Strangely Triumphant.

I’ve mentioned before that just about everybody in the Shire seems to know my name, but I know hardly any of theirs. I put it to the test by working out how many people’s names I know. It amounted to eleven. And then I searched the population of the Shire and discovered it to be around two hundred and eighty. A sudden reverie entered my mind…

I’m woken from my sleep by a knock on the door. Irritated, I go downstairs and open it to find a man who I recognise but whose name I don’t know. He’s standing there, smiling a disingenuous smile.

‘Hello, Jeff,’ he says in a wheedling sort of voice.

I have no idea what to make of this, and so I simply ask ‘What the hell do you want?’

‘Tonight is the night of celebration,’ he intones, ‘fifteen years of work come to fruition at last. Follow me and see the honour that awaits you.’

I follow him around the side of my house to find the whole population of the Shire standing on my lawn with hands clasped firmly together in front of their chests. A great cry goes up as each man, woman and child calls my name in a tone of exultation. The man who knocked speaks again.

‘For fifteen years we have been diligently learning your name so that you may be subsumed into the midst of our community. This day will be enshrined in the calendar as Jeff Day, and our descendants will celebrate it henceforth every year on the anniversary.

‘Are you all nuts?’ I will ask incredulously.

‘Nuts? Certainly not. We are come to take you not only into our community, but also into our bodies. We are going to eat you so that your presence will remain here forever as the provider of sustenance, the founder of the feast as it were.’

And then the assembled throng will move aside to reveal a bonfire, as yet un-kindled, with a roasting spit, replete with handle, arranged across the top. I think quickly.

‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’

‘And what’s that?’

‘I know some of your names, too.’

I pick them out, all eleven of them, and address each one by their forename. A low murmur begins to swell in the night air, the eyes of the multitude begin to rotate in their sockets, and each mouth opens wide in preparation for a concerted scream. Only their jaws fall off instead. And then they begin to dissolve and sink to the lawn as a green and luminescent slime. I hope that it will do no damage as it seeps into the earth and disappears, and then I go back to bed.

I did say that I’m finding it difficult to think of things to say, didn’t I? And it’s long been known that my mind works a little oddly sometimes.