(The Pillowman is a being made out of pillows who visits people on the verge of suicide because of the tortured lives they have led. The Pillowman travels back in time to the person's childhood and convinces them to commit suicide, thereby avoiding a life of suffering. This task saddens the Pillowman, however, and he decides to visit his own younger self, who readily commits suicide. This relieves the Pillowman's sadness, but also causes all the children he saved to live out their miserable lives and eventually die alone.) Once upon a time, there was a man, who did not look like normal men. He was about nine feet tall. And he was all made up of these fluffy pink pillows: His arms were pillows and his legs were pillows and his body as a pillow; his fingers were tiny little pillows, even his head was a pillow, a big round pillow. He had two button eyes and a big smiley mouth which was always smiling, so you could always see his teeth, which were also pillows. Little white pillows. |  Fairytale - Fairy Instrumental.mp3 |
The Pillowman had to look like this, he had to look soft and safe, because of his job, because his job was a very sad and a very difficult one. Whenever a man or a lady was very very sad because they'd had a dreadful and hard life and they just wanted to end it all, they just wanted to take their own lives and take all the pain away. Just as the person was about to do it, the Pillowman would to to them, and sit with them, and gently hold them, and he'd say, "Hold on a minute," and time would slow strangely, and as time slowed, the Pllowman would go back in time to when that man or that lady was just a little boy or a little girl, to when the life of horror they were to lead hadn't quite yet begun, and the Pillowman's job was very very sad, because the Pillowman's job was to get that child to kill themselves, and so avoid the years of pain that would just end up in the same place for them anyway: facing an oven, facing a shotgun, facing a lake. "But I've never heard of a small child killing themselves," you might say. Well, the Pillowman would always suggest they do it in a way that would just look like a tragic accident: He'd show them the bottle of pills that looked just like sweeties; he'd show them the place on the river where the ice was too thin; he'd show them the parked cars that it was really dangerous to dart out between; he'd show them the plastic bag with no breathing holes, and exactly how to tighten it. Because mummies and daddies always find it easier to come to terms with a five-year-old lost in a tragic accident than they do with a five-year-old who has seen how shitty life is and taken action to avoid it.
