{i miss paper letters}

His father was a pyrotechnical expert, contracted by cities and big corporations to execute large-scale fireworks displays.  He was world-renowned and in high demand.  His favorite word was “breathtaking”, and many people used it to describe his displays.  The production was just Breathtaking, they’d gush.

His job kept the family in limbo, constantly moving from place to place, from one school to another.  As a result, Anselm never quite managed to adjust properly to each new place before his father would come home with a new assignment and the cycle would begin again.  His mother was what his father called “a good sport”; Anselm was not.  Anselm’s resentment was quietly building, fueled by each new address.

It seemed to be easier when he was young, but the older he got the more difficult it was to find friends.  He became very solitary, but it was not an obvious change because he’d always loved to read and was a quiet person by nature.  His mother just attributed his behavior to puberty, and his father, well, he only seemed to be around when they were packing up another house and loading another truck.

That morning Anselm left for school with a larger backpack then usual.  His mother assumed he had a big load of books strapped to his shoulders; she couldn’t have been more wrong.  Inside were several flash pots, homemade and without the proper warning pilot lamps, preignition grounding or safety circuits.

As his classmates filed down the corridor for an assembly to address poor fire-drill execution, Anselm quietly slipped out a side door into the schoolyard.  He removed his backpack and began to place the devices at various points around the exterior walls of the auditorium.  Nobody saw it coming, and few made it out alive.  Many of the firemen who would’ve been charged with fighting the fire were inside to lecture the students on their recent shortcomings.

Standing alone across the street, Anselm congratulated himself on a job well done.  My, but the destruction is breathtaking, he said . . . if I do say so myself, it really, really is.