Microwave
It wasn’t deliberate, not really, the impulse instead had struck him, a microburst, waiting for the countdown.
The lunchroom buzzed, indifferent, as he opened the door to the cafeteria’s microwave and without a glance of the tattered paperback, placed it on glass carousel. The cover? Irrelevant.
Closing the door with a refreshing catch, a gift for someone next to find he thought as he walked away with his lunch to his friends.
Trailing through the clamor of voices and plastic trays to where his friends sat, slouched and half-lost in the day’s decay.
He threw his bag on the bench beside him, the weight sagging his shoulder. A bite of stale pasta between lazy banter, remnants of weekend bravado. They had tried to blow up a tennis ball stuffed full with match heads—unsuccessfully, throwing it against the wall again and again until finally one of them in frustration just lit the damn thing. The ball hissed, fizzled into a seething pool of neon green ash, and a plume of black.
Bell rang. Lunch dissipated into the folds of doors. Back to class. Statistics, one of the classes he enjoyed. The teacher, grey-bearded and ghostly, murmured like a dying machine, equations bleeding from his lips onto the board.
Michael thumbed through the buttons on his TI-82 calculator. Drug Wars. Cocaine was always the better hustle. But even that grew tired. A few days before, a girl had slid him a note during class, asking for help on a quiz. He helped, not for kindness but for the vague promise of future payment, however intangible.
Bell rang, class over.
He walked to his locker, gathering the familiar weight of his AP Chemistry books. The final B schedule loomed, and he could already smell the off sweet vinegar like lab. But before he could slip into his regular rhythm, a hand clamped down on his shoulder.
“Michael - I need you to come to my office.”
The voice belonged to the Vice Principal.
Tiny ogre of a woman in heels, short hair butch, a belly constrained in the pant grey suit, a squeezed figure of bureaucratic rot and middle age. He sighed, tugging at his own waistband as he followed her down the hall.
In her office, she sat across from him, shifting awkwardly in her seat. Her small hands clutched the paperback—that paperback.
“So Michael, tell me why you put this in the microwave.”
Um. The moment stretched. “I don’t know. I just thought it’d be funny.”
“Funny? Were you trying to start a fire?”
The absurdity jolted him, but only for a second. "What? No, it’s just a book. I don’t even think microwaves can set them on fire."
His mind wandered back to the weekend. The tennis ball. The disappointment of failed destruction. Then further back, to a summer prior when the morning after a sleep over, his two friends and him collected all the spray bottles full of cleaning supplies in the house, and with a lighters fashioned little flame throwers, burned old toys into goo. Laughing over the mess, coughing thru the fumes. Oven cleaner was the best they determined.
"With everything happening in the world right now, we need to be careful," the Vice Principal's voice intruded, pulling him back to the sterile present. "We need to understand why."
“Why what?”
He didn't care about the why. The why was always the problem, wasn’t it?
The night before the flame fueled fun, after dinner, retreating to his friend’s room to sleep, his two friends popped a video into the VCR. A borrowed relic of smut—crude and grainy, bodies flickering across the screen in imitation of an unknown life. His two friends started moving their hands under their respective blankets, They had laughed as he on the floor, recoiled. They were animals, degenerates, lost to urges he couldn’t—and didn’t want—to understand.
“Faggots” he spat as left the room. They laughed more as he slammed the door, carried his sleeping bag into the living room downstairs.
No way. Tossing the bag on to the couch, he yelled back called them gay as he stomped. They weren’t either, just couldn’t help themselves they said.
The Vice Principal droned on. Something about concern. Something about safety. The book. The fire that could have been but wasn’t. She leaned forward, a parody of empathy. "We just don’t want anyone to get hurt, you understand?"
“But did … anyone get hurt?”
“No but—”
“Anyway I got to get class.” He started to pick up his bag, started to stand. Fuck her he thought. He knew she knew the real threats walked the halls every day, unnoticed and unchecked. The mushroom dealers, the stoners, the chain smokers who lingered in the bathrooms, trading answers to exams like currency, the girls who cut. And yet, here she was, fixating on him. On a book in a microwave.
“Thanks Michael, let’s just try to think thru how people might take things, I know you are a good kid.”
She handed him a slip of paper. "Give this to your teacher. It’s an excuse for being late."
He took it without a word.
Just a few weeks ago, a pair of goth kids dressed in trench coats half the country away killed some jocks. International news. Panic about video games, Doom and Quake, Heavy Metal and Rap, everything was a threat now. People trying to understand. Searching for signs, for explanations, for scapegoats.
The school had cancelled an afternoon of classes for an all school meeting, the same ogre standing in front of the bleachers explaining and droning on. Asking if anyone had questions, or something to share. And all they could do was rearrange deck chairs on the sinking ship.
He walked through the empty halls, the vinegar like smell of the lab drawing him forward. Maybe today they’d finally throw lithium into water as Mr Allen always had promised.
Maybe today there would be fire.
// Zero Strike
Flash Fiction: Microwave