Toast

If I could do any one thing in my life—anything—I would be a space dolphin hunter.

Why? I hate dolphins. They're trash to me. They're scum. And everyone knows that by the time I'm out of college—about nine years from now—they will be in space…lurking in the darkness.

And someone's gonna have to kill 'em.

When I was just a wee little boy I watched my first Crocodile Dundee movie, and it changed my life forever. When I saw ol' Mick Dundee dive into that river and come out with the carcass of a ten foot lizard slung over his back, I knew what I was meant to do. I would dream at night about sharpening knives on the ice caps of Nepal, in frantic search of the Yeti. I figured since it was so elusive, it must have done something it was ashamed of. And when a Yeti is ashamed, you know shit has really gone down.

Anyway, I basically just killed stuff. All the time. For looking at me funny, and for having no souls.

Someone once called me a sociopath. She had a degree in psychology. But if she was so smart, how come she's dead now? Huh? The answer is she's stupid.

But space dolphins aren't stupid. They're cunning bastards, and it takes a truly sharp human intellect to trace them through the vacuum of space. But I figure that won't be a problem, since I aced two of the sections on the SATs.

So back in the jungle, I was wading through a river dyed red with my blood, draining rapidly out of an inch-wide gash circling my abdomen like a hoola hoop. I knew I wouldn't make it much longer if I didn't make it to the helipad by the time the sun hit the jewel of the monkey idol I had placed at the top of the Incan ruins. For the first time in my life I stopped to consider what I was still living for. What was there? Another endless line of vacuous monsters just waiting to be made into corpses. It was the same grind, over and over. Couldn't there be something more to life? Shouldn't there be? What had happened to those high-minded dreams of meaning and morality that I had held so dear long ago?

But just then my bullshit was cut short by a huge fireball that broke through the canopy and landed on the bank behind me and exploded. I was knocked face first into the water before I could even manage to take a breath. I lay below the rippling surface for nearly a full minute before finally collecting my senses and pushing off the muck below. But as I rose slowly from the deep, having been pushed into the center of the river, I felt something cold as death itself slide against my leg.

Dolphin.

Fast forward to space. I'm floating around in a strange embryonic sack of fluid that the government assures me will keep my alive for up to six years in the void. I don't plan to take that long. Five hours before I made a near-fatal mistake by wandering into the den of the space dolphins in the midst of a spontaneous orgy. I only managed to escape after having my left leg severed by one particularly raucous female.

The sack has started its slow process of rebuilding my leg, but I've taken the severed one for my own purposes. For the past three hours now I've been pulling away the skin and muscle fiber. My femur will make an excellent cudgel—and I know who my first target will be. That horny dolphin she-bitch-slut.

I take a break for breakfast. It was here that I first found solace in toast.

I was the first person in the history of my school to come out as toastsexual. I'll never forget the first day after I broke the news. I only told a few friends, but word spread overnight. In my first class, during a test, a boy behind me made toaster noises. Everyone laughed at my expense. Then in the cafeteria I went to buy some milk and one of the lunch ladies threw a fork through my eyelid and farted aggressively. I found out later that she was actually having a psychotic breakdown, but at the time I took it really personally. I went outside to eat under the dock, alone with my toast.

At least, I thought I was alone. I was almost finished when a dolphin walked out of the ocean, dragging what I estimated to be several thousand of those giant barbed things that were all over the Normandy beaches in the D-Day scene of Saving Private Ryan. She glared at me, and made a noise that sounded like "Blomph."

Several minutes after killing it, I went back and talked to my toast. Being the cold-hearted killer that I was, I didn't know if it would work out between me and this warm, exquisitely golden-brown beauty freckled with raspberry jam. Toast said toast understood, and told me toast had known for a long time that I loved killing more than toast. Toast only wished toast could satisfy me in the same way killing did. I said, "Toast, you gave me the only satisfaction a man should need. It's just that I ain't yet what a man should be." Toast laughed in that sweet, crusty little way it always did, and then offered itself unto me. I ate it without remorse, but not a day goes by now that I don't think: what if?

If there's anything I've learned from killing dolphins it's that love can be a funny thing.