Bananas
23rd August, the day I found out I'd eaten far too many bananas for my own good.
“I've always liked them, always had an appetite for them. Maybe I overdid it with them once in a while. It started in the early morning, I had one sliced up on corn flakes. Then one for elevenses, then a banana sandwich for lunch and so on, all through the day, just my normal snacking and better than endless donuts or chocolate or biscuits or caffeine and stuff like that. I thought that I was being healthy, keeping myself right and there was I on the normal side or normal on the grid of measures about being normally normal.
I didn't realise that it was all building up, in me. There like an oil well or a geyser or a time bomb, all that material, that chemical, trace upon trace, mingling and getting into everything. Worming it's way. If only I had had a worm, that might have helped. Tidied up the slack, acted as an antidote, digested all that surplus material. But of course I never saw it coming, that's what they all say, after the event. “Oh, you know I never saw that coming, not at all”. Yes, that is what they all say and I was a typical example of not seeing some inevitable, terrible event coming. Just another drink, cigarette, slice of pizza.
The doctor said it was the Potassium of course. It had built up, I'd ingested it, it was everywhere, I was saturated, despite what I thought was a good balance, well what do I know about balance? What you see from the inside isn't balance, you need someone else to do that, to tell you, from their own reference points, “you're out of balance son.” Best if it's not too late, best if it's not...a doctor, but then we all listen to doctors.
So I suppose nobody was as shocked as I was when it actually happened. The great mysterious event that lurks in those questionable YouTube videos, in Tweets and in the columns of odd evening papers. Spontaneous combustion. A phenomenon, a mysterious and misunderstood phenomenon that baffles the worlds of science and crime. I just burned up, all of me, gone in a blue flash and fizzle. Well that’s how it seemed to me, like sitting inside your own personal firework. I don't suppose it smelled very nice and it was funny how nothing much else in the room was damaged, just a little smoke staining I believe and then there was the carpet of course, scorch marks.
So, all I did was drink a glass of water, next thing I'm up somewhere on the ceiling looking down at a doctor and a policeman and two firemen looking down at, well, what was me. There’s no pain here, there’s nothing really, just a funny blank feeling and a story that I can’t quite tell. But then I’m just some kind of chemical vapour now.
I heard their voices and listened to their theories and then they sort of faded away and now, well I'm here in this foggy place, just thinking these thoughts and recounting as it were the events of my recent change of state and as it would seem the moment of my tragically concluded lifetime. Makes me feel hungry really, all this thinking, floating sensation and going over past events. I would love a nice ripe, yellow banana right now.”