Thursday, 30 December 2021

Execution by... daffodils?

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:

  1. Thrown in a river sewn up in a sack with a monkey, a chicken, and a snake.
  2. Tied to the top of the tallest tree which is then toppled. 
  3. Suffocated in daffodil petals.
  4. You etch an apology on your body in wax, and then you're boiled down in acid until only your apology remains.
  5. Keelhauled in ice.
  6. Bungee jump.
  7. Being used as a whitewater raft.
  8. Defenestrated.
  9. Walk the plank of the spire of the tallest cathedral in Christendom.
  10. Licked to death by dogs with bad breath.
  11. Pricked through with a multitude of skewers.
  12. Eyes and mouth sewn up. Left to starve in a locked cupboard in a busy kitchen.
  13. Lightly browned on all sides.
  14. Forced to eat a hundred weight of offal.
  15. Eat coins and die.
  16. You are dropped out of the sky; and then caught; and then ripped to pieces, by falcons.
  17. A snail with an acid trail crawls over your naked body, as it takes you nine months to die.
  18. Every night a bird comes in your dreams, and pecks away a little more of your flesh. It starts with your eyes.
  19. Snakes.
  20. A mass agglomeration of sticks and insect legs encloses you, and crushes.
  21. Suffocated in a duvet.
  22. Tossed up and down in a sheet until you die of butterflies in your stomach.
  23. Fingernails pulled out, sharpened, and used to score your skin into a checkerboard.
  24. A note so low that your innards fall out.
  25. Plunging down an endless railway, strapped to two pairs of wheels. 
  26. Writing this stuff.
  27. Seeds planted all over your body. Allergy-triggering plants emerge.
  28. You are captured in a picture in the National Gallery. The only space that exists for you is the space inside the picture.
  29. Tuned inside-out.
  30. Hung upside-down until all the blood drains to your head and you die from the bottom up.

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