Odd Deaths

1. While swimming in the St. Lawrence River, being struck and nearly decapitated by a remote-controlled toy speedboat operated from shore.

2. Bending in the shower to retrieve a fallen bar of soap, you slip and bang your head, knocking yourself unconscious; your left heel plugs the drain, while the water fills to the required depth.

3. Tormenting a goldfish by allowing your cat to paw its bowl, you gape in astonishment as fright forces the heretofore sluggish fish to perform a series of acrobatic leaps, the most vigorous of which propels it out of the bowl and down your throat, stoppering your windpipe. Scratches inside and outside your mouth testify to human and feline failures at extraction.

4. Pressing your nose deep into a rose to inhale its fragrance, you are startled by a bumblebee squeezing out of the flower’s core; stumbling backward over the narrow sidewalk, you fall under the wheels of a grocery truck carrying, among diverse comestibles, no honey.

5. Falling to your death from a height less than your own.

6. In your sleep, painlessly, at age fifteen, an hour after passing the Grade 10 literacy exam.

7. Pitching nostril-first from a wobby chair onto the point of a Christmas tree star held aloft by your niece.