It Brings On Many Changes

I shot myself in the head and missed. Sort of. It, the bullet, cut a groove right up my forehead, parted my hair and lodged itself into the bathroom wall behind me. Tiles, and crumbs of tiles, everywhere. I wasn’t dead but it hurt. And I looked a right state too, a right idiot.

The day I hanged myself was the day my wife decided to come home from work early. Me hanging there all red-faced and gasping and she, initially, rolling her eyes. Another of my practical jokes, right? Ten seconds later and she’s grabbing my legs, pushing me up, screaming and shouting, putting the window through with her foot, alerting a neighbour, cutting me down.

I’d swallowed enough pills, the doctor said, to kill a dinosaur. A dinosaur? Yes, something big, bigger than you at any rate. An elephant? Certainly an elephant. A gorilla? A gorilla, yes. A grizzly bear? Is a grizzly bear smaller than a dinosaur? What? A grizzly bear is bigger than a dinosaur, yes? Yes. So if all those pills you took could kill a dinosaur, I’m sure they’d have no trouble killing a grizzly or an elephant or a gorilla. I see. Yes. What about a blue whale?

Like an idiot, flapping about on the side of the bus, slamming my face against the window, some of the passengers screaming, some of the passengers laughing, my trousers somehow caught on the roof of the bus, the bus I’d meant to jump in front of, not on top of. Idiot.

A thin metal rod rammed into the plug socket, my wet hand on the other end. Result: Darkness. And the video clock having to be re-set.

I threw myself from the Ditherington Flax Mill Tower. I landed in a vat of flour.

Etc.