I'll never forget the sadistic chortles and jeers of the neighbourhood children growing up.

My name is Shelby Q. Yolkum, though I am better known by the despicable and dignity-shattering name the children gave me, Humpty Dumpty. I suffer from Ovum Cacoethes, a rare deformity affecting one in every trillion infants, though physicians are told not to count us before we hatch. Sufferers of Ovum Cacoethes (also known as Little's Syndrome) all bear a startling resemblance to delicious, protein-laden farm fresh eggs.

My tale is a sad one, beginning with my roots in a broken (already I can hear the more snide readers asking if I mean "cracked") home and ending with my untimely demise at the hands of one Sir Isaac Newton's most nefarious of inventions. I shall spare no details in the following account, and I pray that at the end of it you can be as ungodly depressed as I.

I was born and raised by a sadistic yet neglectful couple of England's upper class. My father, Juniper X. Yolkum III, was the bacon harbinger of the household, making his living at a local factory where he ritualistically flayed his Orphan workers for failing to meet demand. He was a strict and over-bearing man, who never made the mistake of allowing a young child the privilege of a moment's pride. He was very careful to make sure that any sense of self-worth I had was crushed from me under his harsh criticisms like a baby bluebird's skull beneath the rocks of a crowd of particularly diabolical primary school students.

My mother, on the other hand, was more neglectful than anything else. While she married my father quite clean and sober, by the time they'd been together for three months she'd begun to nasally ingest depleted uranium in an attempt to blind herself from the crippling depression and feeling of filthiness that came with being near him. I was later informed that this habit of hers might have had an adverse effect on my development, resulting in my eggy texture. After I was first dragged, kicking and screaming, from spelunking the netherworld of her lady caves (and no, I do NOT mean after I hatched), she became even more detached from the world. My fondest memory of her is of the time I ran up to her asking her if she'd play with me, and she smashed me with a frying pan saying I was now her brain on depleted uranium.

As you can tell, my childhood was less than ideal. I never had any siblings, and when I asked my mother why she mumbled something about not wanting to have to buy a carton before vomiting all over herself and going unconscious. The closest things I had were Pedro and Winifred, the twin children of Taquita, our illegal Mexican immigrant housekeeper. While most illegal Mexican immigrants made their way into America, Taquita was an exception. When asked about this, she always cried out "ĦTaquita es muy bueno nadar!" or, "Taqutia is very good to swim." Her inability to speak coherently in not one but two languages was almost as inspiring as it was annoying.

While they were not true siblings, Pedro and Winifred were more than enough. Typically, whenever I'd proposition them for a bit of play time they'd call me Huevo Pequeňo and giggle madly as they threw bricks at me, all in an attempt to crack my shell. It was not long before I learned to be an introvert.

As demeaning a nickname as Huevo Pequeňo was, though, it was not nearly as enduring as the cursed moniker that would be slapped across my face daily when I finally started to attend school regularly.

When first I went to school, I did my best to avoid making waves. I attended dressed in my finest knickerbockers and the navy blue jacket my mother liked, as well as a sailor cap which, at the time, I believed to be quite dashing. During recess, I would always go to the top of the jungle gym (I was fond of great heights even back then, you see), and read my little book of fairy tales, kicking my legs and humming happily.

The children, however, did not see fit to let me remain a non-entity. They would throw mud at me, wrestle me to the ground and steal my undergarments, and force me to yodel while drenched in chocolate pudding. I most distinctly recall the day they tied me to a Boeing 747 and flew me over Manhattan, with my clothes burned away and the words "I 3 Penis" spray painted on my rump. None of these things were the cruelest, however.

The cruelest thing they ever did to me, was give me the nickname that would haunt me to the end of my days. "Humpty Dumpty", they called me. Not only was the name demeaning (Shelby Q. Yolkum is a fine, and dignified name. Replacing it with something so inane is an insult of the highest order), but it was completely nonsensical (I've never been one much for humping or dumping, at least not more than anyone else I've met) and catchy as all hell. Before I knew it, everyone was referring to me as Humpty Dumpty. Teachers, doctors, even my favourite toffee clerk! In fact, it wasn't long before my own parents called me "Humpty Dumpty" on the rare occasion that they ever addressed me.

After I completed my primary schooling, I made it into one of the finest institutions possible due to a combination of my parents' wealth, my fine grades, and affirmative action (there are few minorities quite as minor as "Walking Egg Man"). There, I worked towards my PhD in visual arts and lived in a small apartment off-campus. For one semester I tried mixing and shaking with campus life, even going as far as to join a fraternity. This was a very bad idea. While the first few weeks went by without much trouble, I had made the mistake of joining at the same time as Jimmy "The Bacon-Man" Johnson, and a mysterious stranger known only as "He Who Secretes Pancake Batter", and the whole situation came to a rather violent head when our fellow fraternity brothers became both very very drunk and very very hungry one early morning around breakfast time.

After I decided to seclude myself from campus life, my college career went by as a relative non-event. During my graduating year, my mother and father both died of spontaneous human combustion (though ironically enough not the SAME combustion; the two of them died 3 days and 300 miles apart), but this was of little concern to me as I had already convinced them to pay for my education.

After graduating, I purchased myself a small flat in London, from which I tried to set up a successful career as a painter. Unfortunately, my natural prejudice towards ellipses and cream colours made my paintings rather repetitive, oblong, and dull. Depressed by my inability to sell any of my works or prove myself useful, I tried my best to drink myself into a stupor. Having developed with a steady supply of depleted uranium via umbilical chord, normal alcohol accomplished very little and I was forced to drink pure jet fuel.

Alas, as time went on jet fuel became increasingly more and more expensive, and my paintings still weren't selling. Eventually I went more than a little bit bonkers from not being able to afford my habit, sold my home, and used my paintings as building materials to construct a shed on the highest wall I could find. There, I spent my days rocking back and forth with a bottle of water in my hand which I pretended was my drink of choice, babbling incoherently.

Below me, the towns people would often look up and cackle gleefully, drinking in every moment of my misery. "There's Humpty Dumpty!" They would say. "Humpty Dumpty sits on his wall. Humpty Dumpty goes through withdrawal!" To this day, I resent every last one of them.

Eventually, the king decided I needed psychological profiling, and sent every man he could spare to help me through my depression and addiction. When each of them failed, he broke down and tried the horses. I loved the horses best, I think. They didn't judge me. They just neighed gleefully as I gave them sugar cubes and occasionally took advantage of their large phalluses and their equine naivety.

In the end, though, none of them could put me back together again. None of them understood my plight; none of them knew what it was like to resemble something so filled with cholesterol in a society as health conscious as ours. Having had my psyche disassembled and ineptly reassembled, that left only my body as the source of my trouble. The wretched, pitiful body that inspired my mother to smack me with a skillet. The body that gave me my most haunting title. Resolving to disassemble my body, and not caring whether or not it actually got put back together again, I leapt from my home.

And do you know what I did as the ground came hurtling towards my face? As the bricky texture that was once the ladder to my home above swept me by? I laughed. I laughed because I found myself wondering whether or not I had yolks, or intestines on the inside. And that thought, that surreal, wonderful thought, was all I needed to make the splat spectacular.