Mutually Insured Distraction

The gentle shhhhh noise coming from the kitchen cupboard startled Will fully awake from the almost nap that he had fallen into while poring over the mind-numbing actuary tables of his profession. He pushed himself up, and with a trepidation bordering on abject terror, approached the offending cupboard.

By now, the shhhhh had turned into shhh with a rustling noise. Horrible visions of some neighbour’s escaped pet python, or an infestation of hairy-legged tarantulas brought into his house hidden in a bunch of bananas filled Will’s head. He glanced around the kitchen for anything he could use as a weapon, quickly moving past the bunch of bananas in the bowl beside the fridge. His eyes settled on a nice, heavy, evil-exterminating cast iron skillet. Perfect!

Will grabbed the handle of the skillet and slowly slid it off the stove as he crept toward the cupboard. With his roomie doing all of the cooking, the sheer weight of the cast iron pan was news to Will. News he found out quickly as the pan came swinging down from the stove, like some malicious pendulum, and slammed into his right kneecap. The shock of the blow caused Will to let go of the skillet, which, thanks to gravity, continued its course of destruction by falling straight down and landing on his inadequately protected toes.

The pain was unlike anything that Will had ever experienced in his rather sheltered life up to now, far beyond the pain in his right kneecap, which had caused him to drop the skillet in the first place (second place actually… first was his poorly muscled arms), and was now a memory fondly looked back at. His crushed toes, instead of being debilitating, galvanized Will to action. He picked up the massive frying pan and flung open the cupboard door. A river of little white maggots fell out of the cupboard and into Will’s hair and face. If anything ever creeped him out more than snakes and big, hairy spiders, it was maggots.

In a rage borne of fear and pain and disgust, Will used both hands to hammer the skillet into the cupboard, over and over again. He wanted every last one of those creepy bastards to pay. Adrenaline and fear lost out to poor coordination and weak arms. The first few blows he rained down upon the cupboard had been effective. Effective in utterly destroying the shelf and sending splinters of wood everywhere. Soon enough though, he couldn’t bring the pan high enough and ended up slamming it into his roomie’s blender with the glass carafe. Well, the one that used to have a glass carafe.

The sound of the blender shattering brought Will back to reality. The reality of throbbing toes, a kitchen cupboard destroyed by a skillet, and a box of Uncle Ben’s Rice that would never harm another human again. Earl, his roomie’s hamster, eater of a hole in the rice box, sat unharmed on the remains of the shelf, staring at Will.

Babaluzer
500 words
September 13th, 2007