A Bad Idea I'm About to Do Read Online Free PDF Page B

his foot into a three-foot-wide, one-foot-high swath of fire.
    I glared at the old man.
    â€œYou gonna let him talk to you like that?” one of the neighborhood kids shouted from beyond the fence. I couldn’t see which kid yelled it as there was now a wall of smoke rising between us. My anger was quickly replaced by fear.
    Pa’s lawn was shooting fire at us , and his stomping of the flames was only spreading fire to other patches of grass. Even worse, because Pa had developed kidney problems, the nerves in his feet were deadened. In horror, I watched as his trademark brown loafers caught flame as he brought them down into the inferno. The motion of raising his foot blew the flames out, at which point he’d stomp down again, igniting his shoe once more. Because he had no feeling in his feet he had no idea this was happening.
    The flames reached the edge of his property and spread to bushes that had been placed there by landscapers who had evidently also sprayed them down with heavily flammable insecticides. One by one, the shrubs turned into six-foot-tall spires of flame. It was like being in the first circle of hell, or on the set of a Mexican game show. I shouted to the neighborhood kids to get Mrs. Burns out of her house before it caught fire.
    The old man refused to leave. He’d decided that if his house was going to burn, he was going down with the ship. I had to put out the fire, and needed to find the tools to do so. Grandma’s ghost or not, I was going to have to go inside Pa’s house.
    I ran through Pa’s back doorway and up the steps into the kitchen, where I froze in my tracks. It had been so long since I’d seen the place that I didn’t even remember the layout. There was something tomblike and sealed off from time about the room
that gave me the creeps. I took a deep breath that stung in my chest. I didn’t know if it was from smoke inhalation or the lingering fear that my grandmother’s disembodied form was about to descend upon me.
    I was walking through a bizarre time capsule of my own childhood. Some cardboard blocks painted to look like bricks lay scattered on the back porch, clearly untouched since the last time my brother and I had played with them. A clock I’d painted and given to my grandma when I was four hung above the kitchen table, exactly where she’d placed it the day I gave it to her. The hands were frozen in place.
    My fear was replaced with profound sadness. Pa had been sitting in this house for years, just thinking about my grandma. He didn’t change anything about his life or his surroundings. He’d shared this home with his wife for over fifty years. She died. Some time later—who knows when?—that clock died. And clearly Pa spent the last portion of his life doing little more than sitting inside his house waiting to die as well.
    An occasional car crash here. A skunk and/or homosexuality-driven prank there. They were very minor distractions at the end of a very long life. Nothing more.
    The only thing that could be more depressing would be letting my grandpa die in a fire. I had to find a way to help him.
    I ran to the basement looking for a washbasin or bucket—nothing. I sprinted back to the kitchen. Panic was setting in as I laid my eyes on my only hope to save the day.
    Look, it’s not like I thought using a teapot to put out a raging fire was a great idea. It’s just that during a crisis, you’ve got to do something . So I filled Pa’s teapot to its brim—a whopping three to four cups’ worth of water. I ran back into the yard and dumped the water as if I was pouring tea—through the spout part. This
produced a round of applause and laughter from the neighborhood kids standing on the other side of the fence, finding their afternoon entertainment in the prospect that I might be burned alive before their eyes. I ran back in and refilled the teapot, then ran back out, only to see