The best story recalled involved Stretch Armstrong, a childhood memento that was little more than a glorified pull toy. It was made from some sort of space-age material that could withstand any amount of stretching subjected upon it. No matter how hard his limbs were pulled, they would never snap off. And the young boys tried with all their might.

Rick worshiped his Stretch Armstrong, and it was his prized toy back that summer when he was about eight and Stan four. Stan got mad at his brother over something that neither could now remember, stole Stretch, and hid him in the oven of all places. Later that afternoon, their mother turned on the appliance to preheat it for dinner. Rick was playing happily on the kitchen floor and noticed a bright ball of flames inside the oven and pointed it out calmly to his mother. Stretch had reached his flashpoint and had burst into a dense fireball. Stan had stumbled upon dear old Stretch’s kryptonite, temperatures above four hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Their mother fearfully opened up the oven door to investigate. Rick screamed in agony at the sight of one clearly recognizable arm rising up from an otherwise formless burning chunk of plastic, emitting a dense cloud of black toxic smoke. A small secondary fire was formed by molten blobs of burning plastic dripping down onto the oven floor. Obsidian flakes of soot drifted out of the open oven, settling everywhere, like a demonic bastard son of snowfall.

Later that night, when all had calmed down, Their father used a hacksaw to cut Stretch’s remains free from the oven rack, around which it had melted, reformed, and become one with. Rick insisted on keeping the corpse, little more than a softball-sized chunk of tar-like rock with one deformed arm rising in agony. When inspected closely, it resembled Rodin’s epic bronze sculpture The Gates of Hell, with all sorts of twisted forms embedded in the charred surface. For years, Rick kept it religiously on a shelf in his room, unable to part with his incinerated toy.

Excert from: An Open Universe by Matt Arnold

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