It was an elongated stretch of boredom that led me to throw a pair of socks against the brick wall of my apartment, one afternoon misspent and wanting of purpose. To my surprise, the dull thud of knitted cotton on render had found itself to be just quiet enough that it might not wake my partner but still tactile enough that I felt a quiet thrill of breaking something after each throw.
Boredom is an interesting device when an absent mind has no quandaries in misuse: to pick at a stich, to pull apart a headphone cable so that the plastic splits down to the plug, it’s terrifying how accidently destructive a pair of idle hands can be. I hurled the sock-ball again and again against the wall without care or for any aim in reason, I changed the angle, adjusting the way I pitched so as to impart a different spin on the woolly projectile before it bobbed down to a rest on the carpet. It was fun for a time but alas the Gordian knot of boredom grows tangled, and so too did the doldrums of a repetition that brought about a new challenge. Aim askew, I turned my gaze to the light-switch that hung on the edge of a wall dividing my bathroom and the kitchen.
Time had been slow in this stretch of nothing to do as my spending habits had drawn me into the leap of frivolous spending, much like a Labrador and a puddle. In one excited swathe my pay had come and gone and now reguarded me the apologetic eyes of such a small lot; and so it was to be another Friday spent at home.
Thud, thud, thud…
Each throw getting closer and closer to the light switch, each miss renewing the challenge of hitting a nothing target with a pair of socks.
Thud, thud, ha-ha!
With a satisfying plop I had struck the switch directly but still hadn’t managed enough force to turn the light on, and so thus a newer challenge was born.
Day was now settling into night.
The line of light on the horizon had pooled into the putrid kind of green that this city so often used to claw another modicum of day with and the last streaks of illumination were seeming to linger. I had time, the call of the unknown stood before me and all that I knew was boredom,
In a sudden calamity of deep thought, I paused, took aim, and then managed to hurtle my socks into a picture frame that was the distance of a poor throw above my light-switch. I could only watch as the projectile knocked the frame to the ground and ricocheted off at an angle that sounded far more resonant than I worried it might.
Bobbling along the tight ball of cotton finally took rest in the safety of my radiator adjacent to the wall and still burning its rage against a winter night that I refused to close my veranda door against.
In a puff both happy and proud, that little ball did then take light and, against the common flammability of cotton, it managed to incandescently wreath itself in enough flames as to burn away the gas regulator, then continue on to set a healthy portion of the brick wall on fire: paint and render like magma, now dripping to the ground with a molten sigh.
And so my loft was ablaze, the carpet–seldom vacuumed–had ignited itself quite rapidly and the plume of smoke that erupted out from the many patches of spilt coffee sent an acrid haze into the air: dimming the lone lightbulb in a kitchen now full obscured by smoke. I coughed not from the ash but as a repulsion of disbelief, my entire way of living seemed to be perfectly flammable in spite of what should be common sense, the fire hungrily gathered all my possessions and consumed them without signs of slowing; the cheap dining table cracked and boiled from whatever mixture of soft-wood and glue took its construction, the plants, long wilted from neglect, ignited and sent their ghosts upward to become black marks upon the roof; wine bottles, so untouched that the alcohol had separated and exploded from within the bottle, launched flaming shards of glass outward in a dazzling display of light and peril.
I could only stand and watch, why was everything so bloody flammable?
An English teacher of mine, a man who decried reading and what it could do to a person, once told me that a bookshelf is just a neat stack of kindling; like any gas-soaked yule log, my collection of paper-backed obscura had caught alight and now settled into that wicking kind of ember that would make for a perfect for a campfire.
With cruelty it tore apart my favourite novels and sent the fibrous embers of my low-quality Shakespeare out in search of a new source of ignition–how unusual that the flames did not touch the golf biographies, it seemed that every brick in this house may burn before they would.
Sirens called into the chill night air but I felt no allure to their voice.
It seemed that nothing was to be spared as my partner had snapped me from my trance and we had fled from the inferno of memories and things we never used.
I apologised, she didn’t care.
We laughed and stood on the lawn to watch our misfortune turn into ash.
It was cold, I wasn’t wearing any socks.
J.McCray
2021
Sunday Short Stories 