Leafing through an old notebook, I found the beginnings of a table of... something. Apart from a couple of entries (a hawthorn tree whose thorns creep up and down its twigs, and a rat which opens its mouth wide and turns itself inside-out) all of the entries came under "you are executed. Cause of death:"
Here are the ways that you could be killed:
- Thrown in a river sewn up in a sack with a monkey, a chicken, and a snake.
- Tied to the top of the tallest tree which is then toppled.
- Suffocated in daffodil petals.
- You etch an apology on your body in wax, and then you're boiled down in acid until only your apology remains.
- Keelhauled in ice.
- Bungee jump.
- Being used as a whitewater raft.
- Defenestrated.
- Walk the plank of the spire of the tallest cathedral in Christendom.
- Licked to death by dogs with bad breath.
- Pricked through with a multitude of skewers.
- Eyes and mouth sewn up. Left to starve in a locked cupboard in a busy kitchen.
- Lightly browned on all sides.
- Forced to eat a hundred weight of offal.
- Eat coins and die.
- You are dropped out of the sky; and then caught; and then ripped to pieces, by falcons.
- A snail with an acid trail crawls over your naked body, as it takes you nine months to die.
- Every night a bird comes in your dreams, and pecks away a little more of your flesh. It starts with your eyes.
- Snakes.
- A mass agglomeration of sticks and insect legs encloses you, and crushes.
- Suffocated in a duvet.
- Tossed up and down in a sheet until you die of butterflies in your stomach.
- Fingernails pulled out, sharpened, and used to score your skin into a checkerboard.
- A note so low that your innards fall out.
- Plunging down an endless railway, strapped to two pairs of wheels.
- Writing this stuff.
- Seeds planted all over your body. Allergy-triggering plants emerge.
- You are captured in a picture in the National Gallery. The only space that exists for you is the space inside the picture.
- Tuned inside-out.
- Hung upside-down until all the blood drains to your head and you die from the bottom up.
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