The Basement

“Today is the day.” Paul told himself as he went down, stairs to his basement. When he got to the concrete basement, he searched for the light. The machine that took up most of the basement was huge. “People said that a 16 year old can’t build a machine like this, but they were wrong. They told me I could never succeed in my experiment. They will be proven wrong.”

Paul opened the freezer and got out the patent. Then he turned on the machine and placed wirers carefully on the patient, as he walked over to his homemade control panel. Paul was proud that he had spent all of those months planning, drawing blueprints, gathering parts from the junkyard, to finally build the machine. His mother had taken him to a doctor once, she thought he had something wrong with him because he stayed in the basement for hours every day, but there was one thing his mother never even thought to do. She never went to the basement. Paul’s mother never went in the basement because she was very claustrophobic. She was just didn’t think he could be doing anything wrong. The only thing she was worried about was Paul’s mental health.

Paul went to many psychiatrists, but he never said what he was doing in the basement. He thought that they would say that he is insane, but in his mind he was a genius. He thought that after what happened he would never be the same, but that was about to change.

Paul was fiddling with the dials on the control panel trying to generate enough electricity to make the patient wake up. Then all of a sudden the lights began to dim. The machine was almost too powerful and Paul was very excited, but then it all went wrong.

Sparks started flying from the machine, the power was failing, and then the machine caught on fire. It was over. Paul had lost faith in this machine that he spent all summer building.

As his father ran down the stairs with a fire extinguisher, Paul stared at the fire and thought, ‘People told me I needed to stop grieving over the loss of Fluffy, my cat, but I didn’t listen.’