The Relaxed Snowman

There was a subtle movement at the edge of things. Perception included most senses of the body, and the heady stench of imagined black steam was the first sense that officially hit you. Then its acrid acid taste, before the sound of moving metal juttered upon static metal. Closely followed by some fingering out upon either swaying side of your seated body testing the supporting touch of brushed upholstered shuddering weave. Finally, a gradual realisation that around and above was the emerging sight of concerned faces poking towards you with their own instinctive version of fingering out.

But which body sense had sensed the original subtle movement? The sense of fear: the strongest sense of all that could contain itself independently without the aid of other senses to support it? But a sense stronger than fear itself was consumed by a vision that you were thanklessly killed for mindless kicks, not even as a stranger’s gratuitous murder for literary treatment or as a murder performed with a choice of motives for a popular 'whodunnit'.

Yours was a third class murder where prior existence itself was nothing but a multitude of senses forever dwindling one by one along an endless track of dislodged sleepers.

A subtle movement at the edge of things. A hissing in a forgotten siding. A single smeared face and ghostly fingers upon a leather tongue.