Indentured Servitude
The light is low and amber here. Ovens burn with a mild heat and there is the occasional flicker when one of the burners cuts out and relights. You breathe in, slowly, inhaling that warm, summer air come back from days spent tugging at mom's skirts as a child. And there is that smell, that once was sweet and homely but that has now become the single, stagnant stench and there is no other to overpower it.
This used to be a kitchen. Your kitchen. This is where it had all started, ground zero, if you fancy. The inclinations of people didn't mean much these days. You rather wish they had been disinclined to taste in your affairs right from the start.
Dough oozes from every surface. Raw, sticky and reeking of sugar and butter. Chocolate chips poke out from the mixture only to be swallowed again. You slide your forearms from the old counter where they'd been resting, the sleeves of your sweater heavy with the dough clinging to the soggy fibres. The thought in your mind that the objects in your rooms weren't just covered in cookie dough but were actually becoming it came and went from your mind several times in a hectic array of cookie-based thoughts.
You think back to the beginning, when only your friends and your dog bothered to eat your cookies. You went a little overboard, made a few too many, and then granny on her stroll across the road had smelled them and offered to come in to help. Looking back, she'd almost been drawn to them. And then one wrinkly, toothless bite was all it took for her to pledge her servitude and begin slaving to make more damn cookies. Or at the time, just helping about the kitchen.
She'd brought her friends, pretty soon. Mabel, Peggy, Agnes and Fanny. Then Enid, Doris, Gladys and Betty. And then Ethel and Phyllis and Winifred. And Beryl and Martha and Doreen and Noreen and Nora and Norma and Agatha and Jean and Ivy and Maud and Maureen and Beatrice and Mavis and Joyce and Rose let's not forget Dot. And there were more. Thousands more, in the end.
You'd think an elderly workforce would be cute, quaint, a bit of old-fashioned
You don't even have to hire them any more. Now they rise up out of the molten cookie dough like some sort of baking-based terminator, like skeletons covered in the thick, sticky mixture which soon melts off to reveal their flesh, or maybe, becomes their flesh. Maybe they are the cookies. All pasty and beige and cracked and drooping, speckled with liver spots like so many chocolate chips. They are one. And they are many.
How strange the world had become. First just the people. Everyone suddenly clambering to get a taste of your cookies, should have struck you as odd. The way they took over, seeped into the media, into every aspect of everyday life. The expeditions out, digging down into the earth, shooting off beyond the stars, all in the name of baked goods. It never once seemed… strange. By the time anyone thought anything of it, it was too late. By then, the alchemy of gold into cookies had seeped, somehow, into more of the basic elements. Soon, even the smallest atoms began to consist of cookies, until there was naught to do but watch as the world melted away and baked into the sun, a sweet, crisp crust to cover the land.
The sky rumbles and darkens above you, the distant sounds not of thunder but of cookies breaking, the rumble of the brittle, baked batter slowly cracking and crumbling under pressure, a heavy, uncooked rain soon to follow. Great portals shift and shriek high above the stratosphere, now just a haze like the steam on a rise from a tray of fresh-baked cookies. Long, slow-moving tentacles spawn from the many gates and scoop up uncooked dough in great amounts, pulling it back through the hellish rifts to who knows where. The light is fading, like the pale, gooey surface of so many slow-burning cookies. You do not know if you will see another sunrise. You do not know if there will even be a sun. Maybe they'll keep that. Maybe to bake their world of cookies.
You thought you were just going to make some cookies. You thought maybe you were hiring some grandmas, that they would work for you and all would be like the front of a little chocolate box, or rather, chocolate-chip cookie box. How wrong you had been. Foolish mortal, as they say. What was the phrase they used to say? Indentured servitude. You thought they'd been in servitude to you. All along, it was you who had served them.
There is nothing left to pledge to the elders now. Soon it will be over. Soon, all will be cookies.