Upon returning home after five forgettable years
He chose the largest styrofoam cup they had. He pulled a spigot. Slowly, ominously, the cup filled with superheated black serum.
He emptied three sugar packets into it, then made the mistake of trying to use a plastic stirrer. The cup was too deep. He dropped it. Involuntarily he pictured it twisting as it sank, its candy-red surface warping, bubbling, and cracking in the boiling-hot liquid. It settled in a heap of plastic slag at the bottom and the coffee commenced to leech out the potent petroleum-byproduct nerve toxins that are the molecular building blocks of plastic stirrers. The coffee would be bitter at the top, sweet and brain-damaging at the bottom.
He left, turning away from the dizzying lights of the Exxon and starting across the pitch-black field behind it. He could see nothing but the burned-in afterimage of the gas station's sodium lamps. He imagined the field full of rabbit holes and land mines. On he walked. The wind howled. In one stiff, freezing hand he held his bookbag. In the other hand, the styrofoam cup patiently burned through the various layers of epidermis and dermis.
He keyed his way into the lab, set down his things, sat at his desk in the dark, and took a sip, instantly obliterating every taste bud on the top surface of his tongue. It would take months for the damaged tissues to heal, during which time he would taste nothing. He swallowed. The coffee laid second-degree burns down his esophagus, ignited the lining of his stomach, pooled at the bottom of his gut, and began releasing its payload. One by one his horrified internal organs recognized the potent mix burning its way through his veins. His heart pounded. His liver shuddered. The skin on his torso registered the heat radiating from within. He glowed fiercely in the infrared.
As the last traces of California in his system screamed and died, a muscle somewhere on his face twitched. The briefest impression of a grin, or a sneer, flickered there. The hour of fate had struck. He was back. It was time to get to work.