Standing on the back patio seconds later, I found myself feeling dizzy and unwell; at this same moment there was a loud crash from the direction of the house. Still oblivious to my situation, I turned around to investigate the disturbance.

Much to my surprise, in the centre of the pane of the sliding door I had just passed through was a jagged hole, roughly the same height and width as myself. Strewn across the concrete beneath it were shards of the glass that should have been occupying this space, but (it took me several moments to realise) had been dislodged by the hurtling body of a careless and over-excitable teenager. I stumbled towards the door in a haze of shock. Standing before the damage I had caused, a warm sensation came over me -- not in an emotional sense but quite literally, for the flow of blood from my injured face was beginning to find its way down the front of my shirt. Without thinking, I stepped back into the house through the opening. In the living room I was confronted by my friend, Eric, bearing an expression of considerable surprise -- and no doubt formulating how he was going to explain the peculiar condition of their sliding door to his parents. Ever the considerate guest, I immediately gave him something else to think about.

Despite the failure of his composure, my friend still managed to return reasonably quickly with a handful of towels to try to staunch my bleeding face. I pressed them as firmly as I could against the gash that was bisecting my nose, but this did not seem to affect the warm deluge that continued to pour down my chest. It was Eric who found the solution to this mystery.

"Oh shit, Matt -- there's a hole in your neck..."

The towels were duly transferred to this new and more critical source of blood loss. At one point, I looked down to determine the amount of success my makeshift bandage was having, only to become fascinated by the thick, red droplets that continued to escape between my fingers to spatter, in an unnaturally slow, graceful motion, onto the carpet below. A profound feeling of lethargy settled in. Somewhere in the background, I could hear Eric's agitated voice explaining the nature of the emergency to the operator on the telephone. I wandered numbly about the room for a while, leaving a trail of dark puddles in my wake, before finally wandering out onto the front porch; an attempt to sit down in my weakened state sent me sprawling into a nearby bush. Bright stars grew and vanished with increasing speed and numbers across the field of my failing vision. Just before the sirens began, I could hear my friend's voice imploring me from somewhere beyond a dense fog:

"Don't die Matt -- I'll get in trouble!"
M1(7)