They shot me at dawn for my sins, gave me a pauper’s grave and a bunch of wildflowers plucked from the riverbank. They regretted it, so they told me, wished I was still alive. I listened from my black home beneath the dirt. What else was I to do?

What else, indeed.

When the sky split and the world everted, I thought it was perhaps the Last Trump, the Apocalypse of St. John come to take me home. It was an apocalypse, but not the second coming of the Messiah. No, nothing but missiles of proton-fusing power, wiping the living away, freeing the dead from our bonds, loosing us upon a world transformed.

In my yard a tree grows that weeps blood, and my lawn, which I cut with a black iron scythe, is made of souls. This is a queer new world I have been granted, and I intend to enjoy it.

I only wish my wife had been killed, before the bombs fell, so that she too could enjoy this black-sun utopia, where no one’s pulse races because no one has a pulse. But nothing is perfect, is it, eh?

Would you fancy some tea?