The Headline Read: Death by Fantasy

Time is irrelevant when in mourning, so feel free to fuck with it. I think someone said that to me one day, years ago. Or I made it up to keep myself happy. Either way, it’s true. I know, because just last week I was fucking with time.

I don’t really remember when I first met her. Seventh grade camp somewhere in the bush, it might have involved an axe and some chocolate. I don’t know, I spent that camp knocked out from a fallen tree branch. All I got to do was archery. Anyway, the week after, at school, she was suddenly my friend.

We had a few things in common, a love of books and classic rock, contempt for ‘dance’ music (that you can only samba to) and the desire to learn how to properly arrange orchards. Mostly we’d predict people’s actions before they carried them out. Though evenly matched, our skill greatly surpassed everyone else’s.

Aside from that, we were two very different people. Putting aside (and occasionally embracing) these differences, our friendship grew. Growing bored with our analysis of playground faces, we extended our talents to the wider community, and, eventually, to literature. Having read most of the classics, and analysed characters and plot, we quickly became stuck. What were we to do, now that we had exhausted our source of fun? It was a conundrum that kept us in a table tennis and pool playing rut for weeks.

The answer came suddenly one day. As most answers do, it arrived on the doorstep at an awkward moment. I could tell you that we were building a small fort in her bedroom but you’d know that wasn’t true. Over dinner than night it was agreed; we would take a novel each and re-write it based on a single change in the main character’s persona.

She chose for me the usual crime-fiction she knew I detested. As parameters: I was not to turn it into a fantasy or romance and feathers were to be involved somehow. For her I chose a fantasy, of course, and told her not to make it crime or historical, and to involve a boa constrictor.

Tragedy struck a week later, on our way home from a picnic. Engrossed as she was in the novel (reading it for the fifth time) she lost all senses and got into a fight with a train. She lost. The irony was not lost on me: the train carriage was called ‘Fantasy’.