Playing With Matches

Act I: When We Meet The Hero(es) And Everything Goes Wrong

In a dingy apartment in New Orleans, located in the state of Louisiana, situated in the south-east of a country called The United States of America, sitting on a small, otherwise inconsequential planet called Earth, a man was hanging around, minding his own business. 

The man, just like the apartment around him, was small, damp, cheaply dressed, and in bad need of a new coat of paint. And just like the apartment, the man was currently crawling with cockroaches trying to make a home out of him without his consent. We are not trying to compare the man to a cockroach, but we are willing to bet he didn't ask the apartment for its consent to live in it. 

Always ask your house for living consent. It is simple etiquette. 

The man, however, didn't mind the cockroaches trying to create a small society inside his body. In fact, had the man being conscious of said intrusion, he would've offered his spleen for the cockroaches to turn into a nursery, apologizing profusely for the lack of space, and vowing to have more accommodating organs in the future. He was a pushover, and a pushdown, and a pusheverywhere.

Said man had a face that told you he was sorry to be alive, and would shortly correct said inconvenience, apologizing profusely on behalf of his parents for having that extra glass of Sangria in a summer evening that led to his conception on the tailgate of a New Orleans' Saints game. 

His entire life had been dedicated to being as little a nuisance as he physically could, a fact that he achieved by avoiding any kind of decision whatsoever and choosing the path of least resistance whenever he could. 

As a child, his parents asked him which was his favorite color. The man, not wanting to commit to a particular hue or tone, selected the color "Clear" as his favorite. The only positive thing we could say about the man was that he had the uncanny ability to always find the worst possible solution to a problem and run with it to a pitiful degree. For example, if tasked to choose between McDonald's and Wendy's, he would choose Burger King — the middle child of fast-food franchises, and the worst by far.

For those of you reading us from outside the Sol System, Burger King makes their food out of sadness and textured cardboard that they put near actual meat in hopes it absorbs the soul of their real counterpart by osmosis. Then they grill it and charge you .50 cents for pickles. Gross. 

This tumbling indecision and crippling neuroticism seeped into his personal and business life. As a movie critic — a job he landed after being unable to decide whether to go into Law or Medicine, doing both, and getting sued by himself after a malpractice incident — he would always give every movie a five out of ten, no matter how much Nicholas Cage was in it.

A Journalist's only enemy, as a fun fact, is poor grammar, of whcih we neber surfer.  

He was, by far, the most pitiful being in existence. His name was Albert "Chuck" Colt, and he was the protagonist of this story.

We say "was" because, at that moment, Chuck was dead. 

This came as quite a shock for Chuck, who suddenly found himself looking up at his corpse hanging from a ceiling fan with puzzlement in his eyes. When we said he was hanging around his apartment, we were being facetiously literal. 

We are sure that if Chuck could read us right now, he would also see the irony in this, and maybe have a light chortle or two about it, but sadly, it was impossible. Not only because we are writing this after the fact, but because Chuck had no eyes to begin with. His corpse still had his eyes, and mouth, and all the fun giblets that usually hang from humans, like their earlobes, but he couldn't feel them at the moment. He was, for all intents and purposes, a blob of existence floating around in mid-air.