POV: you’re a particular kind of cookie with abandonment issues having an existential crisis 🍪
Pulled from a warm, toasty room, feeling soft and delicious. He’s giving me bedroom eyes with a salivating mouth. “They’re going to love you,” he whispers as he pulls me up and caresses me. He’s the one who made me.
He tosses me into a plastic bag and then into a dark room. I don’t know where I’m going. I’m not alone in here, though. In the dim light that slips through little cracks in the ceiling, I see there are seven others who look just like me. There are even a few who look nothing like me but still have the “same contents,” according to our maker.
No one else in the bag seems to know where we’re headed, but they all seem to know one thing: our fate. Somehow they know our maker’s intention for us. We’re all going to be sold to someone. None of us know who we’ll be sold to, though.
All of the others with me call the boy who made us God. They all send him their silent prayers that they will be sold to someone benevolent and loving. Someone who will enjoy them.
Mary is the first to go. I think she was always the favorite, mostly because of her extra chocolate chips. If I had that many chocolate chips, that’d be me being sold. Maybe then, I wouldn’t still be sitting here. One by one, as the hours pass, all of the others are grabbed away. Jane gone. Buddy gone. One by one until it’s just me.
Just me. All alone except for the crumbs of others who came before me lingering on the bottom of the dark room. I’m not sure how long it’s been since I was shoved in here. I’ve lost all sense of time. Has it been minutes? Hours? Days? Weeks? It could even be months or years, and I wouldn’t know. I’m crumbling apart. Hope is lost. Maybe this is what happens to the unwanted ones. We don’t get eaten. We get forgotten.
But then, fingers wrap around me. Am I being taken away finally? Will I finally be able to serve the purpose I was meant to? Is this all I am? A purpose waiting to be fulfilled by someone else?
I see my maker once again. We’re in a small room that smells of bleach and musk. In this tiny supply closet, maybe my maker now knows how I felt being trapped in such a tiny room for so long. My maker’s eyes look nervous, and he’s standing with a girl wearing a green dress. “She’s the last one till next month,” he whispers forcefully.
“You sure you don’t have any… prettier ones? This one’s all crumbly and gross.” She hesitantly holds me in her hands. If it weren’t for my plastic bag, I’d be falling all over the floor.
“Yeah, she’s ugly, but she’s still gonna get you high. How ‘bout I cut you a deal? Eight dollars instead of ten.” His words insult me. I didn’t ask to be made this way. I feel like I’m worth more, but I don’t argue. I just stare up at them, trying to look as pretty as possible. As sellable as possible.
The girl looks at me and ponders for a moment, then slaps the money into his hands. “Fine, it’s a deal.” She crumbles me up even more between her red-polished fingers, smiling and laughing. Finding joy in my suffering before throwing me deep into yet another room. Another dark room filled with weird-looking new friends.
Pencils stab at me, trying to tear me apart, and I’m smashed between large binders. The bag I’m in is swung violently for an hour before hitting the ground hard. I hear soft humming nearby. The girl. They say her name is Jessie. She opens the bag, and I see her face. She pulls out a few things. Looking for me? Is it my time? She walks away from me. No, I still see her, though, through the cracks of light. She walks out of the room.
An older woman who looks a bit like the girl walks in, holding a small animal. The others with me tell me that it’s a dog. Biscuit, they call her. They say that she likes to chew on things. I’m not worried, though. She’s being restrained by the older woman God. She approaches my bag, glancing around the room suspiciously. She opens it and looks straight at me, stunned. Is she my fate? Will I finally be eaten? Will I finally be enjoyed?
She grabs me in my crumbly glory… angrily. She’s angry. Why is she angry? She’s mumbling something to herself as she walks into the next room. There’s a large porcelain bowl in front of me. She opens my bag, and finally I feel the cool breeze of the earth. Freedom! Warm hands, open air — this is what being chosen feels like. Finally I can — NO! God, please stop! NO!
I feel my pieces falling into the porcelain bowl, into water. The splash is small and pathetic. Not even loud enough to be missed. The water around me turns cloudy. I soften. I break. I melt into something unrecognizable. I fall down pipes and disperse until I’m nothing.
