Life with Toaster

There was no use in pretending anymore; that day had come, that awful day of reckoning that Lamont Sesame-Bagelton and all of the other bagels in the Hollandanse family kitchen had feared for so very long, the kind of fear that is fixed in the imagination and creeps into the visions of sleep, changing sweeping spectacles of rainbow-capped cotton-candy tree orchards into hideous sights filled with darkness and flashes of insidious green flame, nightmares of the sixth degree, nay, of the seventh degree. Lamont gazed down into the giant double mouth of metal and let out a hideous yawp of sheer horror.

“My gosh!” he yelled, “Not the toaster! He is great in the day of breakfast, yay, great and very terrible in the day of brunch. Who can withstand him in that day, in that terrible day when there is no long–”

Lamont was dropped down into the stainless steal jaw of the toaster while Alasdair Hollandanse set the machine to “lightly toasted.” Lamont wished that he could sweat; the heat began to rise slowly at first, gradually become warmer and warmer. He began to blow furiously in many small bursts (he had asthma), but it was no use! Oh no! Lamont thought to himself, his thoughts becoming more and more incoherent as the time ticked on and the temperature began to rise, My goose is surely cooked now!

Wesley le Singe was a toaster. When he was young, he used to sit and toast with the other toastlings in the warm sunbeams that filtered through the Hollandanse’s kitchen window while the lilacs bloomed in the window-box on the lattice, but time is a cruel mistress. The yard sale changed many things; a lot of good toasters were lost; Wesley was one of the lucky ones. His life was reduced to that of a machine: wake-up, toast, watch the world outside the window, perhaps toast again, fall asleep to watching the darkness, repeat. He was only a shell of the toaster he once was. From his perch on the kitchen counter, he wondered if this was all that life held for anyone. One morning, after contemplating such things, Alasdair Hollandanse dropped a bagel into his left slot. He thought nothing of it, that is, until the terrible yawping began.

“Mercy, mercy!” Lamont screamed, “Have mercy on me, good toaster! What has any bagel done so terrible that all of us must suffer your eternal wrath and fury, a fury that is very terrible?”

Wesley reeled back in shock. He ejected Lamont out and up into the air. The bagel fell behind the toaster and the wall.

“What was that all about?” asked Wesley.

“Oh thank you and heaven bless you, sir!” said Lamont, “I was being quite baked alive back there. You saved me!”

“What were you doing back there? You’re a bage; what did you suspect?”

“Fire and brimstone and agony and death!”

“Oh my!”

“But you have saved me, most merciful toaster, sir!”

“I wouldn’t say that; I spat you out just about as much in shock and surprise than anything else. If anything did save you, it was that blood-curdling scream that you had raised up with such a violent furor as to raise the toasted!”

Wesley then said how very sorry he was about the toasting of bagels, and Lamont said that he had misjudged the toaster. All in all, they talked for a very long time and became fast friends within the space of not many hours. That day was a kind of rebirthing for Wesley, a new day dawning in place of the night he had been living in for the longest of times. Lamont continued to live between the Wesley’s back and the wall, and Alasdair Hollandanse never figured out what had become of his breakfast that morning. They would just sit there together, Wesley describing to Lamont the world outside of the window; Lamont would then say all of the things he wished they could go out to do in that world, all the adventures that were to be had by a bagel and a toaster. They would do everything, fly on the backs of birds, climb to the tops of trees, walk along the pavement stones in search of green mosses. During the night they would talk about many things both real and imagined. Yea, they had many conversations in the light of that kitchen widow where the lilacs bloomed in the window box upon the lattice, chattering the time away as their body of steal and body if bread began to deteriorate, turning by inches red and green, respectively, all the time moving if ever less than an inch and only during the jarring motion of the Hollandanse family’s breakfast toasting and the occasional odd-toasting later in the day. There they stood upon the kitchen counter, still as standing stones, doing nothing but talking everything, continuing to redden and green as Alasdair Hollandanse and wife Velva began to grey and the children to grow tall and spindly.

One day, many years from that day their lives were brought together, when Lamont grew rife with green mold and had a horrible cough and Wesley was covered in red rust and either barely warming or burning black the Hollandanse family’s breakfast, the two began to contemplate their life of friendship.

“I suppose we didn’t do anything, really,” said Lamont queasily.”

“Perhaps it was enough to talk about all that one might do with legs and the latchkey to exist the house.”

“Perhaps, perhaps.”

Wesley and Lamont, for the first time in a very long time, were silent. They smelt the boiling up of Velva Hollandanse’s morning coffee and the clicking of the dog’s nails across the tile floor. Orange juice flooded mellifluously down into a cup while the Maine coon cat was purring for a glass of milk. The tea kettle whistled violently and the scent of diverse meats cooking alongside eggs trickled over to the pair upon the kitchen counter.

“Well,” said Lamont, punctuating the injection with a nasty sort of dry hacking, “It has been the lark.”

“Yes,” said Wesley rustily, “Simply splendid!”