She was addicted to sandwiches. Well, not just any sandwiches. Specifically, she was addicted to one sandwich, from one cafe, in one town. And they didn’t always have them.
She could never recreate the taste of them at home, even if she bought the right bread, the same ingredients, even the same butter. She’d asked what she was doing wrong, and the teenager who seemed to run the cafe, just blinked at her and sprouted some more acne.
Maybe it wasn’t a taste thing. Maybe it was the whole mis-en-scene of ordering it, having it bought the table, and lazily eating it as she stared out of the window and watched the world go by.
This was happening one day, when she bit into the sandwich, and something felt different. It took her a moment to realise that there was a bit of laminated paper in amongst the lettuce.
She was about to loudly complain, mostly because the illusion of the whole thing had been cruelly shattered, when she saw there was some handwriting on the paper. She stared at it, not quite understanding, and it took a moment to decipher the badly scrawled cursive.
“You died last week.”
Whilst she thought about what that might mean, she took a small bite from the sandwich and ruminated on it.
Was it just a random message? Something that had accidentally fallen into her beloved sandwich? Or had it been placed there deliberately? For her?
And then she remembered.
She had been in here last week.
And she had been eating her precious sandwich, whilst watching a man punching the post box across the road. It was fascinating, and engaging. And weird. And distracting. Why was he punching a pillar box? What had it done to make him so angry? Had he written a letter and posted it, and immediately regretted what it had said?
She remembered feeling something odd in her mouth as she swallowed.
And then …
… she choked to death.
On a small piece of laminated paper.
And somehow, as she faded away, her ghost passing over into the other world, she knew, with absolute certainty, what had been written on that first little note.
“I love you.”
