Dainty Candles and Tea, Not Pyromania Me

Dainty Candles and Tea, Not the Inner Pyromaniac in Me

I commend you for your efforts officers. You are the only souls to have survived after braving my pepper soup, which even my courageous puppy wouldn’t touch. He knows better than to taste kitchen catastrophes. Your efforts are wasted, I assure you.  As I understand, Mr. Mildew’s corpse turned up cremated during a family birthday party of mine. The only things I was lighting were the candles on the cake I most certainly did not make. It was edible. So I don’t know how this concerns me. You don’t grow up with three crazy brothers without knowing how to pull or handle a prank. Mr. Mildew’s attitude towards me was ineffectual. He couldn’t faze me if he tried, and eventually he became tired of trying and moved on to his next victim.

Now, I hear I have come under suspicion as a result of my so-called pyromaniac inclinations. I can assure you, this sorry excuse of an assumption is laughable. I like candles sir, dainty little scented candles, not bombs or burnt bodies. The only things I ever burnt were my steak and straightened hair. And I suffered a third degree burn, but as I’m sure your nifty file notes, it was from boiling water, tea, to be exact. Happy?

Fine, onto my brother’s birthday. My mom had just finished bleaching all the bathrooms; she claims they were moldy. But I sure couldn’t find anything wrong with them. Our definitions of clean vary vastly. She blames what I call the organized chaos of papers on my desk as the reason why I set my math teacher’s answer key on fire. See, I can’t stand the smell of bleach; it makes me want to heave and flee the house. So I placed pineapple scented candles around the house and settled one of them among the paper masses of my homework. Between checking my answers, frequently I might add, I set the key down, apparently right on top of the candle, within seconds, it was gone. The next day I had to explain to my teacher why his only key had gone bye-bye. Noooo! I’m telling you. I’m NOT a pyromaniac.

I can see how this looks, but really, it was an accident; math isn’t my strongest suit. I wanted to pull out my hair after I lost the answers. Well, yes,

I did catch my hair on fire. Once. By accident! I was leaning back against the kitchen counter, talking to my uncle about school, or something equally trivial, when…nothing. I hadn’t even realized my hair had caught fire from the candle behind me. I didn’t believe my uncle when he sputtered in shock, that my hair was aflame. Talk about a bad hair day! If I’m going to become an assassin or gravedigger for a day, whichever it may be, I’ll do so with impeccable style. How else would you expect me pull it off? Looking like a charred corpse? No! Bad hair is just bad luck. It’s just a tiny little coincidence that this also happened at the birthday party. There were candles everywhere! I couldn’t turn a corner without practically running into one. Even the delicious cake had dripping candle wax on it.

Hey! Just because hair is made up of dead cells and I didn’t feel its loss, doesn’t mean that I’m immune to heat. I’ll have you know that I sustained a third degree burn from boiling water, across my throat and breasts, when my cousins and brothers ran into me while shooting Nerf guns at each other at the birthday party. That injury hurts for months. Do you really think I was in any state to burn Mr. Mildew’s already dead corpse as I was shrieking in pain?! I didn’t THINK so. *Humph.

No! My nine year old cousin Lucy doesn’t set paper napkins on fire without a way to douse them! As far as I know, she didn’t just throw it up into the air and onto the counter in her panic. I was incoherent, remember? You know, this is getting really boring. Can we move on? I have a bonfire to catch. I don’t know what she was expecting when she held it over the candle flame!

Noooo, of course my other uncle doesn’t smoke, I’ve heard that’s bad for your health.

* suspect sighs with an eye roll

My brothers don’t make fires with metal light bulb backs. Or flints. Or melt bugs with magnifying glasses. Or set the carpet in my room on fire with them. Can we move on? ‘Cause really. Not to rat out a fan or nothing, but really, the fans who love my books, unlike Herman, might I add, probably decided to kill him in their outrage at him not publishing the final book of the Suspense series. I mean, really, who does that?! It was some good stuff, until Herman set it on fire. By accident he claims.

So as you can see, I am not a pyromaniac. No darling. I have no idea why Mr. Herman’s body turned up cremated unexpectedly. I was withering in agony. I was dying.  For all my bad luck, I survived; better me than Herman, right? So many people would miss me; just think of all those people from the party. Everyone is relieved that Herman Mildew is dead.

Oh, you want to know about the fire alarms that went off. That happened while we were singing “Happy Birthday”. Of course little candles can create enough smoke to set off those alarms, these smoke detectors now a days are far too sensitive, I set them off all the time cooking. It’s not like you would need to burn something the size of a body to send up alarms. The shrieking alarms added a nice harmony to our terrible pitch and covered up all those nasty off-key notes. Like I said, I am not a pyromaniac. Anyhow, on a more pleasant note, won’t you stay for tea?