Oliver Q. was in pain. It could be a headache from the sun or a form of nausea attributed to the sight of your blood (also accompanied by violent vomiting). However, such things could not be responsible, as they could never have caused the display of pain he felt. It was the pain of all the mysteries of life being discovered; and the answer is to make you suffer. It was the pain of everyone you know deciding you weren't worth it, deciding you had to suffer, and to say it, you know it's true. That and the fact that on this bright, sunny May afternoon, Oliver Q. was hit by a meteor. As Oliver lay there dying, under this huge, black, molten rock (which had landed right under his knees, simultaneously shattering the bones in his body). legs and melting them to the ground), he may have asked himself “why?” He might have wondered who would do such a thing. Anyone would certainly ponder those exact questions. Even though Q. already knew who and why, and now he was probably contemplating death, because with the enemy he was facing there was no second chance, no salvation, no hope. Alternatively, he may simply be in shock, having recently been hit by a rock from space. If he had looked deep within himself, he might have found memories of his youth, when he first encountered the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. All that time ago, when he was a teenager in a big city, and how he had wandered away from his friends just long enough to be forced into an alley. If he had concentrated, he might have remembered that there had been snow on the ground, and that it had glittered like the still-lit but charred coals of the meteor that now paralyzed him. He might have seen the tuque on the thug's bald head, or the generally unpleasant lo... in the center of the card... for the mercy of God, as it had always been. Although he was already crying because the nerves in his legs had been severed by bone splinters, perhaps he was crying harder now. Ironically, if his goal was to get the meteor off his back, he succeeded, because before he could say anything else, he heard thunder and a second meteor fell from the sky and hit the first, which shattered both meteors in two. 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 didn't slow down, or land at an angle, but landed on what represented (or what was left of) his toes and began to roll, flattening his body in a manner similar to a car crash. The last image a pedestrian would have seen of Oliver Q. would have been of his insides pushed out of his mouth, still open from trying to say "sorry"”.