Untimely #9 - Seabiscuit

As has been noted, Jack loved his job. He had always liked bread, had liked to eat, and the town of Barber’s Landing had long lacked a bakery with the wherewithal to fashion a tasty loaf. And yet the bread on which he’d grown to his six feet and one hundred ninety five pounds, stacked on his upper half in the form of a barreled chest and arms to match, was bread any boy would have been more than happy with during a war. There was no war while Jack was growing up, but not knowing better nor knowing worse bread was bread and Jack was a happy man. Then one day Jack awoke from a dream in which he had been rowing a small boat across a calm afternoon sea to an island just distant at the edge of a great fog. When he arrived at the short pebble beach he paused to turn and look at the sky ominously blackening behind him over the bay. Rather than risk his vessel and his life in the choppy, churning waves, he dragged his boat clear of the water and, leaving it, began to climb the rocks, hoping for a bit of shelter, perhaps a rocky overhang or even a shallow cave, a dry spot out of the rain, even, dare he hope, a stone mansion with a great open fire and unwieldy steins of semisweet mead to quaff whilst reclining on the furs of wild bears and other savage beasts. Perhaps someone would offer him a pipe of opium, and as she prepared it for him she would do a little dance, dressed, as she was, in seven veils, and removing them one by one she would finish and fall into his lap, naked and adoring, as he drifted off into a haze of narcotically charged dreams. Of course, to dream in his dream might overwhelm his semiconscious powers, and so instead he simply continued to clamber over the jagged rocks in the diminishing light. Eventually he made it to the top, hands cut and knees and elbows scraped from slips and slides across the imperfect surface, and there he found himself in a clearing little more than ten paces by ten paces. In the center, on a wooden pedestal, was a shiny brass lamp with a small sign reading, in seven languages, “Rub Me.”

No, of course there was not. Instead, in the center of the clearing was ... absolutely nothing. Not a tree, not a cave, not a rock under which to find shelter from the rain that was beginning to fall with alarming force, slapping and popping on his bared skin like fingers on taut sheepskin. He ran to the center and arms widespread looked pleadingly up at the sky but the drops only fell in his eyes, blurring his sight. He dropped to his knees with a squelch in the liquid mud and felt the cold stream of drops running under his shirt and down his chest. For a very brief moment it felt cool and refreshing, invigorating, and then it began to get cold, and then very cold, and then very much colder, and he fell forward with his head on his knees, hands outstretched palms up in the mud and the rain splattered his back and his trousers and the soles of his shoes. He could feel it most on the back of his bare neck and when he went to cover himself he awoke stark naked and kneeling in the middle of his bed. He leaned over the wooden baseboard and retrieved his blankets from the cold floor, and then, rearranging himself, snugly fell into a long and dreamless sleep in which the sensation of being next to a fireplace featured strongly. The next day when he woke up he went straight to the general store and bought himself some flour and salt and corn flour and his first bread was sold out by the time he was ready to taste any.