Chaos snatched me up and, before I could gather my bearings, dropped me amid a romance, a family row and, worst of all, a life I had been trying to avoid at all costs. I yearned for the return of that state of pre-embodiment with which many were satisfied for as long as eternity took. She welcomed me into the man’s body with a gentle squeeze of the hand, followed by a light kiss on the cheek. It was an instinctive reaction on her part, since she was unaware that I had not been possessor of her sweetheart’s body for as long as she had known it. Reluctant souls, like me, torn screaming from the substitute-bench of Fate are bound to provide a seamless transfer of responsibilities for those involved with the emotions of the receiving body. I thus returned the kiss. Surrogates of all shapes and sizes gathered around. These were, on a superficial level, relatives of the woman, who had arrived for our engagement party. However, I knew most of them as others of my kind. The individual, whose disguise as my future mother-in-law was wearing thin, winked an involuntary twitch of the cheek-muscles, perhaps, but one I took to be a romantic enticement to another actor such as me in a theatre called reality. Here, then, I had been landed with two romances: one dictated by the logic of a pair of human-beings ineluctably intended to be in love both mind and body - and the other romance generated in the shape of the foul old winking bird who was being surreptitiously spiritual behind the wrinkle-ringed eyes in her attempts to dupe Fate. I could not possibly reciprocate the latter, since the former was meant to be my whole preoccupation for the next few decades. Furthermore, the rest of the family members had begun arguing. They were picking at the carcass of a roast chicken, one that some had intended to save for tomorrow’s dinner, others to consume now at the party. It was a trivial row, yet with a high significance derived from the objective viewpoint of timescales far in excess of human comprehension - simply an extrapolation, a spoiling tactic, a diversion, a decoy, a wild goose chase of small talk since wild chickens were indeed rare. Ill-cooked, in any event - and I hoped that food-poisoning would rectify the few flinches from Fate now being rehearsed by such rogue spawndrift of Chaos. However, I suffered the abrupt realisation that I had not given my sweetheart an engagement ring. It was evidently expected of me, the climax of current proceedings, one that my predecessors had forgotten, either through the typical inefficiency of deputy souls who have no material or spiritual incentive to cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s - or, more likely, sheer bloody-mindedness. More likely, of course, because, when minds bled, realignments inevitably ensued. And I ripped out the red-dripping wishbone and raised it like Yorick towards my smiling lips...
(The Weird monger's Tales Wyrd Press 1994)
