PodCastle 768: The Consequences of Microwaving Styrofoam

* Author : Leah Ning

* Narrator : Peter Adrian Behravesh

* Host : Matt Dovey

* Audio Producer : Devin Martin

*

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PodCastle 768: The Consequences of Microwaving Styrofoam is a PodCastle original.

Content warning for terminal illness

Rated PG-13

The Consequences of Microwaving Styrofoam

by Leah Ning

We meet when we’re sixteen, and the Spark pops bright orange between us the moment our eyes meet. I don’t want to be friends with her. She’s strange and aloof and unkind. But the Spark is the Spark, and everyone saw it, so soon I’m alone. No one else wants to be friends with her either, so they draw away from me by association.

Now she’s the only one who’ll share a lunch table with me. We sit as far apart as possible, me with my sandwich dripping jelly onto the plastic bag I’ve placed carefully beneath it and her loudly slurping microwaved tomato soup from its Styrofoam bowl. I think about telling her she shouldn’t microwave it and don’t. Maybe if it kills her I won’t have to bother with her or that fucking Spark.

It occurs to me that maybe I, too, am strange and aloof and unkind. It also occurs to me that maybe she’s not the reason no one wants to be friends with me.

I search for ways to get rid of the Spark in incognito browser tabs, rubbing at wrists that weren’t sore before we Sparked. Google just brings up dry Wikipedia pages on the first appearances of the Spark fifty-seven-point-five years ago and chirpy blog posts by Spark-bonded best friends for life who just can’t get enough of spending time together. I pretend to gag even though I’m alone in my room and it’s 2 a.m.

Yeah, my Spark was definitely an excuse for my “friends” to get away from me.

At lunch, she massages swollen wrists over her half-finished soup. So that’s what I’m feeling. I don’t want her pain any more than I want her friendship, and I tell myself that’s why I wonder if eating from microwaved Styrofoam can cause swollen wrists. I wonder if making friends with her will make me someone worth being friends with. Maybe if I’m a good friend.

I scoot closer along the plastic bench, shiny with years of bottoms scooting closer, and quietly tell her that maybe she shouldn’t microwave Styrofoam because it might make you sick.

She informs me that some Styrofoam is actually microwave safe and invites me to fuck straight off.

I scoot back along the bench to my carefully placed baggie, littered with gobs of strawberry jelly, and it occurs to me that just because we are both strange and aloof and unkind doesn’t mean that we’d make good friends, Spark or not. My wrists throb.

She looks at me from the corners of her eyes and asks if I’ve ever considered putting less jelly on my sandwich.

I inform her that I like that much jelly and invite her to fuck straight off.

She tells me her name is Kelly.

I tell her mine is Arthur.

I silently promise I’ll be a decent friend even if I don’t like her. Maybe it’ll even turn me into a good person.

Maybe.

We don’t date. Everyone assumes we’re dating anyway, because Spark-bonded so often do. But we don’t date.

I come to love her in a slow and hesitant way that has nothing to do with romance. She keeps on microwaving her soup in the Styrofoam bowls provided by the school cafeteria. I keep on using so much jelly it drips from my sandwich in big wobbly splats. The soreness in my wrists,