It was never his cookie . . .
That looked like one delicious damn cookie; Charles had to struggle to keep from licking his monitor as his pulse raced and his mind churned.
Sometimes a picture can conjure an emotion in you so strong that it shakes the ice in your glass and forces you to pause, if only for a moment.
Charles was facing the demons again, staring at pictures of cookies on the internet. He drooled slightly, perhaps so as not to weep.
Which is what he’d told himself, when in fact he’d been doing his damnedest to run from the specters of thought that kept stirring up in the dead night. He’d thought he was facing his demons until that picture came and forced him to actually reflect instead of glancing off the shallow waters.
The ice in the scotch shook, and Charles’ hand shook as he brought the glass to his lips, forcing the ice to shake further. All that shaking produced a shuddering soundtrack to the terrors of his thought.
How foolish he had been.
What folly, what madness, had possessed him to refuse that proffered cookie when the plate had hoisted in his direction at the office so many years ago?
It had been a cookie of white chocolate and macadamia, yet in his stuttering shyness Charles had left it on the plate; had watched it pass on into the grubby hands of Wurlitch as a run of saliva had run across his back teeth and an impotent flood of jealousy rushed through his veins.
Wurlitch had eaten that cookie like the hedonist he was, his fleshy jowls quivering with delight as he greedily devoured what Charles would have savored.
Thinking back, Charles sighed and took another hit of scotch.
Why on earth had he passed up that cookie?
Years later, his own jowls quivered as Wurlitch’s had done that fateful day (Wurlitch himself had retired and someone had told Charles he’d died of a heart-attack); now Charles didn’t let any baked goods pass him by. He’d scarf them down and make passes at the break-room to score any leftovers; brownies, cupcakes, cookies, cake, anything.
He’d press his finger against the moist crumbs and bring them to his watering mouth. He’d use his thumbnail to scratch icing off the surface that had held cake. He once fished a half-eaten éclair out of the trash.
His conversion to gluttony hadn’t helped. He was still haunted. He thought he might just be haunted until his death, perhaps even beyond. In his worst nightmares he spent eternity reaching for that beautiful disk of slightly chewy dough, festooned with chunks of white chocolate and slivers of macadamia nuts. He reached, and he reached, but he could never lay his hands on it.
Why on earth had he passed up that one, perfect, cookie?
- finite
Oh my, but it would be far too easy for me to attempt a short psychoanalytical dissection of this here piece, but that’s not what this is for. This is rough and tumble, damn near reptilian brain-driven, only modestly filtered through the higher registers and then slapped on the internet for all to see.
It is kind of odd to me however that I switched gears here so suddenly.
I mean, at its inception, Lewd Cognoscenti was a venue where I tore as deeply as I could into my subconscious and society, strove quite arrogantly for transcendence and then slapped the results onto the internet, but then I write one little zombie tale, and all of a sudden, I’m on a whole new thing, which is bizarro fiction apparently. Who knew?
Is odd how that shit can happen.
Anyway, dear reader, allow this to serve as a warning to you, don’t mess with zombies, not even fictional ones, because there doesn’t see to be any going back.