20 In 5 -- Vol. I -- Spontaneous Combustion

An urban myth renewed.

The day had passed like too many other days in my life: alone, bored, a yawning ache in my gut where satisfaction should have been. Had past 30, was closer to 40, hadn't been anywhere, hadn't done enough, hadn't met anybody who wanted to be with me for longer than it takes to call a cab and the only person I saw every day was my Aunt Tillie, who owned the house I lived in, the bed I slept in, the furniture I tucked my unstylish clothes in and gave me a twenty ever so often so I could "do a little something."


I looked around her room, dotted with my few things and stifled a sigh. I'd been here for more than ten years, since Ma died and I dropped out of college to come home and sell the house and use that money to make a go of my life. But Ma had left it all to her sister Tillie, the widow with the huge investment dividends. And me? I stayed here, in what was now Aunt Tillie's house, using up the few thousand Ma left me and then I eventually figured out I was just waiting for Aunt Tillie to die.


The street lamp outside my window flickered and I noticed it was time for Aunt Tillie's favorite show, a cop drama with cardboard characters. The sigh came out before I could stop it and I creaked heavily standing up. I got to the door slowly, sighed again and started down the stairs to the always stuffy living room.
I sensed the heat first, a distant wafting on the skin as if an oven had floated up the staircase. Two steps down I felt it, a palpable wave of heat that was ghostlike and clinging, a menacing caress in the dim light.


"Tillie? Aunt Tillie?" I forced myself into the heat, my brain suddenly churning with the thought that the house was in danger. I saw Tillie in her chair, the overstuffed Georgian armchair she had brought from Cambridge long ago. She seemed asleep...No, she seemed...frozen.


"Tillie!" I almost ran to her, then skidded to a panicky stop. She was...ablaze. Searing blue flames were flickering over her skin, leaping from her gray-blue hair, her skin crackling as I watched. The blistering heat pushed me away, forced me back as Tillie started to darken and...melt. I watched, horrified, then--fascinated--as her body shrunk, then collapsed in on itself. The ferocious heat continued for an hour, then slowly faded as the body became a large cinder, then ashes. Not much was left: one of her shoes with a blackened bone poking out of it and two fingers on her left hand as pristine as life. The rest of Aunt Tillie would fit--did fit--in a small urn.


Five days later, I sat on my bed, reading the copy of Aunt Tillie's will for the nineteenth time. One clause anchored my eyes: "The bulk of my estate will pass to my nephew Reginald when and only when he establishes a personal income of at least $30,000 a year for at least two consecutive years. Until that time, it will remain under the trust of Jonathan Granger, Esquire." No house, no money, no life until I earned a living.


At what? I have never worked, never tried to find a job, never learned a trade or even wanted to. All I could think of doing was becoming a companion to some old fart so long as said old fart didn't need anything more than a TV companion. I would receive $60 a week, stay in the house rent-free and receive the usual groceries from Furman's until the day I died.


Three weeks passed. I invited Granger the Esquire over to watch the cop drama he loved as much as Aunt Tillie. Pushing 80, Granger still cut a dapper figure that made me feel old and useless. I let him in and waved him to a chair.


"Isn't that Tillie's chair?" he asked, a quaver in his voice.


"No," I lied, "It was part of a set and I kept the other one to remember her by."


He sat down gingerly. "She was a fine woman. We miss her, don't we?"


I nodded as I thought again that Granger would not burn like Aunt Tillie did, but he would end up as my second--and last--victim in the only thing I found I could really do well.

December 2011 Edition of "20 in 5"

Please buy the inaugural ebook edition of "20 in 5." "Spontaneous Combustion" is there along with 19 other flash fiction stories. Brought to you directly by Mis Tribus.