My Fantastic Death by Darby Larson

Music came from the barbershop and made my earwax melt. It dripped heavy, plopped onto the sidewalk, left pools of dull honey for curious dogs to inspect. The music was violinish. I looked in the window of the barbershop and a little Asian girl, two years old, played a violin, music I'd never heard before, soft, strange, like her fingers were still a baby's fingers, absorbing string vibrations in a new way.

My ears fell off at that point, landed between two circles of dried earwax on the cement. I picked my ears up and opened the door to the barbershop and threw them inside. The barber screamed and accidentally clipped a woman's hair. The woman whose hair had been accidentally clipped screamed. The people waiting in chairs reading worn magazines screamed. But all I heard was the sweet violin music being played by the unflinching little girl with soft fingers near whose feet my ears were propped against.

Later, I walked to the river and sat on a log a frog also sat on. We watched the river, the water rolling over the elements. I felt very sad. I had no ears so I couldn't hear the soft water. I couldn't hear the frog croaking if the frog happened to be croaking. An owl landed on a branch. I looked up and saw its beak twitch.

My eyes teared up and soon I was crying. I cried so much that water poured from my eyes like two waterfalls into the river next to the log the frog and I sat on. My eyes floated and twirled and fell out of my sockets, down the teary waterfalls like unfortunate river rafts, dropping into the river, drifting downstream, achieving new perspectives.

Without my eyes, ears, I felt around on the log for the frog and couldn't find it. I laid myself upon the log and decided to dream. I thought that without sight and without sound, sleep would come. It didn't. I was awake.

And my nose hairs began to dance. I smelled something magnificent. The hairs in my nose were like restless stick figures whose feet were stuck in mud. The smell was so poignant. I rolled off the log, onto the grass, acted like a hound dog.

I found what it was. A flower. I couldn't see it. I held onto its stem without uprooting it. I put my nose in it. My nose hairs shouted with joy. They all broke loose and formed a chain with themselves and hoisted each other down to the bud of the flower until they all stood on the flower looking up at me. A chain still linked us together. They, all at once, yanked on the chain and my nose fell off, onto the flower. It lay sideways atop the bud of the flower and soon they inhabited it, would use my nostrils as shelter when it rained, would sing folk songs and dance around the bud when the sun was out.

Oh, my woe! No sight, sound, smell. I propped myself on my knees. My arms and hands and fingers stretched, feeling for anything. I crawled into the river and felt the cold water, cold rocks on my bare legs. I didn't know what I was looking for and so my effort was hopeless before I started. I lay down in the water and concentrated on how it felt. The sensation was real. It was the only real thing I knew. I took off my clothes and lay in the shallow water that flowed around my body. I would lay here and die, I thought. And I did.

All the blood cells that traveled my veins grew microscopic thorns that tore my skin apart and washed my insides downstream. My kidney became stuck on a twig. My penis was the fastest, a rocket canoe, eventually catching up to and passing one of my eyes that caught it in a peripheral glimpse.

My tongue surfed the river, independent, tasting the freshest water I had ever tasted. The sensation was acute and I could taste every parasitic amoeba that latched onto water molecules. It drifted along until it wedged itself into a water snake hole on the river edge where it was kissed repeatedly by a confused snake and finally bitten.