Cover created with free elements in CANVA
Brady’s mouth was agape; a reasonable expression given his hair was on fire.
As his mouth continued to make the shape of an ‘O’, he couldn’t help but wonder about the events which would lead to this unfortunate demise. It had all started six minutes earlier when he had received a phone call from a telemarketer. The conversation had begun in a typical fashion, with Brady objecting to the accented voice on the phone, before he found himself listening to a spiel about a charity which was loosely connected to a non-specific crisis in a non-specific part of the world. The problem, Brady knew, was his anxiety which was connected to hanging up on other people. If he didn’t get the caller to hang up in those first few moments, he was doomed to listen through the entirety of their pitch.
As the seconds of that phone call rolled into minutes, Brady had forgotten about the toast he had been making. He had been down to the last two slices of bread in his loaf, and his craving for toast had led him from his office desk to the small kitchenette in his apartment. He had had his toaster for many years now, and the timer mechanism had long been faulty; but, he could control the cooking process by watching over the toast and manually pop it at the appropriate time.
As the toast continued to blacken, unobserved by its master of the manual pop, Brady let out a sigh of relief as the telemarketer finally concluded the call without achieving their hard sell. Unknown to Brady, the telemarketer also let out a sigh, as it had been only his third day on the job, and that was the first time he had made it to the end of a pitch. Brady, unlike the telemarketer, was less satisfied, as he had wandered away from the kitchen and hadn’t been aware of the entire place beginning to fill with heavy smoke. On seeing the wisps of grey beginning to writhe and twist across the ceiling towards him, he panicked.
Brady raced into the kitchen and was met with a wall of smoke which was thickening. Standing by his toaster, he madly began to push the pop button, but to no effect. It seemed that his old toaster was not demonstrating the servitude which he had become familiar with over the years, instead, it was morphing into an uncontrollable beast. Brady’s agitation had continued to grow, as the smoke detector, which he had always assumed defective, began to wail its sharp tones. The noise drove him to the edge of desperation, as a pungent aroma forced him over the proverbial edge.
Not acting rationally, but moving on some kind of frenzied energy, Brady lifted the toaster into the air and begun to shake – hoping that the toast might dislodge. As the toast didn’t budge, but continued to burn, his movements became more erratic. Crisped crumbs were falling all across the kitchen bench and the floor, but the smoke would not stop billowing from the upended appliance – but now, catastrophe beckoned, as the toast began to flame! With a vigorous force, and acting on adrenaline, the startled man yanked the toaster further into the air, pulling the cord from the plug. Sparks flew from the socket, but the mechanism had finally been released. Unfortunately, the timing of the release had occurred as the flaming toasts turned into flambeaux which landed directly atop Brady’s head.
To understand what happened next, one must understand that Brady had not been able to get a recent haircut and had been using an exorbitant amount of hairspray to keep his fringe from obscuring his vision. The solvents in the product caused Brady’s fringe to immediately catch aflame and as the toast fell to the floor, and Brady stomped on it to put out the flame, the flames spread across his entire head, leaving him standing in the middle of his kitchen, utterly bewildered, and finding himself forming an O with his mouth.