Discovered on reddit.com/r/Pokemon
Taking an evening walk through my suburban neighbourhood last week, I couldn’t help but marvel at the effect that Pokemon Go was having on our community’s youth. While not a player myself (my phone is much too small), I enjoyed the sight of once-disparate groups conversing and pointing in glee, brought together by a virtual reality that has such tangible effects on those who choose to believe.
Upon taking particular interest in a young street gang that had paused play to take turns sucking happily on lollipops with some nerds, I slipped off of the street kerb.
I looked at the bent-back letter L that was recently my human leg, a misplaced serif of bone dribbling a hot cream of what I assumed was marrow, spattering the asphalt. It left cloying whitish drops, like a hot clown’s spilled and powder-tainted sweat, and my mind, so suddenly just electric screams, cleared completely for a second as I saw a new one of my fluids.
A swollen, purplish city pigeon dropped from above – from an arcing wire, or branch, or pollen-coated summer gutter perhaps – and cautiously moved towards me. Lured by my gentle, static trembles, or simply unafraid of something so obviously injured, it edged close, flicking its head, studying me with each flat, stupid eye in turn. With a final, triumphal flap, it perched on the sky-reaching broken bone and, dipping its head between its legs in a way that reminded me of a Madonna dance move, it pecked at the tibia’s exposed core.
Aside from a faint pressure pain, I felt nothing physical as I watched that bird became the first animal to sample my marrow. The thought rushed through me that I should throw up, a psychic revulsion, but my stomach refused an obliging cramp, held as it was in the grip of shock. “God,” I thought. “What do I do?”
Paralysed by pain and indecision, I feared movement, and my throat felt closed by panic, some antediluvian response to stop oxygen reaching my brain and turn on sleeping pain receptors. In a moment of what felt then like realisation (but I now understand as mindless desperation), I farted hard.
It was more a foghorn warning – I knew that any kinetic potential of the hot jet I created would be muffled by the double gusset blast-shield of my Asos boxer-briefs and the hard denim jorts beyond – but the noise was enough. The pigeon cheeped in fear, inadvertently gargling a droplet of my stem cells as it swivelled to wince at the offending arse, then took flight.
Unfortunately, while the noise was sufficient to scare my unwitting predator, I believe it is the smell that betrayed me. Soon the sides of the road were lined with ten to twelve local mice, who advanced in flat ranks like Roman regiments upon the soft, conquerable barbarian wilds of my bod. Quickly, skilfully, they removed my poppered plaid shirt, working in teams of two – one slipping between the overlapped layers of shirt hem to provide leverage for a comrade to jump onto the now-taut fabric above, releasing the popper mechanism.
The shirt removed and folded at the road’s edge, the mice made short work of my belly button, leaving an umbilic gasp in my torso. Confused though I was, I couldn’t help but notice that a local timber wolf (I am from the northern United States, where these are more common than you’d think!) was urinating on a giant centipede (these are from South America, but I put this down to El Nino). All of a sudden, the mice formed up and ran into my gut-hole, single-file, while the now-lubricated centipede entered my shattered bone. The wolf, satisfied, left and entered a local business.
As I felt roiling activity in two separate tiers of my innards, a crow nested in one of my shoes, pumping out egg after egg until the Nike Velocity High-Top was nothing but sticks and yolk, and a goat-herd lost control of his flock, which ran down the road I lay prostrate and crooked across, avoiding everything but my hair, which came off.
When the ambulance finally came (no one called, it was on its way home after a half-shift), the paramedic dropped the collapsible gurney on a family of adult ducks, and the blood mixed in with that of my tattered scalp.
A passing vlogger then tagged me in a picture of what looked like a Lickitung sitting on my face, and it got 140 retweets. It is a good world.