MrTAToad
The last sensation Arthur Ainsworth, fifty-one years and three months into a life he often felt was on loan from a particularly dull catalogue, registered with any certainty was the gritty texture of wholemeal toast between his teeth and the sharp, familiar tang of too-bitter marmalade. He'd been staring out of his Crawley kitchen window at the aggressively cheerful fuschia in Mrs. Henderson's garden, contemplating the yawning abyss of another Tuesday meeting about synergistic resource allocation, when the world had dissolved. Not in a gentle fade, but a violent, wrenching compression, as if he were being squeezed through the eye of a cosmic needle. A silent scream tore from lungs that, a microsecond later, felt alarmingly... inefficient.