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I awoke on the Wednesday to discover that the mirror that hung over my bed had fallen from the wall during the night, released from its precarious mounting by its inferior brass picture-hooks, and fallen to the bed below, severing my head at the neck. I reflected that I must be dead, with an inward chuckle at my own perceptiveness in spite of this fact -- not bad for a man in such dire adversity, I thought complacently. An abortive attempt at a yawn brought me to my senses and I realized that I was, indeed, dead, and that perceptiveness would not make up for all I had lost thereby.
I was standing at the foot of my bed regarding my own corpse.
A glance at the window suggested that it was just before dawn. No doubt indigestion from the previous night's cheese had awakened me at this hour, as it so often did when I overindulged. Indeed, I felt an early-morning stirring of the large gut, the feeling occurring in the usual place in spite of the fact I appeared to be some five feet distant from my actual, bodily gut. No doubt, I reasoned inwardly, this was a similar sensation to that experienced by amputees, who felt disturbing itches in the limb they lacked, but without the ability to scratch.
The mirror and my dead body apart, the contents of my room were entirely as they should be, with the exception of my bedside table, now in some disarray due to large shards of broken mirror-glass which had speared and lacerated objects located on it. This included the clock, which had stopped at a quarter past two. I felt some comfort in having been able to ascertain the hour of my death. The season of the year and the early-morning light presently shining quite strongly through my bedroom window suggested to me that I had now been dead for at least two hours.
A sudden icy chill ran down the memory of my spine and jumped forward some two inches, resting in the area which had been occupied by my pelvic girdle. It leered up at me and winked. I looked away, only to see the hooded figure at the door of my room that had caused the chill.
"Are you -- " I would have stammered, had I had an undamaged and functioning larynx (my larynx had been completely crushed by the mirror).
I am death, a voice said. I had imagined the voice of death would appear within my own mind and echo hollowly, but in fact the voice appeared to originate from the the spaces immediately to either side of where my ears should have been, and was surprisingly warm, like the voices of radio announcers just before they savage a politician. The sensation was that of being addressed through a very high-quality pair of headphones by a comfortable gentleman, possibly with a pipe and wearing a pair of plaid carpet-slippers. Strangely, that made it worse. I wanted to vomit but obviously could not.
The chill that had run down my spine was rummaging around my knee area.
I realized I must now be inhabiting an entirely metaphorical landscape, the world of all those vague things with no physical reality, like death and fear and love, which nonetheless make up most of people's lives. Not mine any longer, of course.
A sudden feeling of rebellion against all this needless anthropomorphism stirred within me. I was a rationalist. I had no need for all this wishy-washy, quasi-religious nonsense -- a Death with a hood, dark brown voice or no dark brown voice, belonged with the myths about monsters and gods of the weather that we had abandoned so long ago. A passing breeze gave me the time of day with great courtesy. This somehow enraged me further and I made to run from the room but tripped over the wrinkle in my rug and fell mindlong to the floor. You'll be wanting to be careful or you'll hurt yourself, the Voice said, and I realized wearily that I was in for a day of this at least.