A Short Story Written By Kevin Massing
Playing With Fire
The summer Tampa air suffocating and sticky, the way a sauna gets after some old man walks in and dumps a fresh bucket of water on the hot stones. On the kind of day when your shirt sticks to you from sweat before you hit the end of your driveway, my best friend Brian and I decided to build a fire in the woods behind our neighborhood. I was thirteen then, and a nerd in every possible way. I collected comic books and Batman action figures, wore shorts that didn’t come close to touching my knees and sported a Star Wars tee shirt about three days out of the week. I even found a way to put a nerd twist on sports. I invented games in my yard that only required one player, and had every single sports card (of which there were nearly 2,000) in order of team and position, a task that ate up countless hours of my youth. I had glasses by the time I was ten years old and had braces by twelve which just cemented my nerd status in the eyes of others.
It is unfortunate, but I spent most of my childhood as a loner, which is why I truly enjoyed Brian’s company. He was my only friend, making it easy for him to convince me to do just about any form of troublemaking, which is all he ever wanted to do. What really stuck out about our friendship to others was the fact that we were exact opposites in our status at the middle school we attended. Brian was a grade above me and very popular, he always had Abercrombie shirts and shorts, the newest Nike sneakers, and a white sea shell necklace that I loved to make fun of him for, like I said, total opposites.
On this day Brian had called me up and after about fifteen minutes of pleading and calling me a pussy, convinced me to help him and his friend Anthony build a fire in the woods. My reluctance came not from the idea of starting a fire in the worst possible place to attempt to do such a thing, but rather in Brian’s choice of accomplice. I hated Anthony as much as anyone who doesn’t yet know real problems can hate any one living being. And he despised me about five times worse than that. He loathed the fact that his best friend would drop down in class to my level almost every weekend.
So there we were, about a hundred yards from the pond, in the middle of a cluster of young trees that we deemed the best place to exercise our inner arsonists. We started with dead twigs and dried leaves. My former Boy Scout days had helped me become quite the fire starter so I was appointed the job of staying by the fire and keeping it alive while Brian searched for bigger pieces of wood and Anthony went off to find “some cool shit to throw in this bitch.” Another reason I hated Anthony, his unquenchable thirst to blurt out profanities just for the sake of saying them.
Ten minutes later Anthony returned with a destroyed desktop, which to our delight burned with a variance of colors ranging from blue to green to purple. The playful dance of the flames kept us entertained us for only a few minutes, since it turns out PC’s don’t burn that well. I was sitting on a log watching some ants that I had picked up with a stick writhe in silent pain as I held the stick deep into the fire when I heard a consistent banging over my right shoulder. I stood up, my Pod Racer tee shirt wrapped around my head in my best version of a bandana and turned to see Anthony chopping down a small tree, so young that it was rather green underneath it’s bark. For twenty minutes Anthony hacked away without succeeding in cutting it down. Finally, Brian decided he wanted to go for a quick bike ride down the trail in the woods into the neighboring county. He was craving a Slurpee from the Texaco down that way.
A few minutes later we heard a voice in the distance call out “Hey. Punks. I just called the fire Marshall and ya’ll got ‘bout ten minutes to get the hell off my property or I’m gonna press charges on you little bastards. Send ya down to juvie for awhile, maybe learn ya somethin’.” I had no idea who this old man was, but damn, he didn’t sound like he was messing around. I started sweating, not due to the heat for the first time that day. Of course, Brian was long gone by now, and who do I have to turn too? I let out a sigh that had the force of a Nerf gun blast with no dart involved.
Anthony, never a fan of authority, was quick to retort, “ Shut the hell up old man, this isn’t your property, dick. This is a public place, leave us alone and go back inside… Dumb ass.” The last part of that sentence, for whatever reason, was more of a mumbled after thought by my account.
I decided that I didn’t want to stick around to see if the old man was bluffing. “Hey Tony I’m outta here man, I’ll see ya later.”
He was not happy to hear this, “Are you kidding me pussy? We haven’t even made a real fire yet. Don’t let that geezer get your panties all bunched up.”
I could deal with his belittling no longer. My cheeks flashed instantly in an almost shameful cherry red and I could feel the tops of my ears getting warm. With a clenched jaw and my pulse being felt in my temple, I finally stood up for myself. “ Ok Paul Bunyan, maybe if you could’ve chopped that tree down an hour ago when you started, you would’ve been able to have your nice little fire. But you couldn’t. Oh and by the way retard, that tree wouldn’t burn well anyway look how young it is not even close to being ready to burn. I’m outta here man.”
We went back and forth slinging insults at each other like a couple of bored Chimpanzee’s at the local zoo. To and fro, a teeter-totter of insults, for what only seemed like a few minutes when we heard a second voice from the distance. “Fire Marshall! You kids stay where you are!”
“Oh, shit.” I exclaimed as I hopped on my bike as fast as I could and tore down the path Brian had taken earlier, Anthony was right on my heels I could feel my heart in my throat beating what felt like fifty times per second as a lifted up my handle bars to avoid a tree stump that was obstructing my path. The exhilaration flowed through my veins and gave me a sensation that I have only ever felt when dodging the law or some other version of authority in a time of mischief. I jumped it. Anthony wasn’t so lucky.
I looked back as I heard the crash; it wasn’t a major accident by any means. I saw no blood on Anthony and he hopped back unto his bike almost instantaneously. However, his bike’s chain was broken. “Kevin! Come back man, my bike’s jacked up, let me ride on your pegs man, shit.”
The Fire Marshall had almost caught up by now. Anthony was screwed and I would be too if I stayed. I didn’t slow down, my hands stayed off the break. I didn’t even blurt out some lame excuse for why I couldn’t help him; I just smiled, faced forward and flew down the dirt path to freedom, if only temporarily.
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