The first time Henry Figg saw a fairy was the morning after he tried to hang himself from a tree in Loring Park. Of course, much had to happen in his life in order to constitute such an odd experience. It was not as if he suddenly woke up one day with the fantastical on his mind. However, the morning of Henry's impending lunge into lunacy began as any day would for a middle-aged man contemplating death.
Initially, he had hoped to leave this world of pain and hopelessness with a bottle of aspirin, but the warning label, in cryptic bold lettering, said that stomach bleeding might occur if improperly prescribed. He had also thought of jumping from the roof of his apartment, but the building was only 4 stories—and he pictured his limbs contorted like an abused action figure and all the blood, and his landlord threatening to sue for disturbing the other tenants.
And of course, he'd thought of the most obvious exit—a bullet in the head. But he imagined the gun sliding from the sweat of his temple and the gun blowing his jaw clear off his face. Henry didn't want to die looking like a zombie.
Then he had read an interesting article online about the Aokigahara forest in Japan. Every year, hundreds of Japanese men and women made a suicide pilgrimage to the forest. They hung themselves from the ancient branches, shrouded in the quietly leafed canopy with only the wind whispering in their ears. It had sounded simple, clean, beautiful even.
Henry scrolled to the bottom of the page and clicked on a picture of a man sitting beneath a large tree. The text underneath the photo described the average day of Azusa Hayao, a park ranger who acted more like a counselor, coaxing suicide hopefuls from their ropes. Hayao sat beneath an ornament of empty nooses—apparently, he saved hundreds of souls per year. Thank God, Henry didn’t live in Japan.
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