite me, thank you for not waiting until I fell asleep, opening the train carriage’s emergency exit and watching me fall out of it, still asleep, propelled along the ground by the train’s speed until I became a lifeless, bloody pulp. Seriously, I've got to hand it to you on this one. Good job.

And to all the people who have yet to make the decision to not kill me, and act or not act on their impulses, may I extend my most sincere thanks in advance. I would appreciate it greatly if you, too, would continue with your plan of not killing me, and encourage your friends to do the same.

Cheers,

Rory