Oliver Q. was suffering. It could be a headache from the sun or a form of nausea attributed to the sight of his blood (accompanied in turn by violent vomiting). Yet such things could not be responsible, for they could never cause this manifestation of pain that he felt. It was the pain of discovering all the mysteries of life; and the answer is to make you suffer. It was the pain of everyone you know who decided you weren't worth it, who decided you should suffer, and to understand it, you know it's true. That and the fact that on that bright, sunny May afternoon, Oliver Q. was struck by a meteor. As Oliver lay there, dying, under that huge, black, molten rock (which had landed just below his knees, simultaneously shattering the bones in his legs and fusing them to the ground), he might have asked himself, " Why ? » He might have wondered who would do such a thing. Anyone would certainly ask these exact questions. Even though Q. already knew who and why, and he was probably now contemplating death, because with the enemy he faced, there were no second chances, no salvation, no hope. Alternatively, he could have simply been in shock, as he was recently hit by a rock from outer space. If he had looked deep within himself, he might have found memories of his youth, where he first encountered the apple of the Tree of Knowledge. All the time ago, when he was a teenager in a big city, and how he strayed from his friends just long enough to be forced into an alley. If he had concentrated, he could have remembered that there was snow on the ground and that it glittered like the still-lit but charred coals of the meteor that was now paralyzing him. He could have seen the toque on the delinquent's bald head, or the generally unpleasant corner...... middle of paper...... by the mercy of God, as it always had been. Even though he was already crying because of the nerves in his legs being cut by bone shards, maybe he was crying harder now. Ironically, if his goal was to get the meteor off of him, he succeeded, because before he could say more, he heard thunder, and a second meteor fell from the sky and hit the first, shattering the two meteors in several thousand pieces. For less than a second he felt freedom and forgiveness, just before he saw the third meteor crash into him. The third meteor did not slow down or land on an angle, but instead landed on what was (or what was left of) the tips of its toes and began rolling, flattening its body in a manner similar to a crash. the road. The last image a pedestrian would have seen of Oliver Q. would have been his entrails being pushed out of his mouth, still open after he tried to say "sorry ».”.