OK, so I got the idea for this one-shot about eating strawberry pop-tarts while I actually was eating them. It's funny how little, every-day actions can put an idea in your head. Anyway, I do not, nor do I claim to, own the rights do Flight 29 Down. Please review. I experimented with tenses here, so tell me what you think.

When Melissa was a very young child, her favorite thing to do after everyone else in the house was asleep was to sneak out of her room and sit on the cold kitchen floor with a box of strawberry pop-tarts and eat them cold. She stopped doing it around the age of nine, and by the time she gets to high school she can barely remembered it.

The night before the trip, that amazing geo-camping trip she's been looking forward to all year, she finds she can't sleep. She tosses and turns but loses no energy, and so at around midnight or so she gets up and decides she is hungry.

She pads down the hallway in bare feet, wincing at the chilly floor. She gets to the kitchen and opens up the fridge, feeling a million things at once. She feels childishly apprehensive about seeing you-know-who the next day. She feels nervous at her first major trip without her parents. She feels a little bit unconfident about her ability to perform; what if she forgets everything she learned about ecology so far?; and a million other things that put butterflies in her stomach.

She forces her brow to relax and shuts the fridge. For some reason she begins to ache for strawberry pop-tarts. She turns to the cupboard and has to search for them, way in the back, crammed inside a box that threatens to fall over. She wipes her eyes in a tired way, and some force inside of her takes over. She turns around and, by sheer habit that had seemed lost to her all these years, sits down in the very center of the kitchen floor. She openes the box and takes out one pop-tart. A few pink crumbs fall to the floor as she breaks off a peice and pops it in her mouth.

Melissa eats slowly, savoring the tangy taste. She brings the pop-tart up to her mouth to take another bite, and catches her wavy reflection in the oven door across the floor. Tears well up in her eyes as all of the feeling she'd been feeling all night, the nerves, the apprehension, the unconfidence, and, above all, the childish way in which she is now behaving throws itself at her. In a sudden rage she throws the entire box of pop-tarts in her lap at the oven, at that stupid reflection of the helpless child who is crying. She sits there for a second longer before getting up, leaving the box where it is, going into the bathroom, sneering at her reflection, and whispering, "You are disgusting." She vows never to behave in such an immature way again.

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About a month later, Melissa will break that vow. She will spend her first night home after the "trip", after the biggest event that could ever shape her life. She will not be able to sleep, and so she will get up after everyone else has gone to bed. She will, as she had done the night before she left, walk into the kitchen, and, with a strange sense of de-ja-vu, grab the box of strawberry pop-tarts from the cupboard, the box still mangled from hitting the oven. She will sit down in the middle of the floor and pick apart the pop-tart with a bite missing, not caring that it is one month old and kind of stale. In a sleepy, dream-like state that puts a slight smile on her face, she will eat the entire box. Melissa will then get up, enter the bathroom, smile at her reflection, and whisper, "You are home."