Fred's Strange End

A mixed messy mass of man and wooden splinter, he squatted on the floor and exsanguinated profusely and without apology.

As he flitted in and out of consciousness Fred remembered the old philosopher De Selby and his notion of the molecular transmigration of souls: De Selby, a damned materialist at heart, had postulated that consciousness was determined by the physical essence of an object . . .no that wasn't it, was it?

Any-who, the nub of De Selby's argument was that if for example a man rode from Skibbereen to Clonakilty on the same bicycle each day, and then rode back from Clonakilty to Skibbereen each evening on the same bicycle, the friction 'twixt trouser seat and saddle would cause an excitation of the molecules of both. The excitation would over time cause the transference of molecules between saddle and backside, and backside and saddle (the law of mutual recriprocation holding fast).

Eventually, so much excitation and transmigration would have taken place that the bicycle would start to take on the personality of the man, and the man would start to take on the personality of the bicycle so that any man or woman or priest or nun meeting one or the other in a dark alley at night would not be sure which of the two they were conversing with.

Or riding.

All this holding true, Fred wondered how much of the personality of the broken chair he had now taken on, and of course, how much of his personality the chair had absorbed.

Of course the sad truth of the matter was that a man in Fred's condition could ill afford to expend his precious mental energies on such hypothesising.

"I can go on." was Fred's last thought.

He was wrong.

1. The entirety of Fred's soul flees his corpse
2. the chair has absorbed some of Fred's personality. It comes to life and decides to hunt down and kill a dragon

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