A scratched bowl can be a precarious thing. Jeremy was scraping rice out of a plastic one when he noticed its etched bottom. As the rice was reduced to a few grainy pockets, little silver lines made themselves known. Jeremy stopped mid-chew and pulled the bowl closer to his face. The etchings were fine, almost pretty. But why were they silver? He lifted his fork and frowned. The utensil was silver too.
Jeremy softly placed the bowl down on the couch next to him and stood up, mouth still stocked with rice. Hands tingling and head faint, the teenager walked to the trash bin and opened wide. A semi-chewed lump rolled off his tongue and made a “piff” as it pelted the empty trash bag. The lump clung to the side of the plastic and did not roll. Jeremy steadied himself against a countertop as his thoughts raced.
He wasn’t sure if he should throw the bowl away or the fork. He tossed both. He went to sit down again when another terrifying thought struck. Jeremy ran to the kitchen and drew another plastic bowl out of the cupboard. This one was scratched even more.
“Have I been eating plastic and fork my whole life?”
Jeremy’s belly tightened as he imagined a stomach lined with a thickening layer of undigestible detritus. He began rifling through the cabinets, peering into childhood bowls and mugs. Each mug has a spiral of slashes at its bottom from years of tea swirling. His once coveted Thomas the Tank Engine sippy bowl possessed a hull practically torn to shreds. He threw it into the trash.
Jeremy’s head swam and his chest heaved at an air supply that suddenly felt very limited. His tongue was like a brick in his mouth. Before a panic attack could bring him low, a killing thought infiltrated the conscious world.
“Teflon! Motherfucking Teflon!”
He practically tore the cabinet door off its hinges as he rummaged for his mother’s favorite frying pan. She lovingly crafted scrambled eggs on that thing for Saturday mornings beyond count. The image of the thing once conjured the scent of frying bacon and grease-battered home fries, but that was gone now, replaced by an emerging terror. Jeremy’s rummaging became frantic. He tore through stacks of cookware, digging through pot lids like a crazed badger escaping the neighbor’s spaniel. It did not take long to find the culprit.
It was horrific. The old pan was scratched to shit, with flecks of black coating scraped clean from ages of spatula contact. It resembled a peeling wall. Some distant knowledge of the dangers of cooking with old Teflon equipment flitted through Jeremy’s brain. Disgust caused him to leap upward suddenly, but the edge of the counter met his cranium on the ascent. If the counter wasn’t what knocked Jeremy out, the cast-iron skillet knocked from its peg certainly did.
Jeremy awoke in a grey landscape, a clearing of sorts. The trees that surrounded him were like mercury pillars, sharp and reflective. He quickly realized that the clearing wasn’t lined with trees at all–they were forks! As he stared at them, they began to decay. The silver coatings peeled backwards, curling like tinsel to reveal rough interiors of knotted rust. The orange brown metal immediately began to disintegrate. Jeremy sensed plumes of invisible flecks invading his lungs. He fled, the giant forks festering all around him. He closed his eyes as he ran and covered his nose and mouth with the cloth of his t-shirt. Blind, he eventually tumbled down a smooth incline.
A burning at his back forced Jeremy to open his eyes. He had apparently rolled farther than he thought, because the fork forest was nowhere to be seen. His back was resting upon the lowest point of an extremely smooth bowl. It was like glass. It was glass. The burning became a searing pain, and Jeremy launched to his feet. The green-tinged glass was too steep and smooth to climb, but that did not prevent Jeremy from trying. As he tried to use his palms to grip the surface of the incline, he yelped. It felt like acid was eating away at his skin. His shoes smoked, too.
“Oh shit.”
Jeremy suddenly recognized his enclosure. His grandmother owned a bowl exactly like this, only small enough for a human to eat out of. It was depression-era glassware, apparently. Uranium.
Uranium glass.
Jeremy used to eat out of that bowl every time he visited nanna. It was his favorite. He could not believe that he used to scoop cheerios out of an irradiated bowl. His poor grandmother had plenty of glassware like it around the house. Thoughts of nanna’s brain turning to radioactive mush while scooping oatmeal elicited tears.
As the evil bowl devoured the soles of his feet, Jeremy could not help but cry out in despair. The material world unraveled around him. His skin intermingled with glass and metal and his nails melded into the cloth of his sweatpants as he gripped them. His teeth bloomed from his maw like glorious crystals and evaporated into the atmosphere alongside the rest of his conscious mind.
Jeremy died that very day. His sister discovered him dead on the kitchen floor, frying pan gripped so tightly in his left hand that his fingers bled.