A fire in the bedroom
Many people have probably done something and thought, “Well I should have seen that coming?” That is what I thought, as a hole about a foot and a half melted into my bedroom carpet. Maybe we should start from the beginning, though. I was twelve years old at the time. I had been living in Hyrum, Utah for half of my life. I lived in a sheltered home, in which my parents tried hard to keep the uglier side of life outside the house. But here and there my brothers and I would learn about things at school. That is where my curiosity came from, that curiosity that every twelve year old boy has at that age: Women.
I had been told already by my parents that they did not approve of “inappropriate material.” To clarify, by inappropriate, I mean pornographic material. However my curiosity had gotten the better of me and I decided one day that I would take a look at some of these inappropriate things. I waited until a day that my parents were away from home, and printed out from the Internet some pictures of women. No sooner had I done this than it occurred to me that I had just created a paper trail of my actions. I was not immediately worried, however, as I knew I had at least a day or two before they would be home, so a plan of action could be formulated later. I enjoyed looking at the images for a while, but soon my attention wandered to video games and the pictures lay forgotten on my bedroom floor.
That is until the next day, my worry about the paper trail had returned. I liked the pictures, the images were those of women I found particularly beautiful at the time and I was loath to destroy them. But I knew I must, if not than they would eventually be found and I would be in trouble. I had disposed of things in the past by throwing them in the garbage or ripping them up or hiding them, to no avail though. This time I knew I had to find a more permanent form of solution. “Fire! Of course!” I thought.
Within a few minutes I had found some matches and was safe in my room with the matches and the pictures. Yeah, I know, I should have seen it coming, but I did not, and that is what makes it entertaining now. I immediately lit up a match and started the first paper on fire, holding from the top with two fingers, because fire was hot, and I did not want to get burned. I seemed to have forgotten that heat rises because a few moments later I let out a yelp of pain as the flames licked at my fingers. Possessing the keen common sense that hot things were bad for my skin, I dropped the burning picture on the carpet.
It was then that true common sense kicked in, “Umm,” I said to no one, “this is bad.” Cursing my ironic statement of the obvious, I slipped on a pair of shoes so as not to burn my feet and began stomping out the fire. As I was putting the final touches on the extinguishment of the fire, the smoke detectors went off. I finished up what I was doing and then ripped the battery out of the smoke detector in frustration. This was not going the way I had planned it, not at all.
Next it was time to clean up the debris, I could not very well leave a bunch of burned paper on the floor. That would attract undue attention from my arson detective of a father. I swept up what was not ground into the carpet from my stomping, and got out the cleaning supplies and towels for the rest. It was about twenty minutes into scrubbing that it occurred to me this was not a traditional stain, it was part of the carpet. A cold chill ran down my spine and the bottom of my stomach dropped out, I had burned the carpet itself. That was not going to come out with soap. I got the scissors.
Eventually I realized that those would not work either and my attempt to hide my deed in and of itself had become a blazing (literally) beacon leading straight to it. I had to hide the beacon. So, my solution was to take a hand weaving that I had worked on for a long time, for those who are not familiar with what that is let me explain. It is a long thick line of yarn that one weaves by using their fingers as rods to wrap the yarn around. Because it is only four loops big (unless ones thumb is used, then its five) it does not form a flat piece of cloth, instead it forms a line as I mentioned before.
Anyway, I took this hand weaving and coiled it around in a circle on the burn mark, making a small miniature carpet to hide the burn under. I felt like it was quite a cunning and creative plan. I had encountered a problem, and I had found a solution using the resources I had on hand. And it worked for a while, until one day a few months later when my dad told me to clean my room.
I had cleaned it as well as I thought I could. But I had left the “rug” in its place. He came in and said, “Well it looks pretty good, but could you get this off the floor please.” and as he said it, he kicked the rug, revealing my hidden deed from months before. There was silence, the longest silence I had ever endured. Then there was yelling, and finally I came clean about why exactly there was a burn mark in the middle of the floor.
In the end, I was grounded for several months, I could do nothing but read, do homework, and play with Legos. My plan to hide my deed had failed, and I had a permanent reminder of how unbelievably witless I had been. I never tried to burn things indoors again... for a while that is.