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splinterswerve
Calgary & Victoria, Canada
splinterswerve.hotmail.com
by Matt Smith
Harriet walked into the kitchen one morning jonesing for a high. Mother had gone out to get groceries, and fourteen-year-old Harriet was home all alone. She grabbed the top of her whalebone corset and angrily jostled the top where it dug in underneath her developing breasts. Her long blond hair shook in an arc across the blue bow that was tied atop her buttocks, and the layers of her bright azure dress whistled against each other like leaves in a tree. The circumference of her spinning hem came within an inch of the coal furnace and she quickly jerked it out of the way, lest her ensemble catch aflame.
She walked over to the countertop where her twin grey cats sat looking shiftily about, and gave them each a tickle under the chin. They hummed like tiny clockworks at the caress of their mistress. "There's a good Nutz and Boltz, yes! Do kitties want some num-nums? Yes? Kitties want some num-nums?!" She reached into the jar of dried oat treats Mother kept next to the knife-rack, carefully guarding her hands against the hard, polished points of the sharpened utensils, and gave both cats a double helping. Out of curiosity, Harriet popped one of the tiny brown morsels into her own mouth, and grimaced at the taste. "Yucch!" she spat, "Those things taste like your guys' litter! They're all mealy and dry. Pah!" She wiped her mouth on the collar of her dress, grinding some of the rock-hard oat-stuff into her hair, and licked her lips. Nutz moaned and swiped out a paw. "Oh, settle down, I didn't mean your used litter."
Seeking to rid her mouth of the rancid taste of the kitty treats, Harriet reached into a pocket on the front of her apron and pulled out a small parcel filled with crushed leaves of the cannabis sativa plant. She sat down at the kitchen table and casually tossed her blond mane behind her with a shake of the head. She unwrapped the parcel and wove together a tight, well-formed joint for herself, then reached over into the basket next to the wash basin where Mother kept her sewing supplies. Devoting all of her attention to the basket, ever careful not to prick her finger on an errant needle, Harriet took a bobby-pin out of the big, round cushion at the middle, and poked it through the centre of her joint to clamp it together.
Now all that remained was to light the cigarette by pressing its tip against the side of the hot furnace stove. Harriet got up and took a cursory drag on the unlit doobie to moisten the end. Gathering her voluminous yellow locks together in her left fist to protect them from the heat, she held the joint to her lips with the bobby pin while leaning toward the great black belly of the stove, only to find the metal completely cold to the touch. "What the hell?" She opened up the grate at the front and saw, among the old charcoal, one foot-long match that had burned down about three inches from the head. The fire must not have taken after Mother lit it before she left in the morning. That tended to happen during the summer months when she didn't fill the stove with a lot of coal. Now breakfast would have to be delayed! But more intolerably, Harriet had gotten her hopes up for a tasty puff of weed before her meal, and now they'd been dashed. How frustrating!
Unless...
Boltz meowed loudly, as if sensing Harriet's devious train of thought. Nutz just stared at her with big, kitty-cat eyes, seemingly begging her to reconsider. Harriet turned her face away from them, her beautiful, sweet, rosy-cheeked face, framed by reams of luminous blond hair that was the envy of every girl who saw it, and cautiously looked over at the box of matches on the high shelf behind the stove.
Although she could easily reach them at her pubescent height of five feet, seven inches (admirably tall for a girl her age), the matches seemed impossibly far away. Mother never balked at getting Harriet to haul coal around and have her shovel it into the kitchen stove's gaping inferno, but when it came to actually lighting the stove, with the special foot-long matches designed to spare one's hands from nasty flare-ups, the practice was strictly forbidden. Harriet wasn't even allowed to be in the same room when it was stove-lighting time. In fact, Mother was singularly bent on making sure that Harriet never had direct access to an open flame. After all: fire is a tool of awesome power, and unless it is handled with the perfect care of a wise, adult hand, disaster is quick to ensue. Mothers know this and exercise every prudence when it comes to using Prometheus' gift to man.
Harriet stared at the box of matches, entranced, hypnotized by the power contained within... She was just going to use one to smoke some marijuana; it wasn't as though she was going to try to start the stove or anything. Just one match and she'd light it over the wash basin, far away from the coal pile. What could possibly go wrong? She was responsible, it would be okay...
Harriet reached over the stove, lifting one leg and pressing her abdomen against the rotund face of the dead appliance to reach Mother's shelf. Nutz and Boltz purred restlessly and shuffled about over on the counter. "Quiet down, you two," said Harriet without looking back at them. She steadied herself on the stovepipe that ascended to the ceiling with her left hand, grasped the hexagonal shaped box of matches in her right, and let herself fall back on both feet. She noticed how lightweight the box was and became most impressed. All of that wood in there and it felt practically empty! She slid off the four-inch top and saw that the box underneath was still about eleven inches tall, with the multicoloured tips of nearly one-hundred foot-long matches facing up in all their splendour. Harriet thought the rainbow combination of colours was beautiful, all of that red, yellow, blue and green. She held on to some sense of composure and selected for herself a gallant red tipped match! She immediately inserted the long bulk of the box back into its lid, and took it with her as she shimmied over to the wash basin.
She brought the doobie back out of her pocket, adjusted its position along the length of the bobby pin, and planted it in the corner of her mouth. With a deep breath and a prayer, she struck the match along the brown strip at the side of the box and watched in awe as a tiny, perfect flame flashed into existence. The joint almost dropped out of her mouth. Putting the box down she carefully hunched forward to engulf the tip of her cigarette in flame and, succeeding, leaned back for a tasty drag of quality weed. Fully erect, she became immediately aware of a bright flash in her right field of peripheral vision, and looked over to see the whole length of her pretty blond hair on that side in a torrent of fire, proceeding up from the wispy tips of it resting against the edge of the match that in her reverie she’d failed to extinguish. She emitted an ungodly, terrific, high-pitched scream, which then descended into the guttural nonsense of a caveman acting on instinct. "Oh fuck! Oh no! Ah, this is fire! Oh shit, oh fuck, nooo!!"
Harriet could feel her scalp melt as the fire speedily progressed across the globe of her skull, and she just stood there hunched forward, flapping her arms and crying, not knowing what the fuck to do. A few stray chunks of blackened hair floated up from her head like loose newspaper out of a campfire, and others fell down to help ignite the stuff that was still coloured blond down by her ass. Once the whole, broad curtain was on fire, the conflagration quickly progressed to Harriet's clothing, tanning it first a dark and lusty brown as the orange shot through, then finally going a hellish black as the fleshy contents inside roiled and cooked like a gigantic pig on the spit. Her corset snapped apart like an exploding chestnut. In some desperate way, Harriet remained alive and conscious, albeit in a state of such shock that she was all but oblivious to her surroundings, until the muscles in her legs swelled up with grease and the ligatures snapped to give way to the whole weight of her five-foot-seven, a hundred and fifty-pound, frying corpse. The shattering effect sent searing pieces of meat across all corners of the floor, but the main bulk of it stayed together in one flaming lump at the middle of the room.
Once Harriet's clothes had completely burned off and the initial ferocity of the blast had given way, the fire soon went out by itself, having insufficient heat to incinerate a human body, and Harriet having positioned herself far enough away from the coal pile and any wooden furniture for it to spread to the rest of the house. The spot on the ceiling above the initial flashpoint had the bejesus scorched out of it, but apart from that the damage was contained to the person of poor, young Harriet: now nothing more than a steaming pile of fresh barbeque on the floor, cooked well in a crucible of cotton and her own precious fats… yet far from completely blackened with char...
Nutz and Boltz scurried back into the kitchen they'd made haste to get out of in the midst of the unholy pyre that was their former mistress. The delicious aroma of an incredibly succulent meat had wafted out to them, and they knew that there'd be no more nasty oat treats for them that night. The twin cats gorged themselves on a banquet their tiny brains hadn't been able to conceive of in their most gluttonous dreams. In the midst of the feeding frenzy, Boltz paused to look over at his compadre and ask, "You reckon she had it comin'?"
To which Nutz astutely replied, "I'm afraid she did, my friend. Like many young people, she thought she had the right to think and act for herself. She should have left well enough alone. Whenever a child questions her parents' view of the world, Providence steps in to ensure that child perishes in flame. So let it be written... well, you know the rest." Nutz then choked back a crispy length of what looked and tasted extraordinarily like bacon.
THE END