The Matchbox House
Photo by Jeffrey Czum from Pexels The Matchbox House By Swadha Rawat Struck a match Or in this case, well more than a few: A bubbling vat of oil, a hunk of smouldering charcoal and Another shovelful of hard, dark coal fuel. Covered your ears, breathed in the smoke: Wispy strands and dissipating tendrils caressing your hair. Set a clock, and forgot, that it was ever there. A decade, two, three and four Then struck it with a baseball bat when the buzzing alarm wouldn’t stop. Eyes still closed, In a slowly warming up room: stifling, festering, irrevocably altering. The ice starts dripping down, pooling round the refrigerator But the taps run dry, coated with a fine layer of corrosive acid. (Entire biomes lost, entire species gone, entire livelihoods lost to the seemingly inevitable crawl of time.) It was not inevitable, it could be stopped But still the man in the room lies, half asleep, deaf to his own wheezes, Resting upon a bed built from t