Accident The First
At the age of 32, Percy Cassidy was a man so unremarkable as to deserve some sort of remark. Were the Oxford English Dictionary to admit the life of an individual as the definition of the word, Percy would have been the obvious choice for standing out in the way a nail stands out in a box of screws, or a grain of salt in spoonful of sugar.
He left school with average grades in subjects that kept his options perfectly open and went to work in the finance department at the head offices of a dry-cleaning firm in Basingstoke where he settled in like an overcast sky on a Tuesday morning that had lasted fourteen years and would likely last another thirty-five. He was mostly punctual and seldom ill, generally helpful and never very rude, conversational but not chatty. His opinions provoked no great thoughts, his activities maintained but did not inspire and his aspirations looked like an AI generated bucket list. He preferred red sauce but ate brown without complaining, he helped his kids with their homework and his wife with the housework, fed the cat and walked the dog, assisted with the weekly shop on Saturdays and went jogging on Sundays.
Neither boring nor interesting, he would hum along to any tune; the man was a walking bran flake. That is until he woke up one morning to find he had turned into a notepad.
And here is where we find Percy, ring bound and resting on the pillow in bed next to his wife, feeling really quite alarmed.
“Dolores! Dolores!” Exclaimed Percy, creasing his first page to look across and meet his wife’s expression as she awoke to his unique distress.
“Yes, Percy dear, what is it?” His wife replied drowsily, glancing at his new appearance through sleepy eyes.
“Something dreadful has happened! I’m foolscap!”
“What time is it?” Said Dolores, squinting in the dawn light allowed by the not quite adequate bedroom curtains and craning her neck to see the digital alarm clock hidden behind last night’s empty cup of cocoa on her husband’s side of the bed.
“Who cares what bloody time it is, my body’s gone missing!” Percy cried in astonishment at his wife’s reaction, more concerned with whether she should resign herself to an earlier start than usual or if she might get away with another ten minutes snoozing.
“Doesn’t look that bad, go back to sleep.” Dolores rolled over, trying to cocoon herself in the duvet.
“That bad?! I’m 65 bits of paper!”
Dolores’ voice now sounded like she’d already passed the halfway point on the return journey to the land of nod, “so? Paper’s nice, ‘specially if it’s been recycled. People can write things on you with a pen…or…a crayon.” Dolores began to snore gently.
Doubtless we are now wondering how Percy’s life will proceed in any practical sort of sense, for a pad of paper has no legs and cannot walk to the bathroom. And even if it could, the journey would be wasted because, unless someone has had the forethought to doodle some pre-requisites on his pages, it has no teeth to brush, no chin to shave and no bladder to relieve. And then there is the matter of his dependents. Short of loading himself into the printer, can he expect to keep his job as an office worker now that he’s a stack of A4? How is Percy going to pay the bills?
These problems being too boring for this author to resolve, we could agree to ignore them and continue in the manner of a deliberately absurdist tale for the sake of a tidy and clever moral conclusion. Percy might learn to be a better listener by becoming a place for Dolores to write down her innermost feelings. He might find himself awakened to a deeper appreciation of his wife’s character and pop off on a second honeymoon to live happily ever after.
Or perhaps Percy’s daughter (who we have yet to invent) could grab him in a rush to get to school on time and involve him in a hormone-soaked saga told through the passing of secret notes in class. We could witness his transformation from wheat paste to Disney dad as his new found empathy helps him steer his little princess through the perils of peer pressure to victory over an evil P.E. teacher and into the arms of that boy (or girl) she really fancies in Year 11.
But no, Percy as stationery is not going to be the antidote to his own passivity. This is a silly story, and our bland hero is going to spend a couple weeks preoccupied with thoughts of ending his life in the recycling bin. And not in any deeply reflective way, like for instance that scene from the classic film Papillon where the innocent inmate played by Steve McQueen has a dream in which his own conscience accuses him of having wasted his life, leading him to speculate whether he somehow deserves his cruel incarceration. Oh no, no, no!
Because this is a silly story, Percy gets used mostly for shopping lists and goes to bed one evening with a picture of a Big Mac drawn on his last page by his young son, who we’ll say is four and junk food obsessed. Percy will sigh ‘goodnight cruel world” and wake up in the morning to find that he has now turned into a burger.
Accident The Second
Being unremarkable doesn’t necessarily mean useless and after the initial turmoil caused him by this and the previous transmogrification, Percy actually found no problem holding down his job. On this particular morning Percy arrived at work ready to participate in the kind of team building activities companies insist upon that more often result in team betrayal. That thing where volunteers are asked to step forward and everyone except our burger daddy steps back.
The event had come about in the usual manner whereby Percy’s employer had paid enormous sums to a consultant who told them the best way to get more out of their employees, like unpaid overtime, was to make them think they’d come up with the idea themselves. So, in time honoured fashion, Percy was placed at a table with a random selection of co-workers he barely knew and with whom he was to magically come up with some smashing new ideas about how they could all improve the fortunes of the company without costing the company a fortune.
As is also the fashion at these sort of things, most of the ideas put forward by those at his table involved libelling various middle managers on topics from embezzlement to sexual misconduct. Which meant that when the moment came to nominate a speaker for the group to immortalise their best suggestions on the flip chart deftly steered by the deputy CEO at the front of the room, Percy found himself not only volunteered by his retreating colleagues but having to make up some convincing material on the spot.
It fits with the character of our protagonist that it was easy for him to invent some sensible and forgettable suggestions. And we can all perhaps see in our minds’ eye a Big Mac with googly eyes, fried onion teeth and lettuce leaf tongue talking like a sock puppet, which will conveniently explain why nobody had tried to eat him yet. Selecting one’s meal while it can still look at you is acceptable to some, but when it proposes ways to reduce annual expenditure on energy consumption, all but the most stoic experience a distinct loss of appetite.
That is not to say life as a burger didn’t come with its risks as the next paragraph will tell us. Can we with confidence say that the average burger-obsessed toddler wouldn’t giggle and then gobble any form of talking takeaway, even if it did claim to be his own dad?
In this case it hardly matters because all it took was one unguarded moment after arriving home and the families’ golden retriever swallowed him faster than a Cossack swallows Vodka.
Which, by sequential logic, should mean Percy Cassidy’s next incarnation was destined to be a poop. But logic will not influence what’s going to happen to Percy next, and there is no point complaining, because there will be so many elephants in the room by the time this story ends that you’ll be squashed flat up against a wall along with all your sensible objections.
We won’t even ask how Percy feels about all this as he slips down a dog’s gullet pondering best- and worst-case scenarios. If he’ll be off to see the world after being stepped in by some unwitting rambler? Or if he’ll hang from the branch of some bucolic shrub for all eternity in a little black plastic bag?
In this story, there will be no such comic parodies of a Buddhist style heaven or hell. Instead, after being the main course of Fido Cassidy’s dinner, Percy will possess the body of said dog at the precise moment he starts licking his own balls for dessert.
Accident The Third
In this manner the story of Percy Cassidy will continue, through ever more perverse trials concocted at random by the incompetent god of this story to try and avoid teaching Percy a valuable lesson. He will be a sick bag, some underwear, a ping pong ball and a fish hook. He will be a pin cushion and a towel rail, some earplugs and a bong. Each transformation will build on the senselessness of the last, but rather than make you, the consumers of this tale, sick with detail, we will skip to the end so as to leave you replete as after a good meal with just enough room for pudding - some sort of point to all this which we hope will taste better than the bollocks of man’s best friend.
Here we find Percy in his penultimate from as a dove, fully able to converse, process invoices, symbolise world peace and blatt himself into windows. But today is different, because he is finally starting to wonder why this is happening to him. And as is sometimes the case with introspections of great personal gravity, he begins to question what sort of god would do such things to him. We may all have looked down on poor Percy thus far, even pitied him. But he is luckier than you or me, because all he has to do is ponder the question for the first time and the god of this book appears.
Rory: Hello Percy, how are things?
Percy: You tell me, it’s your bloody story.
Rory: That it is. And things are going well in this loose commentary on the nature of belief.
Percy: You do realise that’s mansplaining.
Rory: How dare you, I’ve gone to great lengths to ensure this story doesn’t explain anything at all.
Percy: Far be it from me to ruin that for you, is there something you’d like me to say next?
Rory: Well, in that section where you’re a burger I wanted to make ironic use of the phrase ‘hot beef sandwich’ but I couldn’t make it work. Do you have any suggestions?
Percy: Only rude ones, but you ruled that out in the second paragraph of chapter one.
Here we find inserted for no discernible reason an ill-fitting interlude where Percy re-enacts an ancient story of eastern origin in which the Monkey King questions the supreme being’s omniscience whilst reclining in the palm of his great hand. Off flies Percy in the footsteps of the ancient simian monarch on a nine-hundred-page odyssey of confusing prose even the author doesn’t fully understand and writes ‘don’t be a dick’ on one of the five great pillars marking the end of the Heavens. Then, after failing to notice the correlation between godly digits and the number of celestial pillars at the perimeter of the universe, Percy travels back through another nine hundred equally vexatious pages to find a council worker in high vis with a pressure washer cleaning his graffiti off Rory’s middle finger.
Percy: Well, that was a waste of everyone’s time. Did you do any research before eviscerating that story?
Rory: None at all, I thought it would be fun to tell it from memory and risk getting bits of it wrong. People like pointing out mistakes in religious texts.
Percy: Oh, so this is a religious text now?
Rory: I don’t see why it can’t be. It’s got a lot of the key ingredients: discrepancies, conflicting rhetorical goals, blasphemy.
Percy: Where’s the blasphemy?
Rory: You implied I’ve been inconveniencing you.
Percy: What’s inconvenient is explaining how I managed to deface your heavenly architecture when I’m a glorified pigeon.
Rory: Let’s not quibble over who can or can’t do what when they’ve got no hands.
And here our story abruptly ends, with the god of the fable congratulating Percy on managing not to add to any of the problems life has faced him with and offering him the choice of his next transformation as a reward. In a charming moment of magnanimity, Percy says he would like to spend the remainder of his life helping others. A request to which his creator is well disposed and generously allows Percy to live out the rest of his days as a prosthetic leg.
Author’s note: there was a really good reason for selecting the title of this story, which made me sound dead clever and very impressive. Unfortunately, I can’t remember what it was, so we will just have to pretend we can all see the emperor’s new clothes.