A Rube Goldberg machine

He made a Rube Goldberg machine of his life. With one finger, he pushed over the first cd case and it dominoed into the second. The carefully placed albums were in order of when he had bought them so he watched as Parklife by Blur knocked into Garbage's eponymous debut, which in turn toppled The Best of Otis Redding. As the tumbling plastic cases wound their way, snake like, across the table, he made his way to the swivel chair in the middle of the room so he could sit and watch his story unfold.

The final album, Happy Soup by Baxter Dury (son of Ian, the Blockhead king), crashed into a loaded mousetrap which flung his father's watch into a dangling plastic bag. There was a coat hanger suspended from the ceiling and from either end of it hung each lace from his latest set of Converse. He had had a pair for his entire adult life, cycling through the various colours in a typical attempt to be non-conformist. The plastic bag was attached to one lace and the other was tied to a drumstick, almost mint looking; another discarded dream. When the bag caught the watch, it pivoted up the other end of the coat-hanger and the drumstick was slid out from under a tin of supermarket beans, where it had been acting as a stop.

There were 39 cans piled precariously on their round sides, one for each year of his life. Baked beans and spaghetti hoops made up most of them, representing his childhood, his time as a student, his brief time with his child and a few for the last couple of years. There were some green beans for his 8 months in the south of France, picking grapes. Two tins of chickpeas honoured his period of semi-voluntary vegetarianism.

All the cans rolled across the tea-stained counter top and most dropped off the edge into a bucket, standing on a stool. The bucket was full of a brutal cocktail of whiskey, gin, beer, red wine and a thin scum from two emptied bags of cocaine. The falling cans displaced the liquid and the level rose until it slopped over the top and some flowed down a chute, made from some of the central heating that he'd ripped out.

He'd stacked books into half an Aztec pyramid with twelve narrow, shallow steps, showing how long he'd known Sandra. There were a mixture of novels, textbooks and the odd self-help manual. On The Road and Our Man In Havana supported an outdated French grammar hardback and A Beginner’s Guide to Buddhism, which had never been opened. On nine of the twelve steps were things of Sandra's. The last three steps were empty.

The stinking cocktail swilled out the end of the last pipe and tipped her lipstick off the lip, onto a birthday card she'd made him for his 28^th birthday. Some of the objects didn't fall as they should but the pocket vibrator on the fifth step rolled on and on and kept the chain reaction going. A large, framed photo was on the ninth step and he watched as it plunged forward, hiding the three faces from him and slid to the bottom, where it hit a button, turning on a fan.

The fan blew a sheet of A4 paper, covered in scrawled, barely legible writing. The sheet was a sail that turned a horizontal wheel. The string that was attached to a spoke came loose. The penultimate step had failed and he sat, watching the wheel still turning, useless.

He shuffled his chair forward and pulled the string himself.

The final part worked exactly as planned; the hot, spiralling metal burst through the top of his eye socket, spraying out thin bone shards in it's wake and ripping through the dense mass of his tired and grateful brain.