You died making love to a cello

Three days prior: that ragged woman at your door saying she was there to raise money for the starving babies of double-mastectomics, trying to sell you a Yakult 8-pack she'd stolen from the nearest grocer, but how often did you get visitors since your husband was put away for what the press would not correctly label as mere ephebophillia--she was almost sixteen and more of a woman than...anyway you had forgiven him and that was all that mattered, but if the state wants to make a fuss about the menial business of teachers and students well--you invited her in and insisted that she stay a while. Barked at her to sit. That dinner was not optional.

The young visitor sat with her food, obviously homeless, and she sat with her arms under the table for as long as possible to hide the bruises and needle marks. You were puzzled a moment longer until the girl let out a fleshy sneeze across a wide radius of plate and table, and you lept up from you seat "Of course," you said, "I'll warm that up for you."

As the timer counted down, you heard the phone ring in the other room and excused yourself from the stilted conversation of what Good Bacteria was really all about. Not even the miracle of microwave technology could save your shriveled peas and dehydrated pork chops, and the girl, whose stomach was quite possibly in the stages of eating itself by now, had no further interest in your kindness. She grabbed your kettle (though foolishly leaving the power-supply base component), left the Yakult, and made a run for it.

* * *

The plate stayed next to the sink all the next day, with soggy lumps of mashed potato attracting those huge roaches you never really had that much of a problem with. The way they talked about germs on the television these days, it seemed as though you couldn't win anyway. Feces on your toothbrush. Menstrual blood on the remote control. How were a few supposedly filthy insects anything to worry about?

You were never a tidy wife, and in your husband's absence there grew a notciable regression to a state of slothful disregard you had not known since your undateable years in college. You were thirty-two years old, playing WoW and having all your meals at the computer. Those stains, those green splotches appearing all around the kitchen walls, were completely transparant to you.

It wasn't until these markings had spread into the bathroom, that you noticed them one night whilst showering, strewn across the ceiling like hand-drawn fractals, imperfect in their detail, though at the same time following some kind of organic logic. Even if you had the foresight to remind yourself to pick up some Exit Mould the next time you were out shopping, there was no way you were actually going to get up on chair and attempt to use it.

* * *

Your weekly self-improvement came in the form of practicing the cello, which you had shown such potential for throughout high school; WoW server maintenance affording you this liberty. You were lost somewhere in that final note of Chopin's Cello Sonata in G Minor, when you felt the firmness of the instrument wane, allowing your legs to close together pushing against what felt like soft clay.

The cello, which at that point was harbouring a number of... affected cochroaches, began to take on a new form. After all these years it was no longer your instrument. It now wanted you as a part of it. The bow tangling itself around your arm, extending with vine-like tendrils at either end. Connecting itself to its accomplice. Snaking around the neck, around the base. Your legs trapped within its silky smooth curves. The strings freeing themselves at the pegs, only to be reattached under the skin of your slender pale hands. Flowing into your bloodstream.

* * *

It was nausea coupled with a release of endorphins indescribable if you had survived long enough to remember it. It filled your body with its babies; every inch of your skin bulging with thousands of tiny green bumps of calcium carbonate. The incubation was fast; a few hours and they were free to leave, and off they went, abandoning their short lived mother in pieces on her livingroom floor; seeping through walls, eager to be part of our Last Terrified Days.

You died when reality became a busted old TV set

Maybe we've all got it, deep down, that need to recreate the sense of wonder Rick Moranis gave us towards the end of the 80s, but regardless, that piece of shit you "invented" up in your wife's parents' attic was, OK, admittedly it was impressive for the fact that it did anything at all, considering you bought the guts from a clairvoyant hobo whose claim to the supernatural realm was being able to foretell the death of every stray animal that would ever die in an American Saddlery bear-trap--however what the good folks at Disney failed to tell you is that goofy science-related misadventures such as this normally end up on the messier side, like The Fly, and not so much the zany General Exhibition antics of swimming around in a bowl of Cheerios.

* * *

Honey, I Fucked With the Vertical Hold was fun for about 2 seconds until you started getting deathly nauseous, not to mention just plain injured after repeatedly passing through roof tiles, ceiling insulation, and floorboards. The idea of pummeling yourself to get to the off switch was even less appealing when it occured to you that there was no off switch, since after all all you needed was the big red button to make the laser beam go, and if it started cutting through your flesh or sending your organs back to colonial times, well you'd just have to wait until it was finished.

Each cycle consisted of traveling upwards from a central point for a few metres, vanishing, then reappearing equidistant from that central point only from underneath, and continuing upwards. This is what made you think, in a moment of desperation, that jumping out the window wouldn't kill you, since it was more than three metres from the finality of your father-in-laws concrete slab, for the extension that never was to be. You would just float at that same frequency, hovering above the ground in the freedom of the outdoors like Superman caught in one of those dreams of performance anxiety, where he can't quite take off to go save the busload of cheerleaders and all he can do is hate himself for it. But what really happened was much worse.

Apparently gravity still had a say. You did make it to the gardenias, which broke your fall, keeping you alive long enough for one last look at the void between up and down.

It sent you away to a place overwhelmed with the feeling of one of those monolithic wood-encased television sets, switched on in the next room with the sound muted and the door left open. The feeling in your feet as you ascended was like standing over the warm static of rounded glass glowing colours melting through your skin. In Heaven, radiation can't do shit to you and so you are free to enjoy it's comforting breeze all you want. Stand in front of the microwave pregnant all day. Feed your dead kids uranium sticks. It's all quite pleasant when you don't have mortality constantly there to screw things up.

* * *

When your body popped back into existence, grave-deep beneath your in-laws modest vegetable garden, the force ripped you through the earth with no reservations. Whether it was the wind or just some variation in the interference guiding your damaged remains, you were moving in slight horizontal increments with each cycle, tearing through the soil until you made it to the footpath and it didn't bother slowing down one bit. It didn't take many violent eruptions from this unforgiving surface to leave your body an amalgam of shredded soft parts and bone wrapped in clothing, until your remains returned to the lawn, where you managed to disrupt the septic system, and uproot "Colby", the red heeler that was there for your wife through so much of her difficult childhood.

When your in-laws returned home from their afternoon drive of trying to convince their daughter to finally leave you (due to that whole thing with you living in their home for the last three years whilst trying to pitch ideas to late-night-home-shopping networks rather than getting a real job), your body had made its way down to the neighbours paddock where a fire truck had arrived on the scene. And yes, they did try spraying you down with the hose.