Once upon a time, there was a little boy who liked to cook.  The other children at school liked to eat: crumbled raw Top Ramen, Lunchables, candy, and Capri Suns.  But this little boy, whose name was Bobby, would spend hours pounding galangal and ginger in his mortar and pestle in order to create the perfect Pad Thai.  He made fish sauce from scratch, baked pizzas on a marble oven block, and was generally quite the gourmand.The problem was, he was extremely clumsy.  Whilst chopping scallions, he often slipped and gored into his own finger.  His arms and hands were a tapestry of scars and burns in various stages of healing.  His mother feared for his eventual disfigurement.  It was decided that the boy ought not to cook at all, and so he was consigned to the gulag of the microwavable and the frozen.

He found this unacceptable.  Night after night, he rose at four, and cooked until six, in order to satisfy his starved palate.  This resulted in further mishaps – broken crockery, scored flesh.  But he could not stop.

His parents, alerted by the Bactine stains haunting his laundry, caught on.  And so they took to tying him up at night, for his own good.  Thus restrained, he became an insomniac – his nights were filled with fantasy menus, his days a haze of recipe projections.  He fell asleep frequently at school; was often rebuked for his absent-mindedness; and acquired a reputation as an incorrigible dreamer.  This, of course, made him quite unpopular, but Bobby did not mind, as the vacuum left by his friends might now be filled with dreams of potables and prandials.

His fantasies became so strong, so fully realized, that he increasingly found that he had no need for actual food.  This too, was not a hardship, as the Dinty Moore stews and Kraft Mac ‘n’ Cheese forced upon him by his mother seemed sins against his soul, and choked his throat like ashes.He became gaunt, then bony, then absolutely skeletal.  No amount of scoldings could move him.

Eventually, he found himself in a hospital, forced to ingest sucrose through an intravenous.  Psychiatrists reasoned with him; they medicated him; they attempted to make him forget the vision that fueled his days.  But he was imperturbable.

After he died, his room was filled with the scent of baking bread for three days, and no amount of air freshener could erase it.

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