Microfiction #8: The boy tells the girl to light the match
The boy tells the girl to light the match. It’s been raining hard, and they’re crouched in the dark next to a barbed-wire fence. Beyond the fence, the building.
The girl fumbles two matchsticks into the soaked ground. The boy is displeased, and the girl feels his displeasure like a rod twisting into her ribs. She only joined the Movement because she mistook the glow of his attention for affection. She flicks the third matchstick into life with a hiss.
Now he tells her to light the fuse. He gives no rousing speeches, offers no further justification for their violence. The building itself is violence, she knows, cables creeping into their rivers like tentacles, sucking the waters dry to appease the unending thirst of machines.
But didn’t she hear that the machines saved lives, too? (Whose lives? Not ours.) That they’re on the verge of some cure? (For a sickness they unleashed.)
The boy waits, impatient. The flame eats the stick. If she lets it keep going, it’s only her own skin that will burn.
I’m Jenny. I research and write about people and technology.