He woke with the same spiralling anxious thoughts that he would die today, he would have a terrible accident of some sort and he would die. The fact that he’d had this series of thoughts for many years and each day proved it wrong seemed to make no difference. He still had the thoughts. Sometimes they were accompanied by mental images of his death. The severing of his head seemed to feature quite often, as did being crushed by a speeding truck. More unusual recent examples were being catapulted into the air and landing on a spike, being electrocuted by pissing on a power supply and, his least favourite, nailed down to a wooden floor and eaten alive slowly, by crows and rats. This morning was the second time he’d had this thought in the past few months and an additional worrying thought that now joined the others circulating around his overworked brain, was that maybe this would become a new regular. Generally the thoughts came as he awoke, they followed him from the bedroom to the bathroom to the kitchen, paused for a moment when he drank his coffee, then resumed at full intensity for the rest of the day until he went to sleep. Sleep for him was a beautiful wondrous thing. In his sleep he dreamt of not dying, of living a happy easy normal life, occasionally even doing amazing things: eating in fine restaurants, talking to girls and once, touching a breast. This fantasy world was available to him whenever he slept so obviously, he tried to sleep as much as possible. He had every brand of sleeping tablet known to man and he drank enormous quantities of alcohol every day of the week. It was getting harder to get to sleep though and he had started waking earlier and earlier. His cunning plan this morning was to start a new exercise regime. He was incredibly unhealthy having spent most of his life indoors and most of the last 20 years drinking excessively. The advantage of being so unfit, he figured, was that exercise would exhaust him and he would sleep more – it couldn’t fail.
Tag Archive: severed head
His head was severed from his body and he felt the agony of that, but he was still alive. His head rolled down the enlarged gullet of the Mummy-thing. Its throat was lined with a sticky red shiny liquid that burnt on contact. Already one of his eyes had been burnt out and he could barely see out of the other one. As he was squeezed downwards he heard a gurgling churning noise which grew louder as he rounded each of the many corners of the foul monstrous gut.
At each push his head was turned in a different direction so he couldn’t always see where he was going. He tried to bite the side of the gut to stop himself going forward. It tasted foul but the muscular motions were far too strong and he couldn’t hold on.
For a moment he was stuck on what seemed like a fold in the gut which was contracting and pushing him slowly forward towards a small opening.
By coincidence he was turned to face his fate, right at the very edge of the precipice. Below him was a boiling vat of liquid which must be the stomach of this creature. As the muscles gathered themselves ready to contract he had one last stream of
“…he’ll get by without his rabbit pie…”
running through his mind before his head was ejected like a cork from a bottle out and down into the foul-smelling cauldron below. He registered the searing pain of the stomach acid briefly before his life finally flickered out and his head melted to join the morass.
Extract from my NANOWRIMO work in progress
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