Favoritism

In college we had a bird. The bird didn't have a name; we could never agree on one. We taught the bird to say "beer." Then its beak fell off and it died.

One time on vacation I saw a guy step on a queen bee. The bee was just crawling around on the ground; the guy hadn't seen it. As soon as he did it, there were a million bees all over him, stinging every bit of skin they could find. He fell into the pool and that got most of the bees off him, but then the guy didn't come back up to the surface.

I once saw a turtle run over by a riding lawnmower. I was just a kid at the time. It was my dad driving the mower, I could have waved my arms and gotten him to stop, warned him about the turtle, but I wanted to see what would happen. The mower rolled over it and there were several great thumping sounds as the blades cut through the shell, then the tractor sort of lifted up on one side and the whole thing came to a stop. The blade was completely knocked out of alignment and the mower had to be junked. The turtle fared worse -- its shell had been ripped open in two huge gashes, and all that was left of the thing was a throbbing mess of pink and gray turtle matter.

One of my friends was in the hospital once. He was trying to open the window in his apartment, which he had painted shut, and he instead fell forward through the glass onto the sidewalk. Four floors. We visited him in the hospital. He said more than anything he wanted someone to masturbate him. He had been in there for days, he explained, and between the boredom and the lack of privacy and -- you don't have to do it yourselves, he said, and I can't ask the nurses, just find someone --

Another one of my friends dropped his keys down the sewer. He got down there to fish them out and caught some disease and died, but not before a bus he was riding on exploded on the highway and skidded off a short bridge into an old weedy field. He was the only survivor, although his skin was covered in burns. He was in the hospital with his burns when they found the disease. His burns got infected too, so I guess we don't know if it was the disease or the infected burns that killed him. Anyway, we asked him what it was like being on the bus, and he said it was ok, it was kind of exhilarating, the feeling of falling, and it was terrifying but all in all he thought there were probably worse ways to go than falling. The nurse had to come in then and peel the sheets out of his skin, which was still all pink and sticky.