  A middle aged man, somewhat portly and florid of face, strolled with considerable urgency past rows of trim granite tombstones towards the Church for Sunday mass. He had been delayed by a heated argument with his wife; she had refused to accompany him to worship that morning. He looked pointedly at the headstone bearing his son’s name, erected only a fortnight before, still adorned with bouquets of garish flowers. “That woman,” he thought. “That woman won’t stick t’nothin’. Firs’ little thing an’ she’s “questionin’ her faith”, I ask ye.” Now, in a pertinacious effort to make up time and arrive at church without deviance from his livelong record of unwavering punctuality, he had exhausted himself trekking over field, through copse, and at last traversing the low wall bordering the graveyard. He felt perhaps that such a route might be sacrilegious, or that this terrific exertion on a Sunday impious, but without a definite Biblical verdict, he had decided that it would be safe to risk it. He began to doubt this judgement, however, when he found that the ground was trembling beneath his feet with increasing intensity. He stopped dead in his tracks, and looked frantically about him for some possible cause of the disturbance. It appeared to be a localised tremor; the quiescent serenity of the hills and meadows around wholly intact. Yet close by, gravestones began to wobble and teeter precariously around him, and he had to dart as swiftly as fifty years of ale, roast beef, and pork chops would permit to evade the crushing weight of one particularly extravagant headstone.
He decided it would be best to seek the aid of the vicar, if he hadn’t yet began his sermon, and so set off towards the Church while mopping his brow and attempting to reclaim his habitual air of dignified composure, or so he considered it. Malign voices muttered behind his back of his ludicrous, haughty pomp, between exchanges of gossip about his latest marital tribulations. With a mounting sense of relief, he approached the gate leading to the Church courtyard, when all of a sudden he found himself lifted from his feet by a particularly violent convulsion.
His weight born now by his face, he failed to witness the explosion of earth behind him, the rupturing of the ground into a great chasm, the cascade of soil, fragmented granite, and putrescent segments of corpse and accompanying splinters of rotten wood. He did, however, manage to upturn himself in time to see a radiant wingèd figure disappear into the low clouds, but of course that was dismissed as concussion talk. 
