Flachmoths Face Mask

Flackmoth is at the barber’s thumbing a magazine waiting for his turn, and comes across an article about death masks. Intrigued, he feels he should have one as soon as he gives up the ghost. Smiling with no little pride, he notes he’d be the first in his family line to have one and as a result as the article pointed out become part of a group of distinguished men – writers, philosophers, scientists, composers and poets like Beethoven and Keats, to name but two. A warm sensation fills him and a tear runs down his cheek which he quickly wipes away with embarrassment, though heady pride. Of course, thinks Flackmoth with a touch of humor and irony, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d be plastered, indeed it’s happened many times before but on each of those occasions he was inebriated as usual though conscious. The prospect of strangers looking at his death mask for all time excites him to a high so intense he feels he might levitate from his chair, the more so when he realizes he will never have to wake up with a hangover and a splitting headache! Speechless and near delirious, he launches from the barber’s chair and rushes out with half a haircut, crosses a busy street looking neither to the left nor to the right right and is mowed down by a motorist. Waking up in a hospital’s ICU he hears the intercom calling for doctors Michael and Gabriel, names he cannot help but associate with angels in Sunday school as a boy, and with panic concludes the worse, that he’s dead and in heaven. But that reality is quickly shattered when he realizes most of his body is encased in plaster. And he mutters: “Surely there’s been a mistake, all I wanted was a face mask!”