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Burnt Toast

In Mr. Brown’s home the threads of decay had been densely spun on. The grime of

forgotten use dusted a stuttering grandfather clock still trying to tick, next to a brittle light shade

on a brass lamp with a blackened bulb and a mangled corduroy armchair. He watched his home

Nurse battle the thick crimson blinds open, sending a morning beam of light across the room,

capturing the suspended dust particles. In vain, she creaked open the window to ease the muggy

claustrophobia. His nose stung from his own stench as the Nurse changed his soiled brief. Out of

embarrassment he casted his head away to bury his consciousness. His shaky body was then

presented a frail aluminum walker. It looked futuristic among the crumbling antiquity of the

room.

The valley of skin folds tied to his face winced as he inched his way across the dusty

divide toward the bathroom. His aching back fired a few crackle-pops into the air, shot dead by

his youth’s industriousness. The Nurse bathed and scraped his scaly skin, baked dry by hours of

forgotten labor. Then he insisted on being dressed in his favorite mustard colored suit. He

anticipated a visit, and intended to conceal his decrepitness in the style of his youth. Although,

he had forgot what it was like to feel vibrant, and he knew his time was limited, so he hoped the

suite sparked life back into him. His body and mind were thin, and thinning, he was stretched

like butter scrapped over too much bread.

The Nurse left him in the kitchen. For breakfast, his daughter and son were expected for

toast and tea. On the crumbling tiled counters he discovered a loaf of wonder bread. A trembling

hand dropped four slices into the metallic toaster, and at one point he could have used the toaster

as a mirror, but now he only saw a greasy ghost. He supposed all things, in time, lost their
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appeal. Inside the toaster, the metal slinked around, and the burners hummed. With one hand he

gripped the counters edge like a rollercoaster ride, and while he waited for the toast, he rubbed

his arthritic knuckles until they burned ruby red. Then, to his surprise, there was a cozy aroma,

like a blanket on a cold day. It threw Mr. Brown into a daze, and some far off, lost visual

memory was trying to surface linked to the smell. This dead moment was embedded like an

anchor at a great depth. The bread popped up before whatever inside him was trying to resurface,

he was fatigued in forcing the memory to blossom, but he pressed the bread back down. Lost in

that sweet aroma, those deteriorating floral tiles faded into a memory he had long forgotten. His

feeble body morphed into muscle. His mind was crisp. There was no despair, nor any doubt from

old age, and he was left with only that sort of freshness he missed.

In this forgotten world, Mr. Brown’s kids were making him breakfast and there was that

comforting toasty smell. Their squeaky voices greeted him with surprise, and presented a feast of

toast and scrambled eggs. They hadn’t seen him in weeks, and this was the first morning they

had together in a long time. He was always out on business trips and he was about to head out on

another. Work solely consumed his mind and he was running late, so he left the food untouched.

He hurried out the door. Then smoky fingers flew out of the ancient toaster snapping the decrepit

Mr. Brown out of his hallucination. The smell turned acrid; the toast was burnt, now brittle and

dry. Refusing to throw it away he began scraping off the burnt bits with a knife, and then layered

butter over it.

Mr. Brown waited for the doorbell until noon, and sat alone in his gritty mustard suit,

staring at that burnt toast. This loneliness made those missed moments with his children nag at

him like a splinter deep in his mind. He tightly shut his dark watery eyes, then tried conjuring the
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ability to stay with them in that fading memory. Just then the grandfather clock failed mid chime,

and a final croak rang throughout the cluttered home, an echo in his head. Overwhelmed with

regret, Mr. Brown whimpered, his shoulders convulsed and the crevasses on his face grew soggy.

When his home Nurse came back for his noon medication she called his kids on the phone, but

got no response. She tossed the burnt toast into the waste bin and said ‘maybe they’ll come

tomorrow,’ as if tomorrow were sure to come.