Spawn of the Pickle Loaf

Part 7, In Which Our Tragic Hero Reminisces

If you permit me, dear reader, I'd like to speak a bit about my childhood before we resume our tale. Introspection can be a valuable tool for passing the time, and I've recently begun to suspect that apprehending my strange circumstances might first require me to apprehend myself. 

After all, a survivor like me must battle a whole gaggle of demons. Exterior demons, like our sentient pickle loaf sandwich, for instance; but also interior demons, those cancerous mutations of the mind. Perhaps the key to something important has lodged itself somewhere in there--inside of my gray matter. That's the point I'm attempting to convey, dear reader.

My unfortunate condition first manifested itself a lifetime ago, when my scalp barely cleared doorknobs and I ran instead of walked most places. Oh, I was a creative youth back then, spending my afternoons wandering the backyard, collecting odds and ends from the thicket fringing my mother's property. Pinecones, acorns, cicada shells, flower petals, feathers—name an agrarian object, and I'd probably stored it in the rusty iron bucket beneath the porch. 

Or else, I was locked inside my room, nose lodged in one of my late father's dusty tomes. his copies of Hans Christian Anderson and Robert Lous Stevenson, Mary Shelly, Edgar Allen Poe, H. P. Lovecraft. Classic flights of fancy—a far cry from the corrupt literature of our present time. 

My mother was away the morning and the afternoon, but when she arrived in the evening, she would open my bedroom door and gasp in frustration at the state of my living quarters. My bed unmade! My floor littered with linkin logs and pine needles and figurines I'd constructed out of sticks and styrofoam cups! The cups were the worst, I realize in retrospect, because they came apart in little chunks whenever I engaged them in battle, and the microscopic white bits lodged themselves into the carpet and refused to dislodge.

My mother would shriek at me and rebuke me. Her green eyes would blaze with a fiendish light, and her frizzled hair would bounce around her neck like the tangled mane of a sasquatch. She straightened it every morning, but it was a vain habit, dear reader, because her brown tresses came loose within hours.

Regardless, after some minutes of howling and cursing, she would storm away and settle into the living room couch and gape at the television screen for the remainder of the evening. Did I remedy the problem, you ask? Did I ever clean up my mess like she wanted me to? Did I take her threats to heart? The answer is no, of course. 

My lifestyle was already becoming habitual, and my mother rarely followed-through with her promises of retribution. Besides, it didn't matter whether or not I obeyed; my dearest mother would locate something—spilled milk in the fridge, the toilet seat in the wrong position, scattered rolls of kleenex beneath the bed--yes, she would find something out of place, no matter what. And what incentive does a child possess to change his ways, if the consequence is always the same? See? I'm not the sole author of my circumstances, now am I?

Failing to finish my food—that was another of my shortcomings. My dearest mother really got on me for that. Regretfully, I was a daydreamer and a procrastinator when it came to eating, just as I was regarding most things. I played with my food, molded my wonder bread into ivory castles, staged sprawling battle scenarios with my pork n' beans. And hours passed, and the components of my meal became lukewarm and plasticky. They became the hardened consistency of spoiled edibles, which, to my passive interest, made them even more like playthings. 

Meanwhile, my mother would storm in during a commercial break and assure me that this was the final straw, that she would never cook for me again if I insisted on wasting the fruits of her labor. That she would cease restocking the fridge. That she would lock me inside my room for a few days, and we would just see how I felt about pork n' beans after that! 

Again, the threats never came to pass--though her temper certainly was frightening!--and I grew accustomed to doing whatever I pleased, leaving my knickknacks in paces, eating only a few casual bites of my pickle loaf sandwich. She would clean the mess up eventually. It was inevitable. 

The visions began when I was a teenager. I would start awake early in the morning, my pajamas and blankets soaked with sweat, reeling from the horrors of my reoccurring dream. Blood-red clouds. Acid rain. A fiery apocalypse. Yes, a portal would rip open the skies, and horrible preternatural powers would come surging out. This was our future--I knew with the certainty of a clairvoyant. I knew that mankind was doomed, that our days were numbered, that our daily comings and goings were pointless before the netherworld abyss of the future.

Perhaps that abyss offers an explanation. Who knows what eldritch aberrations could emanate from a gash in the space-time continuum? I certainly don't. Come to think of it, I never saw the phenomenon directly. But a man must weigh the benefits and risks when confronting possible mutation.            

This is neither here nor there. What matters is I was cut-out to be a lone survivor long ago, because I could see things no one else could, not the scientists, not the religious zealots; yes, my foresight made me prepared, and now that same foresight suggests that my disappearing sandwich might very well be a byproduct of the advancing void, an eldritch monstrosity manifested in the most common of places. 

The worst scenario I can imagine and, therefore, the most likely.