The Child Within

Chapter 6

To Max's delight, he has found the video game system that gave him oh so many hours of entertainment growing up. The fuzzy feeling inside his stomach grows a bit more intense as he opens the other door and sees a Sega Genesis sitting in all its glory. On the side of each door is a pull out drawer with each containing an assortment of games and controllers. Max begins to sift through some of his favorite childhood games such as Mario Brothers, Tetris and Contra on the Nintendo, plus Sonic the Hedgehog and Sports Talk Baseball for the Genesis.

An annoying loud beeping suddenly interrupts Max's fun, as it appears his meal is ready to be consumed. As much as he would like to pop in some games and have some fun right this second, Max remembers that pizza rolls have a tendency to explode when overheated. Not wanting to ruin his mouth-watering meal, Max decides to revisit the video games a little later.

Back in the kitchen, Max is on the hunt for an oven mitt. After investigating a few drawers he stumbles across a small mountain of them and grabs the top two from the stack. Why his mother insisted on keeping so many of these in the house was a mystery to Max, but at least she never ran the risk of running out. As he removes the pan from the oven Max becomes a little discouraged as he sees that the majority of the rolls had burst open and spewed all over the place. While this isn't the ideal scenario that Max had hoped for, he was still elated that he was about to chow down on a childhood favorite. With that he proceeds to dump the meal on a plate, grab some ranch dressing from the fridge and head to the living room.

The dish is placed on the coffee table and Max takes a plop on the sofa. With a building excitement inside of him, Max reaches over for the remote so he can enjoy some TV while he eats. To Max's chagrin, his hand comes up empty. "Dammit!" he loudly exclaims, remembering the control was still in the family room. With the quickness of a cheetah, he scurries over to the family room to retrieve the device.

Once the task is completed, Max once again takes a seat on the couch and turns on the television. The power comes on and the channel surfing is about to commence. As the television goes from blackness to picture, the first thing he sees is Bob Barker on the Price is Right. "Geez, has that guy always looked 70 years old?" Max asks himself.

He leaves the show on for a few minutes and enjoys watching the Plinko game until the contestant fails miserably and the program goes to commercial. At this point the pizza rolls have cooled down enough to eat so Max pops a roll, smothered in ranch, into his mouth. The decision to toss an entire roll into his mouth, instead of taking a bite, is quickly regretted however as Max's mouth seemingly catches on fire. It turns out that the middle of the rolls were still about as hot as boiling magma, so Max spends the next few moments fanning his mouth to extinguish the heat.

The pain resonates for only a few seconds before his mouth begins to feel normal again. Feeling quite proud that he didn't spit out the food, despite the heat, Max takes a more intelligent approach toward eating the next roll. He takes a smaller bite this time, hoping that he'll actually get to taste this one. To Max's utter disappointment however, it turns out that pizza rolls weren't exactly as tasty as he remembers. While they were by no means disgusting, it ends up being quite a monumental letdown. Max continues his meal nonetheless and tries to simply enjoy the food for what it is.

With a click of the remote, the next show Max comes across is some generic looking soap opera. Although his mother would watch these on occasion, he finds zero interest in the show and promptly moves on. The next channel up turns out to be MTV, and to Max's surprise, there's actually a music video playing. Although the video isn't really that good, Max notes that it's far and away better than the garbage they play now with shows like "Pimp My Girlfriend's Pickup Truck," or something like that.