20
I’ve made a big mistake.
Inside the house, on the desk in front of me. A Helix tin, originally designed to hold scientific instruments, now containing tobacco leaf. Stripped, cured, shredded and flavoured by my own hand.
A packet of cigarette papers.
I must have misunderstood. It’s highly unlikely that Miss Bryant would have said the narrator can never die. More reasonably, she probably taught us that the narrator can’t describe his own death. Not all of it, not to the very last moment, for obvious reasons. According to Miss Bryant then, the narrator either lives to see another day, or dies silently.
Outside the house, the early morning blue of a bright spring day, this day and no other. Outside my window right now. High white clouds. Hang-gliding weather.