“Tonight,” she pirouetted over to a different pile, “Is all about embracing the mystery and the alluring glamour of the unknown. That is the name of the game.”

She adored her niece and two nephews but if she’d known she’d be fantasising about doing the hoovering and plugging in an air freshener after watching them for a few days, she’d have thought twice.

“See, that’s what makes it so great for me. I love to explore new options,”

“I can’t promise you anything though.”

Her high school’s graduation ceremony was known to be one of the longest in the state, if not the country. It was a sort of pride for the inhabitants of her town, if not for the students.

“Not to the point of making it structurally unsound,”

“Let me rephrase. If you want to go to school in uniform that doesn’t look like it’s spent the weekend scrunched in a corner, you will do the ironing.”

I reached for my glass of water and knocked over the salt pot. I righted it, idly dabbling my fingers in the gritty pile that had spilled out.

Death tells us that he wants to take us on some sort of vacation, right?

Should he go with a standard one, the safest one, which might result in blandness and disappointment?