Burnt

Opening

Was this the beginnings of my mid-life crisis? Geoffrey Bauer thought to himself as he tied the white garbage bag together. Lifting it out of the tall kitchen trash can, the bag split at the bottom seam the moment it swung over the tiled floor. Banana peels, empty boxes of hot pockets, and last night's leftover enchilada casserole spilled all over the kitchen in a stinky mess. Great.

Geoffrey swept it all back up and doubled bagged it the second time, daring the cheap brand of plastic to split on him again. As he mopped enchilada sauce up with paper towels while on his hands and knees, he shouted toward the stairs leading up to the second story of the house. "Jason! Did you take care of those gas cans?"

The sixteen year old had mown the lawn just yesterday, and his bad habit was to always leave the fuel out of place instead of putting them back into the shed with the mower. If Geoffrey did not hound his son to tidy up, the cans would forever sit unsightly by the trash cans. More often than not, Geoffrey gave up and put them back himself until the next week, when Jason would mow the lawn again and set the same damned cans in the same damned spot outside the shed.

"Yeah, Dad!" Jason's voice echoed down.

"You sure?" Geoffrey shouted back up.

"Yeah, Dad!" Jason replied in the same exact tone.

"Do you even know what I'm asking you?" Geoffrey yelled once more while tucking the dirty paper towels into the small opening at the top of the already tied off trash bags.

"Yeah, Dad!"

"Can I trade in your Camaro for a cheaper used car?"

"Yeah, Dad!"

Definitely my mid-life crisis.

With the bag in one hand, he pushed open the screen door out to the back yard and cursed when he realized he managed to get enchilada sauce on his favorite blue button up shirt. Would that even wash out?

As he traversed the grass to the 30-gallon heavy duty trash cans tucked up against the shed at the back corner of his property, he started running figures in his head. If he could get away with selling his son's car and replacing it with something that did not have a car note attached, he would only have to reduce his wife's salon and spa visits by half per month to afford that hair plug procedure he had brochures on and safely tucked away in his desk at the office. Once his hairline managed to reach his forehead again, he could finally look into setting up those no-strings-attached dating profiles online. Should he have felt guilty he was planning on how to finance affairs outside his marriage? Yeah, he should, but his wife had been sleeping with the pool boy for three years already. The sad part was they didn't have a pool. She had to borrow the next door neighbor's pool boy while Geoffrey was at work. Thus, there were no guilty feelings when he started thinking about what saucy descriptors he could use for himself to entice lovely ladies into a good time.

The gas cans were sitting right next to the garbage cans.

Geoffrey huffed as he lifted the lid of the garbage can and dropped the bags inside. The kid was certainly going to get a used car lot trade in no matter how much the skinny, spoiled snot argued, fussed, and complained on Facebook to his friends. The father kicked the red metals cans with a grunt of frustration, making the gasoline slosh around and spill out of the openings some. He felt marginally better after the little outburst.

Lifting his wrist close to his face, he checked the time on his illuminating watch. The face read 8:47pm, and just like clockwork, a little bell started tinkling from the other end of the property toward the street. Turning toward the front yard, he glared at the hunched over, little old woman holding the leash to a white Scottish terrier in a tartan sweater. The pooch had its rear leg cocked up at the light pole on Geoffrey's property.

"Eunice. Will you please get your dog to pee someplace else every night? There is a permanent circle of barren land right there, and no matter how hard I try, I can't get grass to grow there again. What does your dog eat to piss out liquid napalm like that?" He had asked her at least a hundred times to pick a different nightly walking route to no avail.

Eunice smiled apologetically at the middle aged man, but his eyebrows furrowed as her face morphed to one of confusion, then transitioned to pure and unadulterated fear. The terrier lowered his leg and started yapping furiously at Geoffrey, the little bell around his collar tinkling madly. That was new behavior, for the mongrel usually paid the man no mind and continued on with its own business after relieving its initial business in the yard.

With a crooked and knobby finger, Eunice pointed at him. No, not at him, behind him. Geoffrey whirled around to see what else could possibly be invading his yard. His eyes registered a firefly, only it was glowing and flickering brighter than any bug he ever witnessed before. Wasn't it a bit cold and out of season in mid-November for fireflies? And why wasn't it blinking its glow like they usually did?

No, it wasn't a firefly. It was more like the flame of a match floating...

...straight toward the shed and the gas cans.

"No!" Geoffrey lunged toward the little light to try and prevent it from nearing the fumes he knew he just jostled into the air, not caring that the flame appeared to not be carried by anyone or anything.

The explosion shook Mr. Bauer's house and broke the windows. Eunice and her dog were blown back to sprawl into the street.

Jason found his dad a couple minutes later on the singed grass with not enough of his bald head left to put any hair plugs into.