The drying of the wick

It was early in the year of 1993. My mother was finishing up in nursing school to become a licensed practical nurse. My brother and I had a lot of free time during that time, unsupervised time and we did stupid things when we were unsupervised. One day, we found a couple of my father’s forgotten M80s. They looked pretty old, so they could have been left overs from 1976 when the last “real” ones were sold off and banned. My brother’s friend was over and we were deciding what to do with them. Returning them to where we found them was never an option. We were in the kitchen with one of our parent’s mini-kerosene lamps going. There was no reason for the lamp to be on except I liked fire. I took the glass shade off the lamp and held the wick of one M80 over it. It wasn’t touching the flame at all, I held it probably two inches above the flame. “What the hell are you doing?!” They exclaimed in unison at me. “I’m just drying the wick. I’m not going to light it, relax!” Yeah, drying the wick of fifteen to twenty year old firecracker. Tssssssss… The damn thing lit! My brother’s friend, who was in a walkway between the kitchen and the living room, dove into the living room. My brother ran out of the kitchen into the dining room. I was left there with firecracker in hand, watching the wick burn down. The sink was full of dishes and there were none with any water or liquid in them. I tried to snuff it out with my fingers, but I chickened out when the heat hit my finger and thumb. I didn’t have any options left; it was about to blow, so I tossed the lit firecracker into a pile of grocery bags near the refrigerator and tried to get out of there. But the thing went off before I could make my getaway and all I saw was flash. It had to be a real M80 because the thing knocked me to my ass. See, the M80 was invented by the military to simulate grenade explosions during training missions. When they got popular with civilians, they were deemed dangerous and discontinued. The M80 you could buy today, the legal ones I’m talking, contain 1/40th of the flash powder the originals contained! When my eyes adjusted back to reality, I saw that the pile of bags was decimated. Only a few survived intact, almost all of the bags either had burn holes or were dust. I couldn’t hear much over the ringing sound in my ears. Do deaf people have the ringing sound or is it complete silence? The phone rang and I answered it. It was my neighbor. We lived next to some really noisy people; they were always sticking their noses into things! I could barely hear on the phone so held it really close to my ear. “Hello?” Was I shouting? It felt like I was shouting. “Is everything ok over there? I heard a loud noise - it sounded like an explosion!” “Yeah, its ok. I dropped a box from the top of the refrigerator is all.” From the top of the refrigerator? Oh, please! “A box? But it sounded like an explosion!” “It was a really big box.” “Well, if you need any help picking up the box let us know.” She didn’t believe me. Hell, that was such stupid excuse to use but I was a little out of it. Over the next couple of hours we cleaned the kitchen up and put everything away. We sprayed a ton of air fresher and had all the windows open to air the house out. Pretty soon the outside got to smelling like the air freshener. Our efforts paid off, though, and we were never caught. Never dry a wick, it’s dry enough! Fin.

You're not the boss of me now And you're not so big Life is a test But I confess I like this mess I've made so far Grade on a curve and you'll observe I'm right below the horizon ~They Might Be Giants