You died taking instructions from the floss

You had this habit of not breaking off the floss until you were completely done with it. Which had its logic, since most people would snap off a length, run it along their teeth until it has that awful smell about it and then what? You've got to break off another bit. You were a busy man and you didn't have all day to be measuring out how many pieces of floss you needed.

So Monday morning you were enthusiastically running that stuff up and down your healthy clean gums so that when you smiled for Mr. Nosigawa at the pitch that day he would not see a man who is incapable of keeping the dregs of an overindulgent American breakfast out of his teeth. No, it would be the sparkling mouth of a winner. You were working some chunk of hotcake from behind your bottom back molars when you felt something tug. Something a little unusual. It wasn't even coming from inside your mouth, but rather it came from that mysterious conduit you knew of only as the floss hole. Sometimes it got stuck. Sometimes it would flow freely. But other than that there was no real connection between you and what unravelled beneath this white hard plastic.

The floss eased from a tug to the resonance of a lightly plucked guitar string. Without knowing why, you felt the urgent need to listen closely. You held your ear to the string coated in your saliva, where a slight minty fragrance remained, but you got nothing. The vibrations became more sporadic, something about them you were convinced felt like words. Like listening to a muffled conversation through a wall with a glass. You thought for a second, then went into the kitchen, rifled around in the pantry and then sat down with the floss.

* * *

You had taken a foam cup and pushed the floss through the bottom of it with a toothpick. Tied the end. You were already running late and your shirt and pants remained unironed on a chair in the living room but you couldn't've cared less about that. You held the cup to one ear and you were not at all surprised when the words came.

They were only numbers. Prerecorded numbers read in a monotone female voice. It had behind it the crackle of radio interference. It was a numbers station broadcast. Without the key these numbers were useless...but you already knew the key? Your brain was its own one-time pad. As you began deciphering the messages you realised that they were in fact instructions being delivered to you. As your pupils shrank you stood up from the table and knew then with such clarity the tasks ahead of you.

* * *

You found the pliers in the garage and they were a bit greasy but you didn't have time to wipe them clean. This was pertaining to matters right then and there could not be any further hesitations. You returned to the bathroom facing the mirror and with the pliers clamped tightly you proceeded to yank out your back bottom wisdom tooth. With such swiftness, such a clean pull as it cracked off your jawbone. Like you'd done it a million times before.

The blood did not bother you though it did make it difficult to work as you returned to the kitchen and made a number of attempts to split the tooth open with various utensils until you were finally successful. Inside the tooth came something you didn't have time to contemplate, though really you knew all along all about it. It was something organic, though also something containing great knowledge or information. Some kind of squirming parasite, and you knew you had to get it to them quickly or else it would perish and its contents would be lost along with it.

You put the creature into a regular envelope, then opening the bottom draw of your office desk you found hidden at the back a larger, silver lined envelope you had never seen before. It contained a mysterious round marking in the top corner and no address. You placed the smaller envelope inside it then sealed it shut, then you ran outside to the nearest post box where you rid of it.

After that your instructions were to remain inisde your house and bleed yourself dry. If you were not dead within twenty four hours the floss advised you to seek out other forms of self-termination. Eventually you went with taking pills, and cutting your own head off in the middle of the street.

You died on the Gravy Boat float trying to assassinate Colonel Sanders and then spooks had to lobotomize your dog

In 1981 you were the most dangerous thing the CIA had at their disposal, but you were also the most meticulous and they knew there was no one else even close for a job like this. It wasn't just like wiping out a Kennedy; by now the nation had a taste for some particularly clandestine ingredients on their fried chicken, and some lame brained cover-up wasn't going to make it all better.

The eleven herbs and spices had become a major concern for the government. To put it plainly: they didn't like being in the dark on shit. Any shit, much less a fast food sensation such as this one. The Colonel would be ousted, and during a time of national mourning, the powers above would slide their way in and take the franchise by the reins. The Making Chicken Great Again banners and pins were already in production.

* * *

The CIA contacted you through the usual channels with instructions on money and weapons and when and where. Reagan would announce on a public broadcast a National Day of Fried Chicken & It's Affiliates in the coming weeks. It would be the first and last of its kind.

You had a tight group of operatives running this thing, and on your side of things the orchestration was to a T. That T was trauma causing death by organ failure, accidental enough not to raise eyebrows, but graphic and enough of a public spectacle that it would leave the nation paralyzed with horror. It would be relayed by future generations across telepathic media airways, that frail aging body squashed under a massive bucket of fiberglass chicken bearing his own grinning facade. His head gushing blood from every hole, his protruding polished boot throwing sunlight across the crowd with the final twitches of his lower extremities. You had the wiring all sweet. You had the low profile explosive charges. But when you don't work alone someone always fucks it up.

The Colonel had more bodyguards than anyone could have anticipated. And they seemed to come out of nowhere, but more accurately the float itself rode atop a bullet proof limo filled to the brim with his own private mercenaries. Maybe he'd caught wind of this strike against him. Maybe he was just a paranoid old coot. Not surprisingly you found yourself the last of your men left alive as you took shelter inside a foam Gravy Boat and fired the last rounds from your side piece. They returned fire with automatic weapons and you found yourself truly outclassed, with no choice but to take down as many as possible as they filled your body with magazine after magazine. You killed nine of them, including one that was drowned in a puddle of your own blood.

* * *

You were as dangerous dead as you were alive, since you had amassed intel on hundreds of covert ops and the CIA weren't taking any chances. They firebombed dozens of houses that they believed may have belonged to you, although most of them were places being rented by women you had dated in college. The rest were crack houses frequented by your long lost twin brother who incidently died from electrocution after attempting to unload a faulty crack house washing machine.

They also took your dog Sputnik and removed a portion of his brain for analysis after a video surveylance team recorded you supposedly teaching the animal to communicate by barking in morse code, when all you were really doing was trying to surprise your girlfriend by teaching him to bark in time with Lost in Love by Air Supply.

You died in the hardware store your boyfriend worked at

What hadn't he done for you really? Ok so the place you had wasn't so great but it was afforded by love. Sure the toilet was in the laundry and the shower was down the hall and the bedroom folded out from the wall. But that was love. He loved you with all his heart. Both of you. And in less than three months you would have brought him that child and he would hold it in his arms and maybe then they'd make him junior manager.

No, this baby was a fucking disaster. Morro Valencio had promised you big things--if you knew what he meant as he winked (and you knew what he meant) as well as a car with no roof and not the kind your brother drove around in after he failed to read the low clearance sign when the inbred Berkshire he'd stolen from up the road slid off his roof and into his field of vision consequentially saving its own bacon. He would always tell that one with the bacon quip at the end, and generally speaking the ladies adored him for his sense of humor.

* * *

The idea was to get your idiot boyfriend out of the picture so that you'd never hear from him again. He was the one who had convinced you to keep this stupid kid the one that would no doubt come out with some massive abnormality anyway, the amount you smoked to keep your figure. It wasn't so long back the Gliggen's had their boy with a brain on the outside. What good is a brain like that? You knew you were making the right choice here and no matter who you hurt, Morro would soon be there to wash it all away under those crystal California waves.

Morro had given you the name of a guy who would give you what you needed. It was a vial of liquid that would induce the baby's birth prematurely, but once took you'd better get yourself to a hospital quick smart he told you. You had a better idea. You would sneak into your boyfriend's work on a Sunday night and dispose of the foetus there. You would place it in one of the display toilets and leave it for him to find when he opened up the following morning. Maybe you would leave a note as well. Something that would let him know how much of a loser he was for ever loving you in the first place.

* * *

You snuck out in the early hours and took his truck. You planned on leaving it there and having Morro pick you up when the whole thing was over. Maybe set it on fire also. On the way over you drank the contents of the vial. It tasted like chlorine and burnt the back of your throat and it took a deep breath not to vomit.

Stumbling around in the dark you finally found it and took a seat. You sat for about fifteen minutes before you started to feel something. He was kicking hard. You punched back at your own stomach thinking about your idiot boyfriend sitting at home studying for that stupid software engineering degree he had almost finished. While you'd be living it up in some mansion sleeping with all of Morro's super hot friends and--you felt very ill then.

Apparently the kid was more on his dad's side than yours. Even though he didn't have a full formed brain yet, and was scientifically unable to form an opinion of you, well he still thought of you as a particularly vile blemish upon the species. And so he wasn't going down without a fight. The stillborn knew he would find a way in his final moments--and he found a way, to break through the womb and grab hold of whatever manner of slimey putrified organs you possesed inside this body and he would take them with him all the way down to the bottom of a display toilet in Hank's Handy Hardware, and if you wanted them back you'd have to pry them from his tiny little dead fingers, bitch.

You died when a street cop decided to be an s-hole about you raking leaves for the homeless

So there you were, doing what you did at five p.m. every weekday in Autumn on your way home from work, borrowing the rake from Mongo Sun, (while he was passed out on Mad Dog and a shot of car battery) which was normally used to ward off kids attempting to disrupt his collages of pre-peeled Kumsusan Memorial Palace bumper stickers. Every weekday in Autumn, sifting out the foliage into bedding for those less fortunate. How many years had you been at it now? Spawned out of an early mid-life crisis, and now there you were approaching retirement. After all this time someone finally had a problem with it.

Heavy boots down the sidewalk. He began to whistle a tune from his marching band days, until he was right up close enough. "If you wanna clean up after bums, maybe I can get you a job down at the station doing our washroom." Evidently he thought that to be a good one. You continued your arrangement of a commodious maple leaf double spread for Alice and Petrov, two aging lovebirds who had married behind a dumpster last Spring. Reading their vows to a hydrophobic moggy named Flannigan, who left the proceedings early to trade his rented tux for some wet chemicals. You weren't going to let them down regardless of this hard man's attitude, but when he shoved you across the jagged rocks lining the nature trail causing you to take a fall, it got you thinking that maybe he wasn't just gonna be another one of the council's empty threats.

"Well then." He stared down on you through reflective lenses while you nursed the palms of your hands bloodied and stinging from an unfortunate landing onto a patch of thorny prickles. He began talking about you needing to "get the message" and that the Mayor was finally "gonna clean up this s-hole." His delivery of that euphemism revealed the murmurs of a lisp he had no doubt spent years in speech therapy trying to correct. Being the empathetic type you were, you took a moment to think of how this poor man had come to be who he was.

* * *

In '87 Officer Bugel was just a kid named Paddy, who dug holes in the dirt so he could watch the other kids play marbles. If he got too close they threw sticks, and in first grade he fell on one in a funny way and it went through his cheek. He thought that's why he couldn't speak well as a kid but his parents told him it probably wasn't.

* * *

Mongo Sun came awake to the ruckus of some cop barking at you from across the park and still in a state he arrived to both of you in his wheelchair. "You got this guy? You got this guy in trouble? This guy trouble." He said in his voice always much louder than it needed to be. "He steal my fucking rake every day and" picking up the rake and poking you with it "yesterday he ruin my business. I don't have my rake and some kid steal my beads what I selling," referring to the boxes of warped anal beads he'd salvaged from a burnt down sex shop a few blocks up. Officer Bugel asked you if this was true, if you were out to bring down an honest man's business. Your eyes were on Mongo Sun's gravy colored boots. You had brought him blankets and whiskey, and there he was giving you up and poking you with the end of a wooden handle.

* * *

So you figured you were going to get taken in by this asshole, and you had accepted that. A night in gaol, whatever. After Bugel was done taunting you he forced you up and was ready to administer the cuffs when out of nowhere Ricky Thorn was back. Last you heard he was on the east side whoring himself out in stalls to get his new book published, that one about the seagulls that take our thoughts and drop them in the ocean until we are literally brainwashed into submission by reoccuring tsunamis.

Ricky Thorn was a problem because he hated cops and he also might've still had the spare keys to your apartment. If you helped him you would be an accessory to the GBH delivered to Officer Paddy Bugel with a pair of nunchucks fashioned from dinosaur bones (one handle fitted out with the potentially lethal thagomizer of a baby stegosaurus) given to him by a client who was a little strapped for cash. If you helped the cop, Ricky would plead insanity, serve a suspended sentence and crush your skull with prehistoric tail spikes in your sleep. Anyway that's what you told yourself while you kicked the crap out of this guy and ignored the sounds of his breaking ribs.

Through the onslaught you didn't notice him radioing for help, and those sirens weren't enough of a warning. Ricky Thorn had done a runner while you were still maniacly stepping on a man's face. A man of the law. Then as the blue and red lights reflected off shop windows you ran too, and the bullets missed but the cars didn't as you sprinted into peak hour highway traffic to lose them in one of those storm water drains where Mongo Sun had once shown you why rats' tails made the best jerky.

You died bringing more chairs in

So it had begun to rain and your mother had declared all things Christmas lunch to be brought back indoors, to the dining room table with all manner of crap still spread about that parents had yet to clean up for their spoiled little children. You were hiding away in your room watching old taped episodes of American Gothic, still pissed at your dad for getting you a bench press instead of a Sega Dreamcast. Because lifting shit was gonna solve all your problems.

Your mum came in and she was wearing the tubes hooked up to the oxygen trolley that you still weren't used to and you averted your eyes and she couldn't help but notice. "Sweetheart, get what's left out there and let's get this shit over with." She gave you a wink as she caught your eyes again and you knew right then that she'd given up on everything just as much as you had.

* * *

Outside there were a few of those wooden director type chairs, with the material seats that were harboring puddles of yellow water. You tilted them forward allowing the rain to run off, and you saw hanging from the awning that crepe paper reindeer thing your sister had made getting all ruined with the red running from Rudolph's nose like some angry dad putting up Christmas lights just clocked him one for landing on his goddamn roof. You got up on the chair and you don't remember falling but the whole thing just kind of folded up around your leg, you went out cold and everyone inside thought you just weren't coming.

When you came to there was painful scratching. It was against your forehead and it felt like it was bleeding quite a bit. It ran straight into your eyes but your hands weren't there to wipe it away. You were tied up and you were wet and you recognised where you were. Just out on the front lawn.

You wiped your eyes against the grass and tried to get a clear look at who this was standing in front of you. It was a kid maybe eight or nine judging by the height. But his arms and legs were thick. He had a stocky round torso. Maybe a midget, you thought. He didn't have a face that you could see, because over it he wore the skin of a bulldog. You looked down; he also wore boots. The rest of him was naked.

He spoke through the mouth of the bulldog, framing his face which was tiny and squashed up and charred. The rest of his skin was pink like a new born baby. His voice did not form words, only high pitched squeals, and he scratched you across the face with a three-pronged claw that was normally used by your mother for digging around the garden.

As you sobbed you tried asking him if this was the end of the world. Or the beginning of it at least. That the millennium would come around and everyone would be laying dead on their front lawns. Being sprinkled by the sprinklers. Being pissed on by the neighbours' dog. He responded to you with a sharp hissing and threw the three-pronged claw into your stomach, pulling up.

He wasn't going to eat you, though he did have one end of your small intestine between his teeth. You cried out with pain, and the music from the house seemed to get louder. He was slowly moving away from you, with part of you still attached in his mouth. He took the rubbery tubing in both hands and began to run, pulling you behind with it.

You made it conscious all the way to the side of the road. He left you for a moment, and you thought maybe that was it, maybe that was all he needed. That you'd both go back to doing whatever you did, and maybe this time next year he'd find someone else to horribly maim in their parents' front yard. The rope around your hands was almost off, you could feel it loosening and you so badly just wanted them free so you could put all your guts back in, but then he was back and he was standing over you with his arms back over his head, but you couldn't quite see what he had and--

* * *

Your mother was in the kitchen cutting what was left from the turkey and the ham. Piling them together on some al-foil, scooping up some pasta salad to sit on top, she wrapped it all up and carried it out to the back step. She left it there and made sure the door was locked. Returning to her family she put a hand on your father's shoulder before taking a seat beside her oxygen trolley and leaning over to give a kiss to one of her many wonderful grandchildren.

You died lucky number seven

_

One died talking itself around in circles

Two died stabbing itself in the back

Three died deciding with rock paper scissors

Four died facing the wall in each corner

Five died falling apart at the senses

Six died with help from a loaded revolver

Seven died hoping its luck wasn't over

_

You died affording a look at the Dust Buster Bunny

"Sorry we've been keeping you here so long floating around in the neutral grey of these cotton-candyesque islands, but now that we're here let's have a look see." He flipped open a clipboard.

"'1986. CES Convention. High-powered modified dog whistle attracts dozens of bears to the Las Vegas Convention Centre. Bears overpower security, ignore women in tightly clad outfits and proceed to take over most of the first floor. Some horribly maimed'; I see your wife here, 'many killed'; your blind sister Elise who evidently had a fairly major gambling problem. When I found her she was trying to put quarters into Sharon Stone who was doing her best to remain inconspicuous. Unfortunately we had to send her back because Basic Instinct hadn't been made yet and this was apparently relevant to something Important which of course would never be revealed to us. He certainly works in mysterious ways.

"So, it says here you were...'in line to test the Dust Buster Bunny?' What is that exactly?"

You hesistated to answer, then told him it wasn't important. He insisted that it was, since well you know, it might be a deal breaker.

"Oh wait--" he says. "It's got it here on the next page. Silly me."

You swallowed.

"'A device used to combine one of man's most hated tasks with one he can't get enough of. Vacuuming and sex.'"

You took a step back.

"Wait. So how does this work exactly? Oh wait! There's more!"

He holds up in front of you the diagram on the clipboard. Its base is circular with a fine black brush running around the edge. You remebered that was where the sucking took place. Protruding from the exterior was like a bicycle seat kind of leading towards the side of the plastic body where the holes were. Also where the sucking took place. As the plastic mold went up it kind of went into the shape of breasts and shoulder and neck and head. It had bunny ears. The breasts were hard and cold, but you specifically remember the salesman saying that the retail version would use internally heated silicon. You don't really remember much else about it. What colour it was. How expensive it was--but it was something ridiculous. You remember the bunny ears.

"So...it's not like you did anything with this thing is it?"

You shook your head.

"Because sometimes they miss stuff on these summary sheets, and--"

You tried to look innocent.

"Cause I mean if we get up there and they check it out on the computer system and you're like--"

You remained silent.

"It's gonna be a shit sandwich for both of us."

You nodded.

"So it says here you afforded a look at the Dust Buster Bunny, that you had some impure thoughts, and then a big ol grizzly came and swiped you through the torso. That about it chief?"

You nodded.

He turned down at you with a glance. "Naw. That ain't about it. Not even close. You thought you were gonna pull one on me?"

You remained speechless.

"To be honest though, wouldn't made much difference if you'd told the truth. Sure, forgive and forget works to an extent, but come on now man. We all gotta have boundaries. Gotta know where to draw the line. Now your wife, she's got a place up here, but we can't let you both occupy the same paradise. We just wanted to fuck with your head a little. Get your hopes up. We'll show it to her when she gets up here. That kinda thing."

* * *

"We got it all right here. Why wouldn't we? Your obsession with the DBB, those sleepless nights in your basement trying to build your own prototype that would be better in every way. More pleasure. More suction. But inevitably you did not have the funds or the self discipline to get the thing completed. Every night you would go down there and instead of improving upon it you would just have intercourse with it, even though the inside wasn't even properly sealed, and you're lucky you didn't get your junk stuck in a cog and die that way instead. Well actually that would have worked out better for you in the end."

He passed you a pair of welding goggles. "Good chance your eyeballs will explode down there, and if they catch you when it happens, they make you drink it. The eye juice."

You took the goggles.

"But really why should I be helping you out? A guy who spends his last moments lying on the ground in two pieces, his wife screaming from the amount of blood gushing from her face. Dragging her out there for the five hour drive because according to you she totally had to see this fucking thing for herself. And you screaming even louder, because in front of you you can see your own legs with the pants torn off. With your dick in plain view. You scream at her to pick you up and she does and you tell her no--the bottom half. You guide her, because she can't see a thing, to the DBB and you tell her to take your dead member and shove it into that contraption, that you wanted to have at least a part of you know what it was like. And she held that half of you there for five minutes as you watched and her knees began to buckle until she collapsed on the floor with blood raining down on her as a scrawny black bear chews your lower body to pieces."

You died in Gladys Knight's ensuite bathroom

7:07 -- At the Mock & Thunder, stumbling Johnny Jaw orders a round of that absinthe that makes you die in your sleep. After taking your shot you take the glass meant for that girl you liked the look of and downed hers also because you heard that's the kind of initiative women like to see in a man at a bar trying to kill himself.

7:08 -- It occurs to you that there is no such thing as absinthe that makes you die in your sleep and that you must already be under the spell of something else in the real world (maybe a type of vodka that makes you die in your sleep?)

7:09 -- You ask the girl at the bar if she saw anyone buying you a vodka, or maybe a bourbon, bourbon was possible, and she said she had, though in the reality you were referring to she was really your friend from community college, but then he was distracted by a girl named Lux and put all his money into her pants and then they went into one of those little rooms where the doors are kind of a secret.

7:12 -- After coming back from the bathroom where you have spent a few minutes trying to burn your hands under hot water in the hope that it would wake you up, you ask the girl if getting more drunk, maybe to the point of passing out would get you out of this. Or a nice punch to the chops? This isn't opposites world she said. Just go for a walk and maybe you'll find something. Your hands still hurt from the water.

* * *

8:45 -- You're telling a girl with white hair about how they had found you. It would be tomorrow, late afternoon they would find you tied up to a bar heater with an extension cord. The heater would be turned up high slow cooking your hands which were shoved between the gaps. Your pants off, your shirt still done up. He sodomised you for hours and broke some of your teeth from the repeated pushing of your head into the hot metal. When they found you, your face would still be red from it. The girl with the white hair whose teeth were crooked as an old fence asks you why you would let this happen. You tell her that it was already happening and you have only just figured this all out. So if she wants to have sex with you right then that might help because what you'd really be feeling would be the penetration of the offender and maybe if they did it hard enough you would wake up. She flicks her hair revealing how much of a bad job she's done of cutting it herself and she tells you to buy her another drink and you do.

* * *

9:09 -- You're over by the band, talking to the drummer from high school whose later successes in life you are so envious of. He tells you that you were wrong about how you were going to die and you say that you knew it after sex with that girl because there was nothing unpleasant about it, until her vagina turned into a rotary phone and you had to dial emergency services to free yourself from its grasp.

9:10 -- The drummer takes you to the back room where the rest of the band is winding down. You ask them if there are any more parties after this, and they all say no that they have to get up early to have suicide doors installed on their tour bus which is really just a Willys pick-up with no tray. You wonder at this point if you go to sleep will you actually be dead, but you don't seem to able to stop yourself. You miss your flight home and end up walking.

* * *

7am -- You wake up at home, except it's the apartment you moved out of six months ago. You had a weird dream about being sexually abused as a child by your friend's grandmother except when you go to tell everyone no one believes you and your friend's mother ties you up in the basement and whips your face with a cane for not keeping it a secret like you'd been told to. You tell this story to your fiance over breakfast and she asks you if the girl you had sex with in the club last night meant anything. You told her it meant you weren't going to die, and that those flowers she'd stuck in a vase were beginning to smell like shit. She smiled and kissed you goodbye as she left for work.

7:04 -- You remember another dream about what you were doing between 7:13 and 8:44 the night before. You were stinging yourself with bees in the parking lot until you saw the flashing of police car lights and you quickly stuffed them back into a matchbox and you balance on top of a car's front tire. The policeman was shining a light in your face and then out of nowhere a bee flies out of the box and stings you in the back of neck. He's asking you questions and all of a sudden you can't breathe and you fall to the ground and everything is going dark around the edges. You pass out face down in your bowl of cereal and the policeman is standing above you blinking his flashlight off the top of your head.

7:45 -- They finally kick down the door to find you slumped over on the toilet with a coked out William Guest injecting heroin between your toes.

You died from a new strain of the common cold

"Jesus Christ Phil where did you put those tissues?" The masked man said as his partner pulled up to the curb.
"No real names!" The driver said.
"We're still in the car Phil. I'm gonna duck across the street and get some more tissues." The man said. There was snot leaking through is balaclava.
"You've got to be kidding me. This is a loading zone. I'm not even meant to be parked here!" The driver said.
"It'll just be a second." The man said removing his mask and wiping his nose on his sleeve.

* * *

To soothe the fact that you'd had about three hours sleep, you made a game of finding the surface which reflected the least fluorescent light so you could take comfort in staring at it. The counter in front of you. It was a quiet morning and as soon as these two walked in you knew what they were here for. You even knew more or less how badly it would go for them, based on the way they carried themselves. One simply lacking the confidence. The other like a cancer patient who had got to the point where he was no long accepting treatment.

* * *

"What the hell took you?" The driver asked.
"They had a special on Day and Night." The sick man said. "If I take more does it work quicker?"
"Just get out of the car already." The driver said.
"Shit I shoulda got water. These things don't go down so easily."
"Where the hell did they find you." The driver said.

* * *

The one who looked more nervous, more inept, though less like he was dying took a place in your queue. There was only one person in front of him. As you poured some old woman's jar of silver coins into the counting machine you spotted the gun that was quite clearly in the side of his pants. The man took a step forward and the gun moved. It slid down the leg of his pants, until the nuzzle of the gun was protruding against the side of his shoe. You pressed down on the silent alarm.

The man awkwardly tried to slide the gun back up his pant leg first by pretending to kneel down to tie his shoe. By the time he was half way back to getting it up to his waistline the eyes of every teller were upon him, until a succession of sneezes created a distraction that allowed the man to quickly drop his pants and reveal the weapon along with his demands.

"Money in the bags. Everyone behind the counter empty your registers into bags. Everybody else give me your wallets." No one who handed over their wallets had much money if any. Probably why they were at the bank.

"Does anyone have any water please?" The sick man asked. "Please could anyone--" and he started sneezing again uncontrollably pointing a gun in your direction, sneezing and sneezing with mucus dribbling down the bottom of his mask. Finally he took it off.

"Shit! What are you doing?" The driver asked.

"I'm sorry, it was getting too hot and--" he started again. Huge streams of snot pouring out now. And then as though his body had run out of the viscous yellowy green product instead he just started blowing out a watery substance that soon turned to blood.

"Looks like he's blown a gasket." The teller next to you whispered.

The nervous man yelled at you to get the sick man some water and you did. You handed him the water but when he looked up at you his face was a hideous mess he looked like someone had poured acid on him. He spat burning blood in your face and shot you in the chest. He then shot his partner and anyone else near by until he had no bullets left. He lay face down and gargled in his own puddle of fluids until he was dead as well.

Hours later people who had survived the ordeal began describing similar symptoms.

You died pulling hair from a ball of hair

Your new best friend Lacey was turning out to be a bit of a bitch, just because you hadn't delivered on the boys, or the alcohol, you were still getting your dad's cabin for the first week of summer, and after all she had said she liked fishing as much as you did. Really that was just an amicable fib. After all this whole sham friendship was just a rebound thing after Lacey went behind Indra's back with Rob and she was exiled from that posse of shallow hearts, but deep down you really wanted to make something out of it. Why wouldn't you? She could tell you how to do your hair right, how to not fill your sadness with pastries, how to make your cleavage look sexy instead of just the unpleasant result of them not making uniforms quite within your size range.

* * *

Lacey barely spoke to you the whole drive up, and when she did it was about any last minute plans to get boys and alcohol. You had told yourself you would say no, but you knew that you were weak and that you would really do anything to be even a little bit popular. Even that kind of popular where you know you're being used and guys are getting your name wrong while telling you how awesome you are but not daring to make eye contact. And if you're really lucky you might have the honor of giving the drunkest one a blow job that's so good he throws up on top of your head. It's OK no one had the gall to tell that one at your funeral. But a few were thinking about it.

When you arrived the weather was nice and you decided it would be the perfect time to sit by the lake with your rod, but you could tell that Lacey wasn't interested and you didn't even ask, and she said something about topless sunbathing if she could get onto the roof and you said sure and she said she wasn't asking your permission. Well then.

* * *

The guy who found the bodies in the lake had actually come back with some beers in the hope of getting a little action from the one with the nice rack he had spotted from his treetop shanty. Along with the beer he had a bag full of homemade roofies which probably would have taken a permanent chunk out of your brain's ability to function, but after stripping you naked he would have decided not to go through with it anyway.

When they pulled you out you were all tangled up in what looked like seaweed. A topless girl in jeans and her much larger friend fully clothed swimming together in the lake became caught up in some underwater plant life which caused them to drown? In the end they just pinned it on the creepy tree guy, whose suspicious lab equipment and crates of vintage "alternative" pornography didn't work in his favour.

* * *

It wasn't seaweed, or algae or anything they'd said. It was more like hair. Lacey was staring up at the sky through her huge sunglasses when something quite suddenly entered her field of vision. It was falling right at her. It landed right beside her. It was like a big ball of tumbleweed and it rolled down the slope of the roof towards her, and as she batted it away it took her hand.

She wasn't screaming because of her mouth being stuffed with all the stuff this thing was made of. In fact the whole thing was very quiet as it rolled through the forest swallowing up all kinds of sticks and leaves and smaller animals and assorted crap, causing the hairy outter layer to expand.

You did catch it in your peripheral sight before it took you. You saw Lacey's blonde hair hanging out the side and in an instant you grabbed onto it before it could make it to the water. As though the hair was no longer under her control, it wrapped itself around your hand and pulled you in. Once inside you crawled into the middle and found Lacey squriming about. You cleared all the crap out of her mouth and pressed your lips over hers, because it wasn't like you were ever going to have another chance to kiss anybody. regardless of whether you'd survived or not. And you wished in those final moments she had shared your sentiments and not bitten you on the tongue, because really this wasn't such a bad way to end things.

You died on account of that Rodney Doon kid

"So...enchanted urinal trough? That's your story?" The Principal loomed over you and somewhere in the corner of your eye you could make out that look on your step dad's face which really brought out the dent between his eyebrows. As though given time, his deep contemplation would uncover anything.

You began to speak, thinking maybe you could just explain it all over again. All you wanted them to understand was that it wasn't as impossible as it sounded.

* * *

"Purple Rain? No shit," your thirty-five year old step brother said turning up the dial on his car radio. "Back in the eighties I would always have dad rent me this when I went over on weekends. Until he bought it for me on my birthday." You tried to look interested like your mother had told you to. Console him in those little victories, because really that's all the guy's got. "I've still got it if you wanna borrow--naw you wouldn't have a VHS player anyway. Forget it." He turned up the volume some more and you watched his face as he tried to send himself back away from this hopeless vector his life had been stuck on for the last going on twenty years, you estimated. You had recently begun learning about vectors from a text book your grandmother bought you from a second hand book sale out the front of the library where she always took you to meet her friends who never looked all that clean. Like they weren't anyone's grandma. It wasn't like you were going to grow up to be some genius though.

Your sbro dropped you at school and he was meant to pick you up that afternoon with Rodney Doon, but who knows he probably had an important job interview at the last minute right? Anyway he didn't show (it was drugs and then 14+ hours of floorsleep), but Rodney wasn't phased he said he had something cool in his backpack and you should both definitely go to the toilets and check it out.

Now Rodney Doon was not a trouble maker and even though he lived with his uncle and aunt they weren't weird or anything in fact they didn't have kids of their own so there wasn't even that bad feeling of inadequacy for him to deal with. And his birthday parties were always pretty normal, but not too normal that if you pushed hard against the wrong part of the living room wall you'd wind up spending your embittered adolescence hunting down the guy who swapped out your liver for a Brillo pad. Nonetheless you remained trepid about the whole thing; if your step dad had taught you anything, it was how people could be, and that that was never an easy thing to see most of the time. You were afraid that he was going to put you in some terrible situation with pornos or cigarettes or spin the bottle. One of those situations where you'd come off no less than an absolute retard in front of everybody. No wonder you were always last picked.

* * *

There were no drugs in his backpack or anything like that and thank god it didn't involve his penis, or Laura Malcorn tied up in one of the stalls--though it excited you more than just a little bit to think about. You weren't exactly sure why.

Rodney Doon produced a stick, it was thick and old and didn't look like it came from any of those eucalypts from around the playground, the ones that made you tight in the chest with their piercing aroma every time you were made to do laps along the perimeter. At one end the wood had ruptured out into what looked like a mangled hand, and Rodney waved it in your face, running it across your cheek. You squirmed like a little girl and almost took a step back into the piss trough. "Careful." Rodney Doon said. "That's not clean. What do you think I've got this for?"

* * *

Your mother was in a heightened state of panic after she failed to make contact with your unconscious pseudo-sibling. Rushing through school zones at reckless velocities she pulled up where you would normally be waiting, then she ran to the main office and began shrieking at admin ladies working late who weren't being paid to give a shit about the state of anybody's children. She found the principal still in the parking lot, and together they searched the buildings.

By the time they found you, Rodney had already stepped over to the other side and you were waiting for...well you weren't exactly sure but you assumed his hand would just appear through the metal of the urinal, that he would pass you back the old stick and let you trace out your own portal to join him.

* * *

Some kid found the old stick along the fence line while doing laps for the fun run. It was covered in blood which belonged to Rodney Doon, and after that, day and night, they didn't stop asking you questions. They figured if they kept you awake you eventually would say that you beat him dead with it. There were your foot prints at the scene. But there was no body.

Your step dad left your mum and you never saw him or his son ever again. Your mum never got mad at you, and she never went quiet on you like Rodney once did when you played operation on his cat's guts with some antique medical equipment his uncle was so proud of, displaying it behind glass in the main hallway as you came in to hang up your coat. How easy it had been to pick that stupid lock. Your mum loved you the same until one day when you were old enough to be on your own she left the gas on in the kitchen so that when you came home and slammed the front door the way you always did it would spark the flint she had placed in the gap so carefully.

There was no body, and her story was better than an enchanted urinal trough, but still she did not fare as well as you had in the Principal's office that day.