A man who had gone to bed on a warm night covered only by a thin cotton sheet for the sake of not having that weird uncovered feeling while he tried to sleep woke up to a chilly morning. He was so cold! And it wasn’t nearly time to get up. If he’d had to guess, he’d have guessed it probably wasn’t even five – but he was also half-awake at most and not thinking with that level of precision.

Along those lines, it so happens there was a perfectly warm blanket in a wooden trunk at the foot of the bed, and in theory taking it out and pulling it over himself should not have been especially difficult; but in his bleary state, such a task seemed altogether insurmountable. So, instead of getting the blanket and drifting cozily back to sleep, he simply wrapped the thin cotton sheet tighter and tighter around his body until at last he’d wrapped himself so tightly in it that he up and exploded liked a watermelon with a firecracker inside of it, bits and pieces of his flesh and bones splattering about the bedroom like so much seed and rind.

At the sound of the explosion – something akin to sound of a balloon popping and a bass drum thumping simultaneously – his wife woke with a start.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “It looks a tomato fight broke out in here.”

The man explained what had transpired. “You know how it is,” he said. “Like when you wake up in the middle of the night because you need to pee, but instead of going to the bathroom you just lay there and lay there waiting for the feeling to subside until at last you give up and pee in your nightstand drawer.”

“Truthfully,” replied his wife, “I really don’t know how that is. For example, if I wake up because I need to pee, I get out of bed and use the toilet like a normal person.”

“Well,” said the man, “at this point, all I can do is apologize.”

“Or,” said his wife, “you could clean up this big fucking mess you made instead of leaving it for me to take care of as usual.”

“Unfortunately, I would need opposable thumbs in order to do something like that,” the man pointed out, “whereas in my current condition, I don’t even have hands.”

Since it was impossible to argue with that kind of logic, his wife filled a bucket with soap and water, took a pile of rags out of the linen closet, and scrubbed the bedroom spick-and-span herself.

“Aren’t you at least going to say thank you?” she asked when she was finished.

But in order to do that, the man would have needed vocal cords, a mouth, teeth, and a tongue, whereas in his current condition, he didn’t even have a head.

Eli S. Evans's absurdist bits and bobs can be found all over the internet. In addition, two books of small stories, Obscure & Irregular (mostly true-ish) and Various Stories About Specific Individuals in Particular Situations (mostly not), have been published by Moon Rabbit Books & Ephemera. Buy them!