CHOOSE YOUR OWN CATASTROPHE

You open the matchbook and feel inside for the matches. Good news: There are seven matches left! Bad news: You have not lit a match in a very long time, ever since the shoelace incident—which you admit was a poor choice because you were wearing your shoe at the time and it is very difficult to untie a flaming shoelace. Still, it did not seem fair that your parents should hide all the matches from you. It is entirely your parents’ fault that you are now out of practice and have already blown through four of the seven matches without so much as a spark.

Finally, when you are down to your very last match, you succeed! You have made fire. You are like the cavepeople in your National Geographic book. How you used to love that National Geographic book. You especially loved the picture of the woolly mammoth. Once, you made a woolly mammoth out of cotton balls and hunted it with a toothpick spear. Though now that you think about it, the toothpick never seemed quite right. It was too small, too skinny. You should have used a stick. You try to picture your woolly mammoth in your mind, which is easier now that your fire has gone out and it is completely dark again. Thanks to all your woolly mammoth thinking, you now have all the time in the world to come up with a new spear. Maybe you can use the skull-sized rock to whittle down a piece of the wood that you will no longer be able to light. Then you will really feel like a caveperson.

If you would like to whittle your wood into a spear, stay right here on this page and start whittling. Just keep whittling and whittling and whittling.

If you would like to toss the skull-sized rock around, just for a bit of fun, turn to here.

If you would like to try on the shoe because for the next several hours or possibly days, it’s pretty much that or tossing a skull-sized rock around, turn to here.

If you would like to just sit and do nothing because if you stay in the pit long enough to be discovered on the brink of death, it would be a really cool story to tell your friends and might even go viral, turn to here.