Tim Frank

By the time I was fifty-five I had turned into a fully-fledged skeleton. My skin and sinew had wasted away, and all that was left were my bare bones. I should have been hanging in the Natural History Museum posing next to the dinosaurs, ogled by school kids peeling their doughy tangerines, spilling their apple juice boxes. Obviously, I had to avoid being seen by the public—the culture shock would have been catastrophic, and even I felt disturbed as I gazed in the mirror, aghast at my atrophied figure—oh, the horror of all the lack!

In the forest, where all the trails leading back to the city were faded, I lost one of my high heels as I trudged through a boggy marsh on a drunken escapade. After blasting my frontal lobe with whiskey sours all night, I stumbled around aimlessly as my friends’ cackles merged into the night sky. I slumped against the base of a tree, my head swimming. Then I was struck by an insatiable hunger, so I reached into my handbag and found a pack of half-eaten biscuits.

Hello? Hi. Who’s this? What do you want? I want to talk to Stanley. Stanley who? Stanley Kubrick. It’s Mr. Kubrick to you, and how did you get this number? He gave it to me…. Of course he didn’t, are you crazy? Of course he didn’t. How else could I have got it…? I have no idea, I’m not psychic. I just want to ask Sta… Mr. Kubrick about some of the themes in his movies.