Your father had once said of his eldest daughter, “God didn’t maker her pretty, he made her busy.” Your father loved you in that stoic, rural Pennsylvania way that made him want what was best for you, so he instilled in you an unimpeachable work ethic and taught you to value that work ethic above all else. Years later, when you grew into your sturdy body and your wholesome face, you discovered that you really are pretty. But you’re still busy.
When you moved away from Lancaster County to explore everything a large metropolitan city could offer a sturdy, pretty girl you quickly found that your capacity for toil was appreciated. Thanks to generations of hardy, grain-fed farm women passing down their knowledge from mother to daughter, you knew your way around a kitchen. Thanks to your own adaptability, you found your way around a commercial baking operation. Now you’re the lumbar vertebrae of small family-owned bakery that maintains a coffee shop in a part of town where the rents were just cheap enough, but you don’t have to take your car battery inside with you when you came home from work.
Like all bakers, your shift starts in the wee small hours of the morning. You do your baker’s work while serving reasonably strong coffee from the good glass-lined, stainless steel airpots that keep it hot and fresh-tasting until your relief comes in at 9am. You watch over your breads, your pies, your pastries, and your small dining room – a pre-dawn weigh station for the last of the night hawks and the first of the sparrows.
Your father was a fine dairy farmer in his day, but your mother could put weight on a Holstein who had spent a tough winter nursing a calf like no one else, and in that way you take after her. When a regular comes in at 3am to nurse a black coffee and enjoy the warmth and smells of the commercial ovens against the rain and cold of the outside, looking muscular but showing the telltale signs of hunger in cheekbones accentuated by a distinct lack of body fat, your keen instinct to make sure every living thing within your sphere of influence is well-fed takes over and you pop a day old gruyere and chives scone in the toaster oven and plate it. You set it next to his coffee nonchalantly, the way you bus tables or roll silverware.
“I can’t sell this day-old,” you offer flatly. “Do me a favor and eat it so I don’t have to throw it out.”
You turn away before he can reply. You are not shy, but you do not press for friendship and you won’t start today. The regular does not refuse your day old scone.
The next morning, far enough ahead of the dawn that there are still stars out, he comes in and before you make a pass through your dining room you set a pair of chocolate croissants in front of him. They are a bit chewy from being left out overnight under a glass cake dome, but they are edible when warmed. He leaves with a small paper bag of day old pastries and a loaf of your good Jewish rye bread tucked under his arm. In your mind, you begin referring to him as your regular. He is a handsome bull calf who would do well at the state fair if you could just put a little weight on him. And he has a gentle face like your unmarried uncle, the one who was always in community theater productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Music Man and the like. The one who emails a few times a month and sends you a thoughtful gift at Christmas time.
It’s 2am. The good, strong coffee is brewing and the ovens are preheating. You have not yet opened the dining room to the reluctant insomniacs of the city, but you will soon. You don’t like to spend too much time completely alone. Even the company of the silent and sullen is better than no company at all.
You take a break shaping puff pastry dough into croissants to walk to the front of the dining room and unlock the door. You flip on the open sign and begin walking back to the kitchen when you hear it flip off behind you. Then you hear the door lock. You have not yet turned around. You are a woman alone in a bakery at 2am and you are not ready to turn around.
“LITTLE MORSEL.”
It’s time to turn around. Everything is moving slowly and you can hear your own heartbeat in your ears. You pivot on one foot so that in turning around, you put a few more inches between yourself and the voice you just heard.
The voice belongs to a monster. The monster is tall with muscles rippling under black oil skin that is somehow both fluid and completely solid. You are suddenly reminded of the black oil sunflower seeds your mother fed to the hens to keep them shiny and fat in the winter.
You were not bred to be rude to strangers, even strangers with oh so sharp teeth and oh so big eyes, how better to do whatever he wants to do to you, my dear.
“What can I do for you?”
“GENTLE CRUMB, DO YOU FEAR US?”
Your brow furrows. You’re not sure how to answer, but you know that you should answer, that you should keep this great black oil beast talking so that he doesn’t rip your throat out.
“You’re much bigger than I am.”
“THAT WE ARE. YOU ARE JUST A LITTLE TREAT.”
You’ve never been referred to as “little” before. Buxom, thick, curvy, stocky even, but never little. Hell, to this thing everyone must be little.
“YOU ARE A GOOEY MORSEL.”
The thing begins to salivate. Up until this point, you had actively avoided considering its mouth. Its (his? their?) wide, toothy, smiling mouth and viper of a tongue seemed to grow ever closer and you felt glued to the floor.
“WE WONDER HOW SUCH A SOFT, GOOEY LITTLE MORSEL MIGHT TASTE.”
Prompt: reader works at a bakery and gives Eddie leftover goods because they notice he’s always hungry. Then one night it’s Venom who shows up…
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Patata Paradaisu 