The Pudding Man
His descent into madness had occurred quickly and had started with that last, fateful chocolate pudding run. His mind was ablaze with hatred, hatred for those who so thoughtlessly paraded their seemingly endless supply of pudding in front of him as if to mock his own inability to supply pudding for his family. He knew it was through no fault of his own that his children frequently came to him in tears over the lack of pudding in the cupboard. What was he to do? He owned an extremely successful advertising firm and brought in well over six figures a year. When he was younger this had seemed like more than enough to support a family of four, but as the years passed, so did his hunger for chocolate pudding grow, until it had eventually become something beyond his control. He laughed cruelly as he found himself checking once more for any stray pudding cups that might have fallen behind some of the other dried goods which he stored in the pantry. Not that there was much other food in the house these days. He sullenly recalled the reaction which he had garnered from his wife on his return from his last trip to the grocer. She had become uncharacteristically enraged as she watched him unload case after case of chocolate pudding cups from the back of their SUV.
"Didn’t you buy anything besides PUDDING at the store, Harold?" She had screamed in what seemed to him to be a rather unprovoked attack.
"Umm, no honey... why would I? We need the pudding. The... the kids... they need the pudding. I tried to get some Raman noodles, but the cashier said it brought the total over my credit limit so I had to put them back. You understand, don’t you sweet’ums?"
And just like that, she had left him, taking the kids, the dog, the SUV and, most painful of all, at least to Harold, a case of his sacred chocolate pudding. She had left over a week ago, and still Harold felt certain that she would return at any moment, possibly with the unfinished case of chocolate pudding in tow. How sweet would that be, to be reunited with his beloved pudding? Oh yeah, and his family too, as long as they stayed away from his pudding cups.
But Harold knew this kind of thinking was getting him nowhere. Sure mistakes had been made, mostly on his wife’s part for never fully appreciating his powerful need for chocolate pudding, but now was not the time to point fingers, now was the time for action. He grabbed his coat, a pair of his wife’s nylons that she had fortuitously left behind and his 9mm, and made his way outside to hail a taxi.
When he arrived at the grocer’s he exited the taxi, politely thanking the cabby for the enjoyable conversation, and slipped through the grocery store’s automatic doors into the harsh, glaring light of his destiny. He would have his pudding, all the pudding he ever needed and more. He slipped the nylon stocking over his head and purposefully wrapped his sticky fingers around the handle of his 9mm pistol. The other customers, engrossed in intense mathematical equations involving cost to package weight ratio comparisons, did not even notice as Harold strode to the storage room in the back of the store.
"Hello there." Harold calmly intoned as he entered the office of the store manager, who was busily poring over invoices and had failed to notice Harold, "This is a stickup. Please have one of your boys load the chocolate pudding into a truck for me. I mean no harm, and if you do what I say you’ll be back to your paperwork in no time."
The store manager looked up slowly from the mound of papers. He squinted thoughtfully at the figure standing before him. Then it came to him.
"Harold? Harold... Peterson? That’s you, isn’t it?"
"Yeah... I mean no. I mean... don’t worry about who I am, just get your boys loading that pudding," Harold answered, trying to fight off the embarrassment of being recognized. He knew he should have gone to a store further away from his home, but he had been a little short on cab fare.
"Harold, what in blazes do you think you’re doing? First of all you look ridiculous in that pantyhose and secondly, you just came in here last week and bought up the last of my pudding. I told you then that I don’t have anymore, and I don’t."
Harold was not about to be thwarted that easily. He had been ready for the manager’s lies.
"Don’t GIVE me that crap. I KNOW you keep extra stuff in the BACK here, so just get your BOYS to load it into a truck and I’LL be on my WAY." He jabbed outward with the pistol in his coat pocket with each stressed word, to emphasize that he was not fooling around.
"Now Harold, just calm down. You don’t want to..."
"Don’t tell me what I want! And stop calling me Harold! Now do what I say or you’re going to be sorry!" Harold liked the feeling of power that was coursing through him, and even more he liked the anticipation of all the sweet, delicious pudding that would soon be his.
"Okay, okay, I admit we’ve got some extra boxes of pudding cups laying around, but the thing is..."
"Just shut up! I’ve heard enough of your mouth. Now go get your boys to load them up or there’s gonna be trouble!"
The store manager could tell that Harold was out of control. Sighing heavily, he stood and led Harold into the storage room where, much to the surprise of the boys working back there, he ordered them to load up a truck with the extra boxes of pudding. While they were loading, the manager tried again and again to plead his case with Harold, but Harold would immediately shush him before he could get more than a few words out. Harold was enraptured watching all of that wonderful pudding being loaded into the truck, cases upon cases, more than he had ever imagined would be there.
About a half hour later, Harold rushed into his house carrying a case of the chocolate pudding. Ripping off the top of the box he proceeded to devour pudding cup after pudding cup until he was soon feeling quite bloated. He knew that he didn’t have much time, since the store manager had surely alerted the authorities by now, but as he was getting up a sudden sharp pain cut into his midsection. Harold dropped to the floor, grasping his belly and writhing on the ground in agony. What was happening to him? He suddenly felt quite dizzy and noticed the room around him start to go blurry. Just as the last corners of his vision began to close in around him he heard a door open and his wife’s voice seeming to come from a great distance.
"Harold, I’m back, I thought maybe we should try to work through this together. What’s that truck doing in the driveway... Oh my! Harold! What’s wrong?" She ran forward to her dying husband, throwing the case of pudding and a newspaper that she had been carrying onto the kitchen table as she passed. The headline of the paper read: "Poisoned Pudding Delivery Baffles Local Grocer."
Back at the grocery store, the store manager was shaking his head. "Poor bastard," he said quietly to himself, "Poor dumb bastard."
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
No comments:
Post a Comment