Baker's Dozen

Hera Sfenkut and the Horrible Lunch

Author’s note: In the following yarn’s raw, unadulterated form, related to me over cocktails and spinach dip, it had no nasty bits. So I picked the anecdote up by its bootstraps, hog-tied it, stuffed it with artistic license and made it into a man. A strapping lumberjack of a man with giant, swinging balls and food stuck in his beard.

Hera Sfenkut strutted into the room, beaker held betwixt long, spidery fingers. She walked like a lady who knows what she’s about. ”I need more dead mice!” she screamed at an intern, shattering a beaker against his fragile, freckled head. The intern yelped and lept toward the cage of shivering mice, tiny gallows in hand. Hera stomped back to her desk, frantically calculating a whole mess of numbers in her head, scribbling out figures on crumbled pieces of paper, dollar bills, old receipts and the wrappers of so many empty packets of skittles. 

Hera longed for the day when she could escape from the island of kidnapped sexy lady scientists. In her previous life, before she had been tricked by the mad dictator, Lupe “Lobo Loco” Fitzgerald, into following him into his jungle trap, she had been near a breakthrough. Since her college years, she had lived for her work, curing every known disease. Especially the plague that had since 2012 had destroyed countless spleens. Thankfully it had thus far only ravaged the entire midwest. Soon, however, it would reach states where fun, sexy people lived. Hera wasn’t about to watch that shit go down.

But for now she was trapped. Even now the hiss of the steam warned that soon it would be the mandatory removing of glasses and swishing of undone up-dos.

Hera decided to escape by punching out and going to lunch. 

She liked to spend her lunch break hidden on the terrace outside of the cantina. There she would hunch over a surreptitious iPhone and slurp her hastily microwaved soup. This was the only time of day she could contact the outside world and tell her numerous fiances how life was treating her.

Little did she know her lunch break was about to get shat on.

Pamela, an older woman who worked as a warden on the island, peeped around the corner. Pamela knew where Hera liked to hide on her lunch break because
Pamela was nosy, and liked to listen in on other people’s conversations, and watch them, goggle-eyed, from great distances, tracking their movements while she breathed heavily. She worked mostly as a spy for the Dictator Lupe, but she was a grossly ineffective human being.

As soon as Hera heard the shuffle of Pamela’s orthopedic loafers she stashed the phone.

Pamela spoke, her eyes bulging from her head. “Ah hoooaaappp Ah wathent enterooopting yeaaaooh,” Pamela said, in her stupid accent.

“No,” said Hera, curt as could be.

“Oh ok,” Pamela said, dropping the accent as she suddenly realized how stupid it sounded.

Pamela continued to stand there, eying Hera’s soup consumption. Hera finished, the whole time having succeeded marvelously at not making eye contact.

“OH HEY SINCE YOU’RE FINISHED!” Pamela said casually, leaping into the air. “COULD I MAYBE BORROW YOUR SPOON SINCE YOU’RE DONE WITH IT?”

“Ok,” said Hera, wishing that just once Pamela would trip and fall into a wood chipper.

Hera abandoned her original hiding spot, seeking solitude in a corner of one of the many Disney-themed water parks that dotted the courtyard. Believing herself unobserved behind a pink fountain, Hera once again removed her cell phone from its secret hiding place between her bosoms. Scrolling through her contact list, she wondered which fireman or Prince of Dubai she would booty call next.

Just as she was about to hit send on a steamy text message, rife with innuendo and rude emoticons, she heard Pamela’s heavy breathing just behind her shoulder. Hera whipped around, quickly swallowing her cell phone. “Can I help you?” she inquired of Pamela’s oafish face.

“Oh!” Pamela batted her lashes shyly. “I was done with your spoon. I was just wondering where to put it?”

“Wherever is fine,” spat furious Hera, planning to throw the spoon away.

“In the drawer or in the mug with the utensils?” asked Pamela, blind to Hera’s angrily quivering nostrils.

“Where. Ev. Er.” Hera’s composure was hanging by a thread, dangling off a cliff in high winds.

“Ok! I won’t bother you again!” said Pamela gaily, and strode away, confident that Hera wasn’t thinking about setting fire to her eyebrows.

Hera waited a moment. Then two. Then two and three quarters. Finally she regurgitated her phone.

Pamela jumped out from behind the fountain. “Oh hey!” quoth Pamela. Hera panicked and threw her phone in the fountain, where it was immediately eaten by a piranha. “Just thought I’d let you know, I wasn’t sure where to put your spoon so I wrapped it in a paper towel and put it in the drawer.”

A sudden push, an awkward bout of flailing, then silence. Then more texting. Hera had soup and a thieving piranha for lunch that day. The piranhas had Pamela.

littleallison asked: Alloo, Baker. As it has become apparent to me that I am unable to contrive a way in which to remark singly upon any of your individual entries, I will ask you THIS, because it is "anything," and I believe the forum of your blog offers me qualifying grounds to interrogate you however I wish. "This," that I wish to inquire is: not a question at all.

I like the scheme you present in your first entry (found at last, using tumblr's "random" search link, and a small amount of investigative nosing around -which made me blush mildly, but I hope it was excusably invasive). A set of novellas, perfectly numbered at "13" to match the sticky subject matter, could not be more appropriately conceptualized. I have enjoyed your exploration of sensual trysts with beings of the unknown, but I wanted to say, just this once: I hope you have not forgotten about your original muse. Although it does seem like a hefty undertaking, it amuses me. I thought you should receive some recognition on this point.

Ah yes. I think I am still in the process of deciding what genres work together. And how much I would want to be plotty and thought-out or just loosely strung together schtick. Work in progress.

Die, Hiatus!

So I have been switching jobs, which is more time-consuming than you might think. I have also been visiting more than 0 lake houses over the Memorial Day weekend, a 100 percent increase from previous weekends. Recently I was felled by an illness, which was not that serious but I am a hypochondriac and diagnosed myself with a lot of life-threatening diseases before my headcold dissipated. But now I am right back on all over my shit. My real shit, not the shit that makes the money.