Death By Yawn

An apparently little known fact, is that like the sneeze must be covered, so to the yawn. When you frequent public transport, you will realise the dark state of ignorance to this fact in which your fellow man dwells.

The yawn, unlike the sneeze is a subtle evil. Where the sneeze is loud, and produces a certain amount of tangible outbound traffic (spittle), the yawn sneaks under the radar. It is silent. There is no wetness to be felt. And yet the damage can actually be of a similarly devastating magnitude.

Sorry, layman, let me stop blinding you with science, and turn the theory into example.

This morning on the train I stood by a well-dressed woman, say, 36 years old at a guess. Nothing out of the ordinary. There was maybe 1.5 metres separating us, and she was engrossed in her book (I didn't see the cover, but it was probably either Dan Brown or Stephanie Meyer). Suddenly she broke forth with a yawn, and rather than concealing it, threw her head back and wiggled it, like a braying pony.

This act of wiggling directed some of this subsequent yawnage over to me. I was caught off guard, without means to defend myself. I was bombarded. Suddenly I smelt the noxious evil of untreated morning breath. The smell of the grave. The smell of pain, and of a thousand unicorns crying. The smell of the black vortex opening between this world and that beyond. The smell of dying.

And then the vortex was closed. The silent braying pony returned to her book about whining teenage bloodsuckers with unwashed hair. the rest of the carriage was oblivious, and yet there I was, left to reel from the silent carnage, somehow changed, somehow a little older; a little broken, yet with no visible scars.

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a yawn.