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- Story Listed as: Fiction For Adults
- Theme: Fairy Tales & Fantasy
- Subject: Miracles / Wonders
- Published: 12/30/2018
I am the baker.
Born 1951, M, from Wilmington NC, United States.jpeg)
I first noticed it at Costco. I was waiting for my wife to finish cruising all the aisles looking for samples to well…sample. She loves not knowing what will be on display each time we go. Sometimes she eats almost a whole lunch from all the little delectables on display. Other times, well, just some gummy bear vitamins, hydration drinks, and terrible coffee. I don’t go on those patrols down the aisles. She drops me off to order my pizza and a Pepsi for $1.79 - and I just people watch until she joins me.
Not this day.
*****
My wife was out making the rounds of samples, I was eating my pizza. All seemed normal. Until…
I looked down at my hand resting on the table; the table and my hand seemed to be melding into one another. I couldn’t tell where my hand ended and the table began. They were sort of blurring into one another. As if my hand was sinking into the surface of the table. I couldn’t find a defining edge between either…one was just kind of mixed in with the other.
Let me tell you, I was fascinated…at first. Then I got scared. I jerked my hand off the table like I had just touched a hot element on our stove. That scared me even worse. Because when my hand came off the table I could watch it blend in with the background as it rose in the air. Like my hand was leaking particles that sparkled and faded as they drifted away from my body.
I closed my eyes.
*****
My wife startled me:
“Kevin, are you okay?”
“Yes. Yes. I just had a weird feeling for a second.”
“What do you mean? Like a heart attack?”
My wife was always afraid I was going to have a heart attack. Probably because of the extra sixty pounds I was carrying; and the simple fact that my diet looked more like a scene from a Beer Commercial than any resemblance to a healthy meal. She looked a bit worried as I laughed that hope off.
“A heart attack? No. I wish it was though. Because whatever happened was really weird. I couldn’t tell where my hand ended and the table began.“
I wish I had a picture of the look on her face. I would have won a Pulitzer Prize. It looked like the face you would see if someone placed a differential calculus problem in front of a tenth grade English Major. A look that said: “I hear words coming out of your mouth, but I have no earthly idea what they mean.”
It made me laugh so hard I had to hold the table with both hands to keep from collapsing into a heap. I wish I hadn’t. For now both hands simply melted into the table. I stopped laughing.
I screamed.
*****
I don’t remember much after that. They tell me that they had to sedate me in the ambulance because I kept screaming that they were all too close to me. They tell me I was yelling at the EMT’s:
“Get back! Get out of my face. Oh my God, you are in my head. Get out!”
I do remember looking at my wife’s hand holding mine on the Gurney on the way to X-ray…it looked like a flesh colored blob to me. I couldn’t tell where her hand ended and mine began. When I tried to look harder, I couldn’t tell where our hands ended and the gurney began. Then I saw through the floor.
I screamed.
*****
They tell me this went on for a week or more. I don’t remember much. Just snippets of scenes that made me shiver just recalling them. I knew my voice was hoarse, rough, almost a whisper- they tell me that was from the screaming. They tell me I scared the bejeezus out of them.
And that made me laugh out loud.
Scared? Them? What about me? How do you tell someone that you can’t tell where your body ends and anything else begins? Because it wasn’t just my hands anymore. I knew I was laying in a bed but when I turned to look at my body laying there…well, it was kind of a soup. My body sort of floated around in the bed without any kind of perception of what was bed and what was body.
I now know what disorientation really feels like. What it really means. I had no orientation at all. You need to know where you are for starters, and you have to know that what is “over there” is actually …over there. I couldn’t tell. It was bad enough when my extremities melded into surfaces, it was horrifying when my body followed suit.
People would stand six or seven feet away from my bed (at first); including my wife of more than thirty years. Because at that range I wouldn’t scream. At that distance I could still tell they were somebody else and not part of me. If they came any closer than that, well, you know those pictures of Galaxies Colliding they show in Cosmological type Documentaries? You know where spiraling arms of twinkling stars, multi-colored gas, streams of plasma all reach towards each other making them almost indistinct from one another? That is what people looked like to me…if they got too close.
Now?
I long for those days, when people were separate identities with their own bodies.
Heck, I long for the days when I could still scream.
Now?
I just sleep.
*****
I don’t know where I am now. It is some kind of container. I know that. For the first time in a long long time, I can see “other people” outside the container. If a person is still what I am. I see my wife crying sometimes. I notice when she looks up. I know she is seeing me, but what is she seeing?
Her face is one of complete bewilderment, stuffed full of sadness, regret, and not understanding. I hate that look. I see it a lot. I gathered my thoughts, narrowed them to a tube, tunneled into her mind, and made a request.
I was exhausted by the effort. It took me days of trial and error before I got into her mind with my request. It was a simple one. I don’t know why any of the Egghead Scientists, Wizard Doctors, and Puzzled Shrinks didn’t think of it on their own. I “asked” her to hold up a mirror, so I could see what she was seeing when she looked at me.
“Asking” wasn’t the right word. I was way beyond speech. I had lost that particular aspect of being Human long ago. It was much closer to making a thought out of baking dough and placing it in her mind “oven”. Set the timer, sit back, and when the bell goes “ding”, the thought is fully formed and ready to come out of the Oven of her mind.
I watched it happen.
She spoke to some of the other people in a sharp commanding voice. (My wife was a fierce advocate for me when we were both Human, and that didn’t ’t stop just because I was in whatever shape I was in now. That girl loves me- and it shows.) Someone brought her a mirror.
She stepped closer with short determined steps that revealed the war going on inside her: fear fighting with love. Love won.
She held the mirror up with the reflecting side facing me. Her hands were trembling as she tried to hold it still. I almost put a thought back in the oven of her mind: “Don’t worry about your shaking hand, I can’t really tell where it ends anyway.” But that might have made her drop the mirror.
A moment later…and…well…I wish she had dropped the mirror.
I can’t scream anymore.
But I can black out.
So I did.
******
You remember those old “lava lamps” where two fluids of different viscosity would react to small changes in temperature and flow up and down on thermal currents inside the glass? Sometimes they looked like oversized blood red blobs pulsing up and down. Other times they would use cool blues or greens that moved in calming wave lapping movements instead of the always climbing lava blob look.
Well keep that picture in your mind. Now, add some glitter, a lot of glitter. Then make it all sparkle like those hand held firework sparklers you got as a kid- then make it move with just the barest outline of a human body hidden in the seams between sparkling colors and twinkling glitter.
Yep. You got it.
That’s me.
Kevin in a tube.
I blacked out.
*****
Something different is happening to me now. I don’t need the tube anymore. Nobody knows that. I haven’t told them. Not even my wife. I have tunneled into her mind (and a few others too) to plant more thoughts in the oven of her mind. Except I was beyond simple baking, like thoughts of cookies or cakes. I could place entire ranges of emotions inside a Human Mind- and watch them rise like cakes, or bubble like pies, until they emerged fully formed. I think of all Human Minds now, as tiny ovens that can be set to baking wonderful thoughts, emotions, or feelings.
In fact, I call the Human Brain: Mind Ovens. And I am the Baker.
I can’t tell anymore where anything ends. I can make beginnings. Or at least A beginning. I am reaching out to more and more Mind Ovens. I am putting in all kinds of thought pies, or cakes, or even exotic thought dishes that can be very delicate and will crumble or flake off if brought out too soon. Thought pies like: kindness, forgiveness, curiosity, tolerance, love (lots of love, it is like the yeast of Mind Ovens).
I can, and do, enter Mind Ovens to correct some problems with the recipe. Some folks are unaware of how special they are…others seem to think they are too special. I put a little tart or pastry in their Mind Oven, until it is just right. Then out it pops, a sense of being unique, grateful, and yet still part of the group.
I am the Baker.
I know no boundaries. Therefore I can give boundless energy, ideas, motivation, and hope to the Mind Ovens I encounter. And love, one of my favorite ingredients.
My wife still goes to Costco. She still tastes all the samples. She still strolls the aisles looking for treats. Only now she does it with Sam. Sam’s a good man with a clean oven in his mind. He actually likes sampling too. They are a good match.
She still comes once a week to see “me” in the tube that the Eggheads designed to keep me in a magnetic bottle with defined edges. They have no idea that I am not there most of the time. I am not bounded - but boundless.
Just like the Human Heart and Mind.
I am the Baker.
There might be more.
I am the baker.(Kevin Hughes)
I first noticed it at Costco. I was waiting for my wife to finish cruising all the aisles looking for samples to well…sample. She loves not knowing what will be on display each time we go. Sometimes she eats almost a whole lunch from all the little delectables on display. Other times, well, just some gummy bear vitamins, hydration drinks, and terrible coffee. I don’t go on those patrols down the aisles. She drops me off to order my pizza and a Pepsi for $1.79 - and I just people watch until she joins me.
Not this day.
*****
My wife was out making the rounds of samples, I was eating my pizza. All seemed normal. Until…
I looked down at my hand resting on the table; the table and my hand seemed to be melding into one another. I couldn’t tell where my hand ended and the table began. They were sort of blurring into one another. As if my hand was sinking into the surface of the table. I couldn’t find a defining edge between either…one was just kind of mixed in with the other.
Let me tell you, I was fascinated…at first. Then I got scared. I jerked my hand off the table like I had just touched a hot element on our stove. That scared me even worse. Because when my hand came off the table I could watch it blend in with the background as it rose in the air. Like my hand was leaking particles that sparkled and faded as they drifted away from my body.
I closed my eyes.
*****
My wife startled me:
“Kevin, are you okay?”
“Yes. Yes. I just had a weird feeling for a second.”
“What do you mean? Like a heart attack?”
My wife was always afraid I was going to have a heart attack. Probably because of the extra sixty pounds I was carrying; and the simple fact that my diet looked more like a scene from a Beer Commercial than any resemblance to a healthy meal. She looked a bit worried as I laughed that hope off.
“A heart attack? No. I wish it was though. Because whatever happened was really weird. I couldn’t tell where my hand ended and the table began.“
I wish I had a picture of the look on her face. I would have won a Pulitzer Prize. It looked like the face you would see if someone placed a differential calculus problem in front of a tenth grade English Major. A look that said: “I hear words coming out of your mouth, but I have no earthly idea what they mean.”
It made me laugh so hard I had to hold the table with both hands to keep from collapsing into a heap. I wish I hadn’t. For now both hands simply melted into the table. I stopped laughing.
I screamed.
*****
I don’t remember much after that. They tell me that they had to sedate me in the ambulance because I kept screaming that they were all too close to me. They tell me I was yelling at the EMT’s:
“Get back! Get out of my face. Oh my God, you are in my head. Get out!”
I do remember looking at my wife’s hand holding mine on the Gurney on the way to X-ray…it looked like a flesh colored blob to me. I couldn’t tell where her hand ended and mine began. When I tried to look harder, I couldn’t tell where our hands ended and the gurney began. Then I saw through the floor.
I screamed.
*****
They tell me this went on for a week or more. I don’t remember much. Just snippets of scenes that made me shiver just recalling them. I knew my voice was hoarse, rough, almost a whisper- they tell me that was from the screaming. They tell me I scared the bejeezus out of them.
And that made me laugh out loud.
Scared? Them? What about me? How do you tell someone that you can’t tell where your body ends and anything else begins? Because it wasn’t just my hands anymore. I knew I was laying in a bed but when I turned to look at my body laying there…well, it was kind of a soup. My body sort of floated around in the bed without any kind of perception of what was bed and what was body.
I now know what disorientation really feels like. What it really means. I had no orientation at all. You need to know where you are for starters, and you have to know that what is “over there” is actually …over there. I couldn’t tell. It was bad enough when my extremities melded into surfaces, it was horrifying when my body followed suit.
People would stand six or seven feet away from my bed (at first); including my wife of more than thirty years. Because at that range I wouldn’t scream. At that distance I could still tell they were somebody else and not part of me. If they came any closer than that, well, you know those pictures of Galaxies Colliding they show in Cosmological type Documentaries? You know where spiraling arms of twinkling stars, multi-colored gas, streams of plasma all reach towards each other making them almost indistinct from one another? That is what people looked like to me…if they got too close.
Now?
I long for those days, when people were separate identities with their own bodies.
Heck, I long for the days when I could still scream.
Now?
I just sleep.
*****
I don’t know where I am now. It is some kind of container. I know that. For the first time in a long long time, I can see “other people” outside the container. If a person is still what I am. I see my wife crying sometimes. I notice when she looks up. I know she is seeing me, but what is she seeing?
Her face is one of complete bewilderment, stuffed full of sadness, regret, and not understanding. I hate that look. I see it a lot. I gathered my thoughts, narrowed them to a tube, tunneled into her mind, and made a request.
I was exhausted by the effort. It took me days of trial and error before I got into her mind with my request. It was a simple one. I don’t know why any of the Egghead Scientists, Wizard Doctors, and Puzzled Shrinks didn’t think of it on their own. I “asked” her to hold up a mirror, so I could see what she was seeing when she looked at me.
“Asking” wasn’t the right word. I was way beyond speech. I had lost that particular aspect of being Human long ago. It was much closer to making a thought out of baking dough and placing it in her mind “oven”. Set the timer, sit back, and when the bell goes “ding”, the thought is fully formed and ready to come out of the Oven of her mind.
I watched it happen.
She spoke to some of the other people in a sharp commanding voice. (My wife was a fierce advocate for me when we were both Human, and that didn’t ’t stop just because I was in whatever shape I was in now. That girl loves me- and it shows.) Someone brought her a mirror.
She stepped closer with short determined steps that revealed the war going on inside her: fear fighting with love. Love won.
She held the mirror up with the reflecting side facing me. Her hands were trembling as she tried to hold it still. I almost put a thought back in the oven of her mind: “Don’t worry about your shaking hand, I can’t really tell where it ends anyway.” But that might have made her drop the mirror.
A moment later…and…well…I wish she had dropped the mirror.
I can’t scream anymore.
But I can black out.
So I did.
******
You remember those old “lava lamps” where two fluids of different viscosity would react to small changes in temperature and flow up and down on thermal currents inside the glass? Sometimes they looked like oversized blood red blobs pulsing up and down. Other times they would use cool blues or greens that moved in calming wave lapping movements instead of the always climbing lava blob look.
Well keep that picture in your mind. Now, add some glitter, a lot of glitter. Then make it all sparkle like those hand held firework sparklers you got as a kid- then make it move with just the barest outline of a human body hidden in the seams between sparkling colors and twinkling glitter.
Yep. You got it.
That’s me.
Kevin in a tube.
I blacked out.
*****
Something different is happening to me now. I don’t need the tube anymore. Nobody knows that. I haven’t told them. Not even my wife. I have tunneled into her mind (and a few others too) to plant more thoughts in the oven of her mind. Except I was beyond simple baking, like thoughts of cookies or cakes. I could place entire ranges of emotions inside a Human Mind- and watch them rise like cakes, or bubble like pies, until they emerged fully formed. I think of all Human Minds now, as tiny ovens that can be set to baking wonderful thoughts, emotions, or feelings.
In fact, I call the Human Brain: Mind Ovens. And I am the Baker.
I can’t tell anymore where anything ends. I can make beginnings. Or at least A beginning. I am reaching out to more and more Mind Ovens. I am putting in all kinds of thought pies, or cakes, or even exotic thought dishes that can be very delicate and will crumble or flake off if brought out too soon. Thought pies like: kindness, forgiveness, curiosity, tolerance, love (lots of love, it is like the yeast of Mind Ovens).
I can, and do, enter Mind Ovens to correct some problems with the recipe. Some folks are unaware of how special they are…others seem to think they are too special. I put a little tart or pastry in their Mind Oven, until it is just right. Then out it pops, a sense of being unique, grateful, and yet still part of the group.
I am the Baker.
I know no boundaries. Therefore I can give boundless energy, ideas, motivation, and hope to the Mind Ovens I encounter. And love, one of my favorite ingredients.
My wife still goes to Costco. She still tastes all the samples. She still strolls the aisles looking for treats. Only now she does it with Sam. Sam’s a good man with a clean oven in his mind. He actually likes sampling too. They are a good match.
She still comes once a week to see “me” in the tube that the Eggheads designed to keep me in a magnetic bottle with defined edges. They have no idea that I am not there most of the time. I am not bounded - but boundless.
Just like the Human Heart and Mind.
I am the Baker.
There might be more.
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Ed DeRousse
12/31/2018Mind melding, cookies, baking, glitter in a tube, ovens beginnings and no endings, boundless energy, and acceptance, all in one story, WOW! That was one powerful pizza!
I'm wondering where the baker will go to now!.
Quite a lot of imagery. I enjoyed the story.
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Kevin Hughes
12/31/2018Hey Ed,
Happy New Year. Thanks for the kind words. I love your stories, and will read your latest posting soon. I am exhausted - I stayed up late to make sure I was awake when the kids called to say Happy New Year. My wife and I, like most old folks, celebrated at about eight PM. LOL,
Smiles, Kevin
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Rich Puckett
12/30/2018Ah this took my mind to the twilight zone. Good story, I expect in some ways perhaps we all live more in a tube then we know.
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Kevin Hughes
12/30/2018Happy New Year Rich,
My Kathy (wife, friend, partner, lover, and guide for the last 39 years) tells me that we are all "limited"by our paltry number of senses- she often wonders what we would see, or be like, if we just could get outside our tiny four dimensional world. Then she goes back to watching her Baking Shows. LOL
Smiles, Kevin
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Alan Bruce
12/30/2018Dear Kevin,
weird and wondeful.
I am glad at the end you did not tell us that the Baker was the result of eating shopping mall pizza.
Look forward to further offerings.
Happy New Year.
Alan
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Kevin Hughes
12/30/2018Alan, you made me laugh. Shopping Mall Pizza brings a certain image to mind - but of course it does, you are a wonderful writer! And Happy New Year to you too!
Smiles, Kevin
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JD
12/30/2018OMG... I just checked and this is story number 501 for you, which means you have surpassed 500 short stories written and shared on Storystar! That is a record! I'm not sure what the world record is, but as far as I am concerned you're the world record holding short story KING! Way to go Kevin! Congratulations, and THANK YOU!!!
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JD
01/01/2019I love even your weird stories, Kevin! And I think this one is especially wonderfully weird and brilliant! Hugs back to you, and CONGRATULATIONS on meeting and exceeding your goal! You're the undisputed KING of short stories and the brightest story STAR I know!! THANK YOU Kevin! :-)
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Kevin Hughes
12/30/2018Jd, Wow! I can't believe I reached my goal! It seemed so very far away three years ago. And I am glad you like even my weird stories! Hugs to you, and all the folks who have supported me for the last three years. Smiles, and Happy New Year! Kevin
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JD
12/30/2018OK... I can definitely see what you mean by being in a 'weird mood' (comment made on your previous story). This is a really WEIRD one! But it is also totally cool, incredibly original, unique, and quirky, and a real masterpiece of science fiction funky fabulous! Thanks for sharing it on Storystar, Kevin!
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