The Man.

There is a man who comes homes to a dark empty apartment every night, pausing in the doorway with his hand hovering above the light switch. It is during these seconds of brief silence that he allows the darkness to envelope him, closing his eyes to let out a deflated sigh before facing the hollowness of the rooms that await him as they do every night. Routines are what make this man feel as though he has some sort of substance in his life and so, after sweeping his hand over the light switch, he takes off his shoes and his suit jacket and walks down the narrow and short hallway to his kitchen just as he does every night, in that exact order.

In this man’s kitchen there is not much other than a box of Special K cereal sitting in the same place on the counter, waiting to be replaced as soon as its contents run dry. A picture of a bowl of fruit sits on the white stove top, one that the man found on someone’s lawn months ago. This is the only picture that rests in his house and he thinks it is quite homey. There are seven yellow cardboard boxes that sit in this man’s freezer. The bold, black block letters on the top of them read “Fettuccini Alfredo.”

The man walks through his kitchen and into the living room and, without turning on the light, inserts a VHS into the television. A fire appears on the screen and it will burn until the tape has ended. He found this, too, on the same lawn that the picture of the bowl of fruit lay. Usually the man would wander into the kitchen without looking at the television screen, to open his freezer and pull out his boxed dinner, the bleep of the microwave buttons interrupting the silence that swirls through his apartment like smoke, suffocating him.
But on this particular night, the man lingers in front of the television engulfed with the flames and the crackling of the virtual fire that dances along the screen. He feels the heat coursing through him, tearing at his insides with a sense of urgency.

The phone rings.

Daddy? a little girl’s voice asks through the receiver. Her voice burns through him as if he has swallowed all the colours of fire that bounce along the walls around him. The man hangs up the phone and walks into his kitchen, opens up his freezer and places the yellow box in the microwave, watching as the green digital numbers count down backwards from 2:00, feeling the flames circle in closer, creeping up his thighs, all the way to his neck.