Poison Is Not Pretty--I Kindle You Not

It says right on the label, but I had used my man-vision, unfortunately, reaching for what I thought was quite something else. This, however, burns. All the way down. I fall back in horror as I realize I may have just poisoned myself.

However, before I call Poison Control, I have to ask myself, Is this really a bad thing? After all, I had toyed with the ol’ to-be-or-not-to-be many times. This mortal coil could be unraveled.

But from the inside? The label is a serious portent: “Serious gastric disturbances.”

I lower myself into a chair, fireside, but the fire is out. I should busy myself and start a fire, shouldn’t I? But soon the subterranean activity begins. Gurgling and gargling in the lower registers, in my lower levels, with a rumbling tactile feedback I can feel down my entire abdomen. Then the vise grabs me. A sinewave of undulation rumples through my tracts, snapping at the end with a fetid puff of noisome smoke, a blob of noxious, unstable gas--a retrospect of maldigestion in the aether that settles across several realms of the multiverse. “Run for your life!” comes to mind, but there is no running from this. The pressure builds into a throbbing Pandora’s box that strains to contain that which will detonate into a seismic wave that will level a progressive zone of death--to the horizon first--then expanding a periphery of malady from the ill-wind, then finally settling into a somber chagrin ultimately stopped by the shores of a grateful sea.

The “serious gastric disturbances” coalesce into sudden and total intestinal chaos. There are a thousand electrified, acidic pinpricks that buckle me at the knees, and I fall out of the chair onto the floor, as if in supplication. It is supplication indeed--divine supplication, for this torment, arising from Hell, could only be routed by the supernatural. I exude this evil with a turbulent cacophony of malodorous pollution.

My output is body temperature, slightly warming the room, but I shiver from either the cold or my colicky crush. I will light that fire.

It isn’t the poison that kills me, but the explosion when I strike the match.