Story Go Round 02/08/2002, round 3, #2

Angus the Nutter Butter

The few remaining Nutter Butters huddled together in fear, perched precariously at the top of their bookshelf fortress. They could hear the cooing of the grapefruit on the ledge below them, and the chatter of the tortilla chips. They knew their time was limited. From the moment they had cooled on the conveyor belt, headed for plastic destiny, life had been precarious. Some were eaten by their worker caretakers, surreptitiously. Some discarded. Some were carted off by insects. Life was hell. Every noise made the poor edibles jump, until one day a leader rose up among them. His name was Angus, and he had a little more stuffing than the others. Like all leaders, he was self made. Failure had made him stronger, along his back at the narrowest point was a crack that had partially crippled him. But he spoke with words of a healthy, nutty wisdom and with a buttery tongue so smooth and silky, you wouldn't believe its not butter. Angus said the time had come to reclaim their domain from the humans, to stop acting like victims. They wanted to believe him, but the litter of the crumbs left from their comrades constantly reminded them of what failure could mean.

"It is not the end you think, to be a crumb!" Angus would shout through their stacked cookie piles. "There is something beyond the disintegration, digestion - when a Nutter Butter dies, it goes on. It goes beyond, to the plane where milk is spread out in lakes, and there's M & M's, and caramel corn, and they're laughing.

His words made them forget the plastic mass coffin, the daily jostling for the furthest back space in the package. He galvanized them. Even cookies on the other side of the partition listened and w ere filled, not with creamy goodness, but with a sense of pride, a feeling of hope, that the end might not come today. The next time the hand came for them, they ganged up on it, driving their cookie edges into the knuckle joints and under the fingertips, until the fleshy mass withdrew.




Amber is purple; John is pink; Alan is blue; Terry is orange; Habeeb is green