When I came back to my body I discovered that various small creatures had taken up residence in it. Both of my ears were crammed full of spider egg-sacks which were apparently in the process of hatching – giving forth to untold thousands of minute baby spiders which were busy swarming out and crawling all over my head. Families of mice had settled in my jacket pockets, having chewed the lining to shreds in order to make cosy nests for themselves. Prodigious numbers of red spider mites had made their home in my eyebrows, where they gathered together in big crumbly clumps. Snails had had a great time crawling all over my skin, as I could plainly see from old the dried out trails that they had left all over me. They had attached themselves there and there on various parts of my body, sealing themselves up in their shells the way snails do when they don’t want to be going anywhere for a while. Making little paper doors for themselves and sealing them tight. My shoes were full of centipedes and earwigs, by the feel of it. I could feel them wriggling and writhing – there must have been hundreds of them in it, going by all the action I could feel there. My body had been taken over by untold representatives of the insect world, the small mammal world, the arachnid world, and the mollusc world. How long had I been away? It must have been months, perhaps even years. I had no way of knowing. I slowly lifted an arm from my side and tentatively scratched the top of my head, dislodging innumerable communities of teeming micro-fauna in the process. They fell like living dandruff onto the leaf-mold around me. I regretted the disturbance that I was causing to the ecosystem that was my body but it couldn’t be helped. I had places to go, things to do…