Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 3 (1925-03).djvu/97

 ''A Different Story, Off the Beaten Path, Is This Tale of a Match That Fulfilled Its Destiny''

HE began her life as a match along with several hundred million near relatives of the great family of pitch-pine, in the factory of the Emerald Match Company, of Scranton, New Jersey.

She had not realized her inferiority until she was shut up tightly in the close quarters of what was to be for a long time her home. Fate placed her in that particular kind of box which was labeled as a "Product of Finland, Average Contents Sixty Sticks." There was also other printed information on the box-label, couched in some Scandinavian language for anyone who might be able to read it.

Life in a family, even one averaging sixty members, is a decidedly different matter from being one item in a phalanx, a horde, of hundreds of millions, all exactly alike. Just here was where the thin match's troubles began. She was different. In her ease it was not a mere slip of the machine. It was natural depravity. She had grown a trifle too close to the bark in the original tree. Along one of her slim sides there was a brown streak, which set her off from the others like a touch of the tar brush. Then, she was thin—altogether too thin for a respectable match. Exact conformity to type is expected among matches. Her inconsiderable cubic area was rather less than half what it should have been, and besides all this, her head had a decided, an unmistakable, hitch to one side.

Her box, along with fourteen gross of precisely similar boxes, was shipped to a Nashville jobber, and she learned next to nothing of this world's experiences until her box, with twenty-three others, was placed one sunny morning in a cent-in-the-slot machine on a cigar counter in Chattanooga.

Here she got her first intimation that she was different. It was very close quarters—would be, of course, until the box found a purchaser and her box-mates began to go out one by one to fulfil their destiny. She began to receive cool jostles, cold shoulders, from the other matches, her particular near neighbors. Here, too, she had some experience of coal smoke; rather premature, but inevitable in Chattanooga.

One memorable day there came the familiar snick of an inserted cent and the rasp of the lever, and her box dropped out and went into the pocket of a young man who had bought it to light cigarettes. There was wild excitement and no little speculation among the matches. They were like troops on the very verge of an action. The young man gave them plenty of action. He used the first thirteen matches very quickly, which made a good deal more room in the box, and then there was a long undisturbed period while the box remained in the