Day 306

The T-shirt Collector stands before his stock, admiring his garments, teasing the folds of their fabric between his frozen skeletal fingers. Stricken with fever and wracked with anxiety he absentmindedly rants.

"T-shirts. T-shirts. Must wear T-shirts. Not enough T-shirts - Never enough T-shirts."
"Maybe. Maybe. Maybe I can create T-shirts. Yes! Create them. Forge them. Bring them to life! Mwahahahaha!"

His cackles join the chorus of incessant thunder barking overhead and lightening snakes its way down through the coiled conductors lining the rooftop. The voltage races across a ramshackle apparatus, coming to settle in the cords of a long copper washing line draped with T-shirs.
The T-shirt Collector, raised on a podium, takes up a metallic clothes peg in each hand, both wired to a vat of mysterious liquid concoction that's been brewing to the point of luminescence.
Without hesitation he clamps the pegs onto the lines and braces the electrical impact. His bones illuminate and his organs glow. His jolting torso thrusts him clear of his footing; his body twists downward into the heap of white-hot cotton and electrified washing line. The vat explodes in the background and a torrent of bubbling ooze collides with the static snarling, shorting out the experiment in a crescendo of sparks.
The lab falls dark and largely still, save the twitching cables that crackle and fizz.
The T-shirt Collector did not survive the grisly tragedy. It's The T-shirt Freak that wearily pulls himself free from the smouldering wreckage.




*****

If you hadn't already guessed, I will be attending tonight's Halloween party dressed as The T-shirt Freak - a personification of the obsessed T-shirt collector's mind, driven mad by the torment of the year slipping away and a lack of T-shirts to fill it. As the costume is heavily T-shirt based, I will spend the entirety of Day 306 of my THREEHUNDREDANDSIXTEEFIVE T-shirt challenge wearing it, making it a valid entry on the challenge calendar. In fact, this will be the first time during the challenge that I'm over performing towards the quota - the costume is made of multiple T-shirts hacked and stitched together, so technically, I'm wearing several T-shirts simultaneously today.
Now, I know what you're thinking. You're wondering, if I'm so desperate for T-shirts, how I can justify destroying a few for the sake of a Halloween costume? The answer is that during the course of the year, I'd received several T-shirts that I just wasn't comfortable wearing for the challenge under normal circumstances. They were funeral T-shirts. I had no idea there even was such a thing, but apparently in some parts of the world, wearing a commemorative T-shirt to a funeral is a done thing. I initially planned to discard these tees from the challenge altogether, but then I considered how morbidly apt and somehow poetic it would be to forge a Halloween costume using T-shirts of the dead...