I should like to die on a splendid day at the height of summer, under a radiant blue sky on a bed of flowers. If it were not for my morbid longing for the picturesque, I should not mind expiring as wildlife do, on a grassy hill, amidst a field of crops or by the river, with a dull thud. To be still amongst the moving, decompose amid all that is growing and blooming: what a feat that would be, for a mammal at her prime. But, alas, I long to greet Death, the mother of beauty, atop a fragrant and fast decaying blanket of Flora’s petaled spawn, so insatiable is my appetite for the aesthetically charged. In time and with magic stolen from childhood fairytales fast growing veins, not varicose, shall slither up my rigid white legs, seize and pull me under, back into the safe warm earthy womb of Mother Nature, and there a fantastic feast I shall make for things that wriggle and crawl. This final offering to the earth I will become only after the feet of ravenous crows have marked on my skin what age had not; oh, to die while one is but a bud!