| image | youtube |
|---|---|
CwA43YJCIZs |
Today the weather was perfect for drinking tea in the garden. There is a reclining chair in the garden, just for occasions like this. So I walked out into the garden, set my cookie tin down next to the chair, and sat down. I drank some tea, and had a cookie from the tin and closed my eyes. Lying in the sun, my mind turned to Gunk.
For those of you that do not know her, Gunk is not a normal person. For one thing, she is tiny, compared to us. She also doesn’t live in a house, she lives in a burrow at the bottom of the garden. Her teeth are razor sharp and she is rather fond of chocolate cookies.
When I opened my eyes again, to have another cookie, I realized the tin was no longer there. I looked up and saw it moving slowly across the lawn, in the direction of Gunk’s burrow.
I got up and walked over to the tin, which was already several inches further. I couldn’t see a string. I was sure it wasn’t Gunk herself pulling the tin (while being invisible) because then the tin would have moved a lot faster. Curious as to how she was doing this, I headed in the direction of her burrow, to investigate.
Gunk was standing in front of her home, twiddling her thumbs, looking around with a furtive look. When she saw me she grinned and greeted me.
“See any moving cookies lately?” she asked. I threw a glance over my shoulder at the cookie tin that was slowly following me. Gunk seemed to understand my uneasy glance, as she broke out in an even wider grin.
“It's working, isn’t it!” she exclaimed. “I wanted to go see for myself but I can’t leave that alone,” she said, nodding at something in front of her. That was when I first noticed it. The reason I hadn’t seen it before was that, well… there was nothing to see. It was just that, a hazy patch of nothing. Too dark to be a shadow and barely larger than the tip of my finger.
“Gunk”, I carefully inquired, “what is that?”. I could feel my right eyebrow twitching in its desire to rise. I had a feeling it would get its chance soon enough. However, instead of throwing me a look as if I’d asked her something stupid (again), she got a rather pensive look. It was very un-Gunk-like.
“Its a sort of thing,” she said, “that is both too much and not enough”. She looked almost desperate. “Ooooh!” she moaned, “You’ll never understand! See… what I did was… You remember that cookie you gave me? The one that I saved?”
I did remember. I thought it rather odd at the time that Gunk had managed to display such constraint. Usually, when cookies are involved, she barely pauses long enough to chew.
“I took that cookie and scrunched it and scrunched it and scrunched it until it couldn’t be scrunched any more. And then I did! I did scrunch it some more! It kind of scrunched in on itself and turned into that”. She pointed at the hazy patch of nothingness again.
The tin of cookies was now gently bumping against the back of my shoes.
Gunk continued: “Because it is all scrunched in on itself, there is soo much cookie in one place that it isn’t enough anymore. So it pulls in all the other cookies. See?” She looked up at me hopefully.
Normally when Gunk deigns to explain herself to me, I don’t see. I just listen, nod occasionally, write down whatever she says and quietly hope that you, dear reader, can make more sense of it than I can.
But this time I did see. I told Gunk that what she had made was basically a chocolate cookie black hole. A chocolate cookie so dense that no other cookies could escape its pull.
Gunk stood perplexed for a moment, while the cookie tin managed to move past my feet to continue its journey closer to cookie infinity.
“You actually… understand” Gunk looked amazed. That was when something occurred to me. “Gunk,” I said, “if the cookies reach the chocolate cookie black hole, they will get sucked in and you won’t be able to eat them. They’ll fly straight in.”
Without hesitation, Gunk stepped forward, grabbed her tiny chocolate cookie black hole with both hands, brought it up to her face, and swallowed it whole.
As the cookie tin upended and all the cookies flew at her, she just had time to show me her ferocious grin and say:
“Let them come…”