It started one morning when there was no butter in the house. Normally no butter means that you’d use jelly or peanut butter or cream cheese or just some random oil. Not in this house. In this house, no butter meant no toast. Because toast was the the only way that Morgan could get out the door.
You see, toast wasn’t just toast. Toast stood for more than a piece of bread that was browned on both sides and then covered in a thin – only thin – layer of butter from the cows next door who only ate clover and an occasional sunflower so the butter was like clove cigarettes with a hint of summer.
The bread wasn’t just bread either. This was brown bread – the Irish brown bread that weighed more than any other bread could. It was dense, it was chewy, it was something you ate when you needed something to stick with you for sixteen hours and make your tummy happy.
Morgan needed her toast and butter. She needed it because it was the key to leaving the house. Unlike normal houses, her house had locks that scanned for the food consumed before opening. Based on the nutritional profile that her nutritionists established for her, she had to eat brown bread, with a thin (only thin) later of butter from the cows next door before the house felt she was sufficiently nutrified… nurtiented… the word that means she had all the right vitamins and minerals and mix of food in her system to be a productive member of society.
If she didn’t eat it, the house kept her inside and away from everyone else. To protect them from her and her from them.
Why? Because when Morgan wasn’t in perfect balance, Morgan got mad.
And when Morgan got mad, the world burned.
I wish that were a joke or a turn of phrase. Remember the forest fires that one summer that burned down millions of acres? Morgan didn’t get her 10am snack, no time for lunch so she ate a granola bar (full of sugar and fully processed crap) and later that day, still with no time to eat, had black coffee. By 5pm, her hunger-fueled rage was quick and vicious and she loved to watch things burn.
The government didn’t want Morgan to leave the country – she was useful in a rage-attack weapon kind of way but they also couldn’t let her wander around the population without some protections in place. So they sat down, Morgan in a temperature controlled room with a kitchen that was stocked multiple times a day, with a comfy bed, comfy couch, and everything she could want at her fingertips. They met through a video feed.
The first day, Morgan tried to go into the room but being the only woman in a room full of scared, overly confident, arrogant, and vulnerable men made her catch the plants in the room on fire and blow up the listening devices that the spies had placed in key locations. See, another reason why the government needed to keep her around and happy. Controlled rage is what they tried to call it at first. Giving them the sense that they had ownership of it. Directed rage was another phrase they tried. Morgan, from her comfy couch and eating her blueberry muffin said no.
Hers was incandescent rage – blinding, beautiful, and completely outside the control of a group of scared men. Morgan and the men didn’t talk for three days while the men tried to figure out strategies and approaches, ways to exploit her weakness. When she kept setting their shoelaces, their ties, and their pens on fire, from rooms further and further away they realized defeat. They asked Morgan what she needed. She said food, sleep, and an comfortable place to escape everything. They built her a house, installed locks that scanned her body for precise nutritional balances, limiting the hangry urges, and set her off in her life.
Morgan was fine with this until that morning she had no butter. Locked in a house that thought it knew better, by men who were trying to control her, she smiled.
She melted metal nails and screws, burned the wood, drywall to ash in an instant.
She picked up her purse and walked over the smoking pile that was the doorway.