It was the final straw, Arthur had had quite enough of it all, and today, well, today was the time to act. It was that last commercial, that last glimpse of the happy couple dancing through the rain before being distorted to gigantic proportions as they slipped behind a bottle of some nasty aftershave. While Arthur assumed it must have been thought of as an exceedingly artistic shot by some soulless coked-up advertising troll in a suit, the writhing blurs reminded him more of someone stirring a chicken tikka masala. When a human being is forced to take solace in his only friend, the last thing that friend should do is interrupt the Bergman movie playing on them and instead attempt to sell him some designer smelly water… it was the last betrayal, that last moment of ironic contrast that a fragile soul could bear.

 The oven door creaked open and he peered inside. Art wasn’t really sure if he should have been embarrassed by the state of the interior, never really grasping the concept of cleaning an oven he mainly used to cook those things in foil trays that would otherwise cause his oven to explode. It was, he decided, just a form of mild fascism, another one of those schemes designed to guilt him into buying things for reasons of genetics… like mothers day cards to his gin-addled mother, fathers day cards for a father who he’d last seen trying to dance with a stranger’s dog before they’d taken him away, oh, and those valentines day cards he sent to himself every year so the postman wouldn’t think he was a loser. Mind you, the latter hadn’t worked last year, the postman had cottoned on to his scheme when searching through his mail for money and had decided to swap some envelopes about. The postman had watched Art’s face light up as he’d noted the unfamiliar pink envelopes. Art had gone into a frenzy of delight, tearing them open right there on the doorstep, and then tried to work out why the gas-board had a crush on him, and, after he’d open the next card, trying to work out why someone thought his name was Ethyl.

 “Well,” said Art to nobody in particular, “he’ll be laughing on the other side of his face when he notices the mail piling up”. With a one-fingered salute to the cosmos he plunged his head into the oven’s depths and began groping blindly with his arm for the knob. Eventually Art was inhaling gas mark 4 and wondering if he’d remembered to shut the window, it didn’t seem to be doing much… plus, much to his surprise, it was getting bloody warm in there, he could feel sweat beginning to break out on his brow and the smell of burnt hair beginning to mix with the odour of the gas. He realised at this point in the story it would be far too clichéd to light a match to have a look around… and yet… there did seem to be some source of light, a little spot of brightness just at the periphery of his vision.

 “What the hell?” thought Arthur as he lifted his head from the middle shelf to examine the spot of light in the back of the rusted and soot-caked oven. There was definitely something there… he reached out and prodded at what he discovered to be a small jagged hole… an extremely hot one. “MOTHERFU…” he struck his head on the top of the oven, ricocheted gracefully off the shelf, and tumbled out onto the kitchen floor in an untidy heap.

 When he regained consciousness he tried to reassess the situation, finally deciding to turn the gas off to try and reduce the sensation of thinking through custard. He took a cigarette out and fumbled for a match. He finally found one and struck it off the wall. He then realised he had left the window open after all. He found the whole thing very anticlimactic.

 Peering back into the oven he saw that the spot of light was still there and, in fact, if he looked closer he could see a few more holes in the corners and a scattering of tiny points that made the traditionally bland back of a bog-standard oven resemble a star-filled sky. It was very pretty really, he thought to himself as he casually smashed through the back of the rusting metal with a knife sharpener. The decaying metal fell away in a reddish brown powder that puffed out amidst a scalding cloud of heat, stinging his eyes. For some reason he saw, instead of an area of wall unpainted in ten years, a brightly lit and very clean oven with a large casserole dish sitting in it.

 Oh shit, he thought, he’d knocked through the wall into the neighbour’s kitchen… his landlord was going to have him castrated… then Art realised that he lived in an end of terrace and his neighbour consisted of a steep plunge down a hillside to some railway tracks. What was far worse though was the fact that the oven, and even the casserole dish, looked very, very familiar... It was that damn dish his mother had given him as a present when she’d thrown him out of the house… the one he’d used as an ashtray for six months until, just as he was considering emptying it, he’d accidentally knocked it off the table and, in the destructive process, filled his living room with a choking cloud of ash that had made his evenings in resemble the last moments of Pompeii for the next week. He was damn sure that that dish was broken; he’d bled enough trying to tidy up its Pyrex remains. Art remembered the time he was surprised Pyrex was in his spellchecker. The whole evening was starting to freak him out somewhat.

 In a semi-trance he pulled on a threadbare pair of oven gloves he’d been using as a tea-towel for half a decade and reached through to grasp the dish. Art had to reach so far he felt his armpit hair smouldering as it came in contact with the shelf. He brought it out and regarded it. It had the dirty great chips out of it in all the right places… it was his mother’s dish… he knew it instinctively. Art placed it on the work surface and stared at it for a long time, finally lifting the lid.

 A gust of steam rose from the bubbling casserole inside, thick chunks of beef floating in rich brown gravy thick with vegetables and filling the house with an odour that brought tears of hunger and pleasure to his eyes. He’d eaten nothing but crisps and a sliced turkey breast covered in gravy powder in the last three days… he couldn’t resist, within minutes he had burnt his mouth badly but filled his stomach with the most beautiful meal he’d had in years. Art sat on the floor and rubbed his swollen stomach, staring into the depths of the mysterious oven that had provided his meal. Without the casserole producing copious quantities of steam the little window in the opposite over door was starting to clear.

 As he looked closer he felt the remaining unsinged hairs on the back of his neck rising… he could make out a fridge, a fridge with a very familiar magnet on it. Slowly, holding his breath, he looked behind him at his own, yellowed and battered, refrigerator and the remarkably similar magnet with a picture of a cockfight in progress on it that had been brought back from Uzbekistan by his drunken uncle… oh Christ, he thought, that can’t be good.

 Ten minutes, and a lot of asthmatic puffing later, he’d succeeded in extinguishing the flame that lit the other oven. His, previously flowing, locks had been reduced greatly in length, and his face was both red and no longer bearded. The familiar woozy sensation was beginning to return so he retired to stand by the window to wait for things to cool down. He tried to contemplate the situation but Art, in many ways mercifully, was not a man blessed with enough imagination to contemplate the full, terrible, implications of most situations. Mainly his brain was now maintaining a continuous “duhhhhhhhhh” noise that drowned out a lot of awkward “what if?” for his own good.

 Finally, and for one of those rare times in his life, Art came to a decision. He sorted through the knives in his kitchen drawer in search of a suitable weapon. After finding nothing sharp enough to put a dent in butter he gave up and grabbed a full bottle of Ribena from the cupboard. He hefted the weapon experimentally in his hands and, thanks in part to the fumes, felt satisfied. Lowering himself onto his knees he began sliding shelves from two ovens, one set in noticeably better condition than the other.

 Now, there’s not many graceful ways for a man to pull himself into an oven that has miraculously doubled in size, and Art failed around like an infant trying to return to the womb as he clawed his way along rusting walls until he felt the warm caress of scrubbed and gleaming metal. A few more writhing moments later he felt his head strike the oven door… well, a oven door… bracing his feet he gave a final thrust that, back in his kitchen, caused another oven door to fall off its remaining hinge and crash to the ground.

 Arthur was propelled out into a mid-air that hurriedly consolidated itself into an up-rushing floor, and then into the blunt impact of some very fetching stone tiles. He lay there, the cold stone soothing his warm body, staring up at a familiar strip-light, albeit one that did not hold the thousands of deceased insects held by the last one he’d seen. As his head rolled and his eyes focussed he saw the similarly recognisable sight of one chicken head-butting another... albeit this fridge was a shining white and the door seemed to shut properly.

 Climbing to his feet he began to look around… He was in his own kitchen… yet… yet, someone seemed to have tidied it up, decorated it, cleaned it, and generally not left it in a state that made it look like an autopsy had been performed in there at some point in its distant past. After further examination he found actual identifiable food in the fridge and the freezer didn’t resemble a glacier with faint glimpses of creatures charting the course of evolution. It looked like a page from an Ikea catalogue… in so many ways it wasn’t his kitchen… yet… yet it contained everything of the brand he would have bought if he had the money… and it was all put away where he would have put it away if he had bought it and if he’d bothered. Sure, it was all backwards, but still…

 “Er…” Art really was starting to feel woozy now. He looked again at the fridge magnet. “S’ruoy naht redrah dna reggib s’kcoc yM” it proclaimed. “Oh fuck,” thought Art, “I’ve walked into a clichéd storyline.”

 He began to investigate. The rooms were so familiar, at least the underlying bricks and mortar were, they’d just had care laid on top of them, and the carpet wasn’t just a collection of overlapping burns that created a nasty cracking sound with every footstep… in fact, there was no carpet, just laminate floor as far as the eye could see. Artworks hung on every wall, all of their occupants wearing clothes and some even of fields and other such things that really did look out of place. There were things everywhere… it took Art quite a while to recognise what they were… they were “Nice Things”… he’d seen them in pictures of people wearing “smiles” and “not crying and masturbating”

 Slowly he began to work his way through the “Nice Things”, bric-a-brac that actually served a mild purpose, or even just might serve as a memory of a past occasion or holiday… a stark contrast to that tank Art had sitting on his mantelpiece that shot small plastic pellets that would have ruined the hoover if he’d bothered with either. Amongst the shells, remote controls for mid-priced stereo equipment, what seemed eerily like a merely-ceremonial ashtray, and a couple of nice, if naive and slightly avant-garde, sculptures. Eventually he came across the photograph.

 It sat in a silver frame, not an audacious one, just a smart one. Art himself barely heeded the merits of the frame though, he was far more concerned with the picture, with the person standing to the left of the girl with the beautiful smile and the long brown hair… He was trying to work out how the hell his grinning face was staring back at him from under a large sombrero. Above the couple hung a sign saying Los Mexicano Rancho De Burro. Art wrongly identified the creature chewing on the sombrero as a “crap horse”. It was him; he could tell by the mole on his left cheek... wait… the mole was on his left cheek… he was shocked for a moment until he remembered the clichéd storyline. They looked so damn happy… It was then that he began to see the female touches littering the house, the flowers, the napkin with a lipstick kiss on it, the big basket of dirty bras next to the washing machine... He suddenly felt a burning, burning, jealousy.

 The sound of a key turning in a lock was predictable, but necessary to advance the narrative structure. Art spun around and was face to face with an equally surprised looking man, a man whose badge read “trA”

 “What… who… why… how…” the man stuttered, trying to comprehend the sight of the scruffy, charred, vagrant in his house who seemed to be sorting through his stuff. “What are you doing in my house? I only nipped out to get the wine…” the man said, before adding “to celebrate National Speaking Backwards Apart From Names Day, a tradition we uphold even in times of stress” for the writer’s convenience. Art didn’t even pause as he swung the Ribena bottle down on his doppelganger’s head.

 “MINE… MINNNNNNNE…. MINNNNNNNE!” he screamed as he bludgeoned the man senseless and hurriedly dragged him over to the oven. He stuffed the limp form through the two ovens and let him slump to the ground on the other side. He slammed the oven door shut and braced a chair against it. He did a little dance of joy. Finally, he thought, he’d lived up to his potential. He heard another key in the front door; he hurriedly washed his face and put some beans in the microwave.

 “Are you here trA? Happy National Speaking Backwards Apart From Names Day” said the girl from the photograph as she walked in and gave Art a big hug. He felt the brush of her body against him, the warmth in her embrace, and her breath on his ear, tears of joy springing to his eyes… She eased her embrace and he held her at arms length, running his eyes over her, a wide happy smile spreading across his face. She too wore a nametag, he read it and smiled.

 “Oh Amu, I’ve missed you so much, I made you dinner…” he said and pointed at the rotating thing in the microwave. She looked up at him and smiled in a way that melted his heart.

 “Aww… you’re too good to me…” she said and leant forward to give him quick peck on the cheek.

“Oh I love you… never leave me again” Art felt his longing swell within him and pulled her to him, kissing her passionately. The knee was applied expertly to his groin. He fell on the ground in a heap. “I hate to break it to you through whatever cloud of crack you’re on floating in currently, but most brother’s don’t suck their adopted sister’s tonsils regardless of the national holiday you sick fuck.” She stood in horror, kicking him in the groin every so often without realising it. “Man, you know I have to tell your wife about this when she gets home… she’s going to find it funny… this one will keep us going for a while and you’ll be unable to ever show your face at Christmas… Oh, here she comes right now… she wasn’t happy with you forgetting to say “ebydoog” backwards to her this morning as she left, she told me it showed you didn’t care.” Amu disappeared into the kitchen to try and work out why the microwave had just exploded.

 Art quietly thought to himself… well, Amu was beautiful, she had a very nice smile, lovely eyes, and an appealing personality judging by quite how happy he’d seemed in the photo, but maybe the wife might not be too bad, maybe a close second or something… heck, if it was a close second it really wouldn’t be too bad at all… maybe even a distant second might still hold a fair few redeeming features. He heard a key turn in the lock and decided he should do his best to blend in, hope for the best, and maybe try and work out a way to get his folks to unadopt Amu… He decided to try hard.

 “reilrae rof yrros m’I dna uoy dessim I ,yenoh elloH” he managed.

 “GROOOOOOOARRRRRR YOU DID IT AGAIN” Screamed the Wifebot 3000 Urban Pacification and Tidying Droid and opened up on him with its twin built-in gattling-guns and four grenade launchers.

 
 In another Kitchen, in another dimension, arT regained consciousness and started dancing up and down for joy a lot and put his feet up on a sofa for the first time in fifteen years.