Day of No Pocket Bread and Whatever May Have Transpired Thereafter

Perhaps it was the weather that was causing Winston to perspire. More likely, though, was that the creeping suspicion he had indeed forgotten his pocket bread brewed in his head like a storm cloud. You see, the very first thing that Winston does on his trip is pat his right pocket with the palm of his hand, and then the left. His pocket bread is kept in neither, but this is still a notable habit. The bread in question is stored safely in his knapsack, in the top-most pocket sealed with the Lucky Lock™ lock.

Lucky Lock™ was a juvenile cartoon program that aired on Saturday mornings from six until six thirty. The reason I am so critical of the show is due to it replacing Captain, Oh Captain, and the fact that I have been asked to retain its original trademark in order to reassure the company behind the series that I was not infringing on any of their intellectual properties. Ha, I could smile a million smiles and chuckle a million chuckles at the notion of infringing upon such a lackluster lead to a cast of fools. The premise revolved around Lucky Lock™, an anthropomorphic latch that had forgotten its own combination. To counter this (predictable) fit of mild amnesia, Lucky gathered a band of thieves to roam the world with him and extract memories from the rich, hoping to one day stumble upon his combination so that he may be whole again. The only facet of this asinine yarn that I find remotely delicious is the fact that a production house fire caused the show to end prematurely, capping off at 57 episodes and, humorously enough, leaving Lucky forever without his wish fulfilled!

Winston no doubt was more saddened by the cancellation than I. He stopped walking less than one mile into his jaunt, and softly sat the knapsack on the ground beside his feet. Kneeling down to meet it, he took hold of the lock and stuck his tongue out thoughtfully. It then dawned on him that, much like the very lock on his sack, he too had forgotten the combination! Oh, could a lock groan? Winston could, and did. The lock rattled a bit as a school bus whizzed past Winston, a chiming chorus of children rising above the engine’s steady frequency.

“Scary Perry, Legs So Hairy, How Big Are They? I’d Say Very.”
“Scary Perry, Legs So Hairy, How Big Are They? I’d Say Very.”
“Scary Perry, Legs So Hairy, How Big Are They? I’d Say Very.”

The last two were echoes of the first, and did not actually exist on our plane. Instead, they sped into Winston’s ears like a twirling top. The top took a million shapes through each revolution. 360 degrees in one direction brought faces about which Winston had long forgotten. They screamed at him, taunted him. They told him that he was nothing more than a shriveled pile of manure! They told him that he could grow up to be nothing more than human pocket bread, locked away and forgotten. With his ghastly legs, he would be a kangaroo at best. With his thick glasses, he would be a Certified Information Magnifier (CIM) at best. With his gaunt frame, the rest of his body would eventually cave in upon itself, creating a vacuum into which the memories of the rich are fed, and Lucky Lock™ would give him no thanks! Still, he elected not to cry. He was more hungry than sad, anyway, though relief was held behind a wall of thickly woven Indonesian fabrics.

To make up for this devastating outcome, he held the zipper close to his nose. On the right side, air could escape from a small opening, and this was to be his momentary life force. His nostrils flared as he took in a deep whiff, and his instincts took over. A satisfied smile began to melt into his features, and his eyes closed tightly, fueled by what he would discover in the next few seconds was nothing more than a reactive imagination. The change in appearance was instantaneous! The smell coming from within the sack must have been at least one day old, which means that even breaking Lucky Lock™ through drastic measures would yield no spoils! Crashing and bashing his way through the fibers of his bag, one that he had planted three season’s worth of flowers to earn, would be as fruitless as telling a dog to stop barking! As fruitless as a cinnamon flavoured Pop Tart!

Honest to goodness, Winston began to laugh once all of these facts started to sink into his mind. “Ha!” he shouted, falling back onto the pavement, eyes to the skies, “A day of no pocket bread; I must say that I find it funny!” He said every bit of this aloud, although it went against his nature. He repeated it four times and started a fifth chant of what quickly became a sort of incantation. He tempted the gods above and below. He stood up as a couple passed him, paying no mind.

“Ha! I must say that I find it funny!”

This was the crescendo, but it fizzled before long. He hacked and coughed after his final exclamation. Though he was not technically asthmatic, he fancied himself so. During a reluctant trip to summer camp one year, he had carved an inhaler out of wood in the crafts class, and developed a nasty habit of taking it out of his breast pocket on occasion, putting it to his lips and taking a deep breath of its nonexistent vaporous salve. This served only to ignite the ire of the truly asthmatic, a group of young ruffians (at least in Winston’s eyes) that would spend the rest of that summer using him as target practice in their off-property games of “Duck ‘n’ Twirl.” Winston was good at neither.

Still disappointed, yet invigorated by his brief explosion of energy, Winston picked up his pocket bread-less sack and continued on his long trek; a trek that would surely take the better part of the next two hours. You see, if you consult any true mapping of the area, you will find that a person staying along the main roads could easily find their way to Worcestershire Circle in two, maybe three miles. But Winston’s path, it did wind. It winded ‘round so many bends as to collapse upon itself, possibly appearing as a concrete infinity symbol from low orbit with 250x zoom. It is perfectly acceptable to be screaming at the pages right now, I would do the same! But you must understand, given the school bus incident, why Winston would prefer to slink around the canals and backyards of his pathway. The residents in this area all knew him by sight, but had never heard his saccharine voice. “Winston!” They would say. “You should be careful if you plan to hop that fence! I will admit that I have constructed a small gate just for you.” And they had. Four out of five people whose backyards Winston would pass through had indeed cut thruways into their property’s barricades. This is good, because fences confounded poor Winston. While the other children would gladly give them a hop, he respected their reason for being. He would stare at them solemnly before taking out his construction paper and a pen, the combination of which served as his tool of deduction.

Winston will tell you, if you ever have the opportunity to speak to him, that he sometimes feels he can channel a sort of “eye in the sky.” Today, he planned to use it.

Prologue II

Winston normally saved his pocket bread for the long walk back to his home on Worcestershire Circle. His house rested in the middle of a small Culdesac, but was very easy to pick out from the rest of the lavish abodes! In fact, Winston’s family was the only one on the block that abhorred garish colours, though this did not stop them from draping tinsel across the overgrown bushes after the year’s first frost. His mother would always tell him that the only acceptable decoration for any time of the year is crimson tinsel, and this notion would, at risk of spoiling the later events of young Winston’s life, affect him profoundly.

But there were, at last estimate, approximately five miles of intertwining travel paths betwixt the schoolyard (the farthest end of the learning facility, with the front of the building facing the linoleum plant) and Casa de Perry. This was an excruciating task for developing legs. As a matter of fact, and you will find many of those in this story, one of the other things that Winston was teased about was having quite enlarged leg muscles!

He often reflects on these insults on his daily walks, the least insulting of which involved the children calling him “Scary Perry, Legs So Hairy, How Big Are They? I’d Say Very.” He muttered this to himself on this particular day. A day that would come to be known, first in his leather-bound Little Dreamer journal and later, much later, in an unfinished children’s book that no one would ever see save for a stack of frightening illustrations, as Day of No Pocket Bread and Whatever May Have Transpired Thereafter.

Prologue

“You do not know what you are doing with that golden bionic scepter! It is an untested device that is highly combustible, and we are twenty million feet from… the Sun!”

The voice of the goodnik echoed through an artificially generated chamber of egg crates that was meant to simulate the feeling of being very close to our solar system’s Sun. The only problem this time was that the chamber had separated from its mother vessel and had, in fact, traveled very close to the Sun!

“Ha ha ha,” the villain laughed. He was wearing a particularly thin layer of sheet metal that had been crafted and welded together in such a way as to represent the fragility of human beings. But he was not one! That is what he found most humorous about his outfit.

He continued. “I do not care what happens to me, because I am indestructible, you fool!”

The hero, whom we will now refer to as “Jonathan Tumble,” was very concerned at this point. “Well, I think that you should put it down, you rat, because what you do will certainly send the galaxy into an uproar.” He began to pace back and forth as if to deliver a speech.

“In fact, I believe it is this very uproar that is the key to your undoing. How do you know, if you are so vastly intelligent, that you are completely indestructible? Have you submitted your body to otherworldly tests of an impossible magnitude? My deduction, naturally, is that you have not. If you had prepared yourself for this very moment, then the entire universe would be a crater thanks to your selfish tests!”

The villain shrieked. “How did you know?” He then burst into a ball of particles, and Jonathon neatly caught them in a space net and said, “Now I am going to take out the trash. Literally.”

A young boy began to hoop and holler. “Hooray, he has done it again!”

But, friends, what part could this young boy be playing in this vast space opera? None! It was a young Danny… I mean Winston Perry, sitting in his parents’ lounge room and enjoying a rousing finale to episode number 336 of Phantom Jonathon: Space Tumbler.

“Winston,” his mother howled, her tone that of a warmonger, “how can you sit there and watch those darn television programs all day long?”

“But, mother,” he replied, already feeling the sensation of dragging feet and a plummeting level of enthusiasm, a potent and easily triggered tingling that was all too familiar. “This is a very well-written science fiction show that I have been following since it first began airing in the early 1980s. I do not see why I should stop watch…”

A sharp pain cut him off, in actuality a finger’s nail, digging into the fat of the back of his neck. This is an important descriptive distinction to make about young Winston, illud est the fat of his neck was something uncommon amongst his peers. Like a young lion cub, the rear of his neck trunk was home to a looser but thicker rumple of skin. This made it very convenient for his elders, all of which had little trouble grabbing the rapscallion by his neck and carrying him hither and thither. I am sure that none of you fair readers are surprised in the least by his corresponding chagrin!

In fact, his aforementioned peers took any and every opportunity to refer to poor Winston as “Rumple-loose-skin,” a play on the fictional fable character Rumpelstiltskin. I will not bore you with that fiend’s particular story, because I have always found it to be droll and unimaginative. A real rube’s tale, if you will. Whenever these malicious minors would rain these insults upon Winston, he would ball up like an armored ‘dillo and repeat endlessly to himself, “I am hereby proclaimed as the King O’ So Bold, dashing and daring and worthy of gold, worthy of prophecy hereby untold, worthy of chalice, ever young, never old.”

Repeating it so would make his head light, his feet even lighter. He began to dance; first about the floor, waxed to a reflective shine. His classmates appeared frozen, statues in a mist beyond his eyesight, beyond the glasses that he no longer needed in this enlightened state of being. Then his waltz sprang higher, higher, ever higher until he was meeting the stars themselves. The squares scattered about Hollywood’s mangy streets are only emblems of falsehoods and a fairy’s tales, mementos of idols that promote idleness. These were real stars, spaced no farther apart from one another than a spoon would be from a bowl full of cereal. Spaced no farther apart than space itself.

Winston’s eyes opened to see an especially large star tipping its hat.

“Hello, Wendell.”

“Winston is my name, but that is incredibly close.”

The star’s welcoming smile quickly rotated 180 degrees clockwise. Then counterclockwise that exact amount before returning back to the state of its upside being overturned.

“Such insolence!” It shouted, pointing at Winston directly, accusingly.

Winston was shocked! He started to spin around, looking in horror as the other stars began to frown, as well. They began to close in on him; their maws open wide, revealing perfectly sharpened incisors. It was almost as if they were going to… eat him alive! In uninspired defense, he balled up like an armored ‘dillo and repeated endlessly to himself, “I am hereby proclaimed as the King O’ So Bold, dashing and daring and worthy of gold, worthy of prophecy hereby untold, worthy of chalice, ever young, never old.”

And just like that, he awoke in the classroom; still a victim to countless insulting volleys from those around him. This terrible cycle would repeat until the day ended and he began his march, homeward bound.