Matches: New Flash Fiction for a New Year

It's the start of a new year, a time when many of us start new jobs or pursue new ambitions – but what if you are a wannabe superhero with no special powers. In this absurdist fantasy story Matches, James S. Dorr considers what happens when your dream is snuffed out like a candle (in the wind). James Dorr's latest book – Tombs: A Chronicle of Latter-Day Times of Earth – is a novel-in-stories that was published by the Elder Signs Press in June 2017. You can find James at http://jamesdorrwriter.wordpress.com


Matches
by James S. Dorr

It was his dream, to do something special. His sister Nadja had gone into the vampire trade, Robert had gotten himself maimed by a werewolf, but he – he had no powers, no entries into the supernatural, or anything else. He was just ordinary. He thought about Batman, who'd no powers either, but had made it through exercise and clean living (Nadja had slept with the caped guy a few years back, however, and doubted the latter, but it was the principle that counted – in any event she'd declined to bite him). But exercise hurt, he was more the nerdly type, and, as far as clean living itself went, well, he was a teenager. He still had hopes.  
    
But one thing he did do was to play with matches. His mother had threatened to cut off his hands one year when he had blown up the kitchen stove, but he was just little then. What did a kid know? Now, though, at nineteen he set out to build him the world's biggest match, to set the world afire, as it were, or a honking great part of it. 
    
He took his match with him out to the Gulf, to the latest oil spill. He figured if even the oceans were flammable that would be an ideal place for him to light the spark, to let it spread from there, wider and wider, blown by the hurricanes that were in season now, made fiercer, some said, by global warming. That was a laugh, he thought – that is, if scientists said things were too hot now, just wait till he'd set the oceans ablaze, wind and storm fanning flames onto the shore, up the highest mountains – hell, even volcanoes would suck the fire down, to heat the Earth's core even more than whatever it was that lava was supposed to be at now, temperature-wise that is. He'd brought a second match too, just in case, just as big as the first one – it would be his backup – and hired teams of strong men to help him strike them.  
    
With heaves and grunts they dragged the original match across the rocks – these were "strike-anywhere" matches he'd made, not safety matches, because he reasoned that matches the size of these weren't very safe anyway, so why even try? But it was too wet. It wouldn't strike at all. Comes from the rain, he thought, seeing as how they were in a hurricane, so, while the storm built up in strength, he hired a gang of construction workers to build a shed on the beach, open at all sides, but roofed to keep off the precipitation.  

"Oil ho!" one man shouted as the waves grew higher, this was the foreman of Match Dragging Team 2, as black oil began to splash. Wind speed picked up as well.  

"Strike away!" he called back, leading the men himself, dry in their shelter, pulling the sulfured head of his second match through the slot in the floor, feeling the heat as the match-head exploded red – pushing with others against the match's shaft, like raising the flag at Iwo Jima, tipping it upward first, then over to the oil.  

Flames kissed the water, the foam flashed white streaked with crimson and orange, the oil-slick began to catch, frothing and burning – but then the wind blew it out. That was it, he thought. That was his big plan, snuffed out like a candle? But he was no quitter.  

​Tomorrow, he thought, he'd go home to his sister and take vampire lessons.