• Explanation
  • Short Story

 

Reason Behind the Story

 

I have always thought it would be cool to live in a perfect world my brain creates. But wouldn't it be even cooler if someone created a world to live in that wasn't perfect? In my story, the main character is actualy living in a world like this. With a huge twist at the end, my character, Teacher Gerald Trousdouth, is followed through out his last living day on the planet. The knowledge of his death is unknown but looming in his future and he seems to realize this towards the end of the short story.

 

This character was the main theme towards my narrative illustration which can be found in the Design Tab. Go see if you can see the resmbelance between the two characters!

The Death of the Bread Isle

 

 

He stepped onto the scuffed linoleum floor feeling that same empty feeling he pondered in his sleep. Gerald Trousdouth scanned the signs hanging over the isle as if he was looking at a very difficult math problem. When he thought of this, he laughed because Gerald was a trigonometry teacher at a local high school. He thought to himself that it was funny because he hadn’t missed a math problem for the last 18 years, 11 months and 17 days of his life. However, now was not the time for him to reminisce, but instead to focus on buying his weekly rations of food which he would cook for himself in his one bedroom apartment on the corner of Lawrence and Anderton. He carefully recited his weekly food schedule which he had composed the night before on his dated laptop (which seemed to only work when he held it next to the windows and was surely convinced that his walls interfered with the internet signal waves). Once Gerald had figured out how much he needed of each food and of which brands he preferred, he quickly located the nearest grocery cart in which he would use to store numerous items he would be acquiring within the next 20 to 23 minutes of his day. Time was a precious thing to him and he checked his watch once again as he began to walk down the bread isle.

 

On isle seven, a blond haired woman, wearing tight spandex and running shoes along with a spiffy sports jacket was browsing the selection of wheat bread. Gerald scanned her apparel and watched her as she picked up a loaf of bread and began to examine the nutritional facts. Gerald had a bad case of over thinking the smallest things, and this lead him to do things which normal people would never do. With much reluctance, he threw this woman out of his mind and continued down the isle, stopping at the cinnamon bread. He liked this bread specifically because of its swirls that reminded him of the Andromeda galaxy. Gerald checked his watch once more and quickly calculated the time which he had left to shop. At this rate he discovered he would not be able to get all the groceries he had on the list. He also completely forgot to factor in the wait time of the lines as well! His sudden realization struck him, and he stumbled backwards with a look of horror on his face. For the first time in almost 19 years he had miscalculated. Gerald Trousdouth suddenly became very self conscious and stood their, chilled, as sweat started coagulating on his upper lip. The room suddenly became huge and the thought of running to get this next grocery seemed absurd. He started to panic and noticed the blonde haired woman was glancing over at him. Their eyes met for a moment and they both instantaneously looked away. She walked out of the isle quickly and Gerald snapped back to reality. In order to make his mistake invalid, he would have to get all his groceries now, and quick.

 

Gerald quickly grabbed seven or eight loafs of bread and a bag of crackers as he ran to the cashier, dodging a stack of assorted sodas. He had hoped there would be more than one check out stand open, but this was not the case. The blonde haired woman stood in the line at the end of the check out stands looking nervously down at her hands. Gerald hesitantly walked up to her and slowly slipped into his place in the line. He was out of breath and was panting viciously like a dog trying to get his way out of a cage. The woman stood rigged and winced at the sound of every deep and exasperated breath Gerald was emitting. He tried to relax and slow down his breaths but it was too hard to do as he struggled to hold all eight bread loafs and his cracker box. He looked absurd standing there with his back arched and his arms tightly gripping all eight loaves. They looked as if they were waiting to fall, just to mock Gerald’s last effort. The man before both of them was searching for his credit card as the feminine teenaged cashier slowly blew a pink bubble with his scabbed lips. Gerald cursed his actions under his breathe as he frantically scanned his surroundings. He suddenly noticed something was not right. Images of his childhood had snapped into his mind and he dreamed for a moment as his body persperated dramatically. His armpits were coated with sweat and the stains on his blue collard shirt shown through with great strength. The blond haired woman took a step forward and put her bread down on the table. She shot a horrified look to the cashier who didn’t seem to pay attention.

 

“Four dollars and seventy two cents, ma’am.” The cashier blew another bubble which popped all over his mouth and the fold in the skin that connected his nose to his upper lip. She pulled out her credit card as well and tapped her foot as she patiently waited for the employee to do his mundane job and let her go on her way. Gerald was not observing this. Iinstead he was using his hands to probe around his back where sharp pains were emitting from. His visions became blurry and he struggled to hold the bread.

 

“Yo, man! Like move up please.” Said the cashier as the blond haired woman turned to leave. Her eyes glistened in the afternoon light, gleaming through the wide windows in the front of the building. Her expression of sadness seemed to capture time itself so that Gerald was stuck in this moment. Then, once she looked away, his hands let the loaves of bread fall, and his body soon followed, collapsing to the ground. Blood stained the back of his polo and a trail spilled across the floor leading to the bread isle. As his face hit the linoleum, his mind could only think of this woman’s eyes, and her bread that she held so dearly. Nothing more came as his life took its last breath and slowly slipped away from his grasp. There, Gerald Trousdouth laid dead; the cashier and woman stood with bewildered and horrified looks. These looks became nothing more than a thought as their bodies slowly disappeared. Everything around him began to evaporate and blow in a swirling vortex before its own mass had swallowed itself. The world in which Gerald Trousdouth had lived in now ceased to exist. His mind was the only thing supporting this world and once his life had faded, the support for all of that which his mind had created had collapsed and left an empty space of nothing.

 

The next day, Dan and Susanna Trousdouth were notified that their 47 year old son had passed away. They had given the okay to pull the plug after Gerald had been in a coma for almost 19 years.

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