Friday, 7 June 2013

Day 158



Ring ring
Ring ring
Hello, and thank you for calling The Underworld. Please listen to the following options carefully and make your selection, followed by the hash key.
To renew your order of coffin-burrowing earthworms, press 1.
To reanimate the corpse of your recently departed and have them delivered to your home or private function, press 2.
For troubleshooting advice, or to report a fault with your undead, press 3.


The origins of today’s THREEHUNDREDANDSIXTEEFIVE challenge T-shirt are as mysterious and spooky as the graphic it bears.
Upon finishing her shift at the theatre one evening, my friend Emma presented me with this T-shirt she found. She told me it had been left behind by one of the actors, but she failed to mention that that actor was last seen making a call from the public telephone out in the runner’s corridor and that she scooped up the tee from beneath the lifeless dangling receiver…

On the T-shirt is a full canvas print of a faux horror movie poster, crudely presented in high-contrast black and white, as if reproduced for a monster fanzine. A terrified heroine is shown cowering in the bottom right corner, partially obscuring the text behind her, which reads “A telephone connected to the grave told…” Though we will never fully know the end of that sentence, I like to think it concludes with a fantastic pun like “..me that the line was dead”.

Despite the previous owner of this tee having his soul reaped by a technology gremlin, I feel quite at home in it. Full-cover illustrative T-shirt designs are always a big hit with me and—
Oh sorry, I just have to take this…
Hello…?