Couch Burners Anonymous

The setting sun shined brightly through the opened window on the third floor of Stalnaker Hall. Groggily, Alex got out of his comfortable desk chair and ambled towards the door, ready to face another harsh, fall Morgantown wind. As he descended the stairs he wondered how his most recent project was doing; the students involved in the group seemed to be unresponsive to his ideas. What a laugh, he thought, “The group,” a silly idea started in a college dorm room that turned into what was being called “WVU Students Who Care.” Really, it was “Couch Burners Anonymous,” a WVU spirit organization started to cash in on the serious money that was available to be made by rabid students wanting guaranteed football tickets. Well, thought Alex, we care about WVU, just not in the way that everyone thinks we do. Now he even heard that the papers were crediting his group for the decrease in couch burning in the city limits. Alex wasn’t that naïve, he knew that people were burning less couches because the football team was garbage, they couldn’t even beat the nonconference opponents, what was going to happen when the big dogs came to town.
As he opened the front door of Stalnaker, he was initially shielded from the wind by the large pillars that made the balcony of the large building. As he gazed out upon the campus, he started to think about how beautiful the school looked in the fall: like something out an Irish fairytale. The trees were beginning to change colors and lose their leaves, reminding everyone of the cold weather to come, yet no one was depressed by the impending winter. They were happy, frolicking in the fallen piles of leaves blown up against the buildings by the wind. As Alex watched the kids playing, he suddenly realized that he wasn’t happy. Those kids, they were happy, jumping up and down without a care in the world, not trudging through the cold wind to another meeting where no one would listen to anything he had to say. Although the campus was beautiful this time of year, it only brought more misery to Alex than happiness.
As he opened the door to the Mountainlair, a sight inside suddenly drove the realization from his mind. The students in his group were gathered around outside the meeting room, sitting on the floor designing spirit posters for the impending game. Alex was so pleased that suddenly his dark thoughts were no longer important, he could no longer remember what the pleasant fall scenario had made him realize—the only thing that mattered was that his students were happy. And he was happy, strangely.
Alex began to help his students with posters, while musing over the thought that perhaps his students were energetic enough to make a difference, and that perhaps people were burning less couches because they DID care about the university. That was a lot of perhaps. As the sun slowly disappeared behind the beautifully colored mountains, the entire WVU campus was alight with a roaring orange flame, almost as if it had become the flame of a candle.