How to Brand Your Own Lip

Yesterday was the first cool day of the season.  I love fall!  And so I was thrilled to come home from work and put on jeans, a sweatshirt, and my slippers.  Later in the evening, I had the brilliant idea of roasting a marshmallow over the flame of my gas stove burner.  I'd never tried this before, but heard it works pretty well.  I headed for the kitchen.

Being the clever girl that I am, I chose a fork with a plastic handle, so I wouldn't burn myself.  This detail makes the story extra ironic.  Just wait.

I lit the burner and proceeded to catch the mallow on fire several times in the process of finding the best distance from the flame (in case you're going to try this at home, you have to hold it much farther away from a flame than you do embers of a fire).  Eventually I found the right distance, and watched joyfully as my little marshmallow puffed up and turned a beautiful, golden brown.

I turned off the burner and gave it a couple seconds to cool.  Then I carefully removed the treat from the fork.  I took a bite.  Mmmmmm.  As I savored the first bite, I realized that a small lump of marshmallow had stuck to the fork when I removed it.  Without thinking about it, I put the fork in my mouth to eat off the leftover mallow.

I will never know how that particular bit tasted.  As I began to close my lips around the fork, I was started by the sound of a very hot metal fork cooling quickly from the saliva in my mouth.  The reaction was so fast that it didn't even feel hot- I just heard the sound and felt the steam in my mouth.

Feeling stupid for not realizing that the fork would stay hot longer than the marshmallow, I tossed the offending utensil in the sink.  I finished my marshmallow and returned to my life.

A couple hours later I realized that there were rough patches on my lower lip.  I headed to the bathroom for a closer inspection.  Sure enough, there, branded into the skin inside my lips, were the four tines of the fork.  I had branded myself.  Oddly enough, it didn't hurt at all.  Not sure how I managed that.  I'm just gifted, I guess.

Or something.