Adventures in Baking

I scribbled this one out in a very very boring class on Research and Methodologies. Completely useless. But I had to look attentive and as if I were talking notes. This was the result.

Mandy Stockwell was out of butter. ‘Drat,’ she thought, staring into the fridge at the empty butter tray. She went through to the living room to grab her handbag and head into town. Her sister’s birthday was today, and Mandy had agreed to make the cake. ‘Drat,’ she thought again as she opened her handbag and stared down into her empty purse, forgetting that she has spent all but 17p the other day on cake ingredients –minus the butter. There was no going around it, Mandy would have to go to the bank and then to the shop.

Mandy walked the mile and a half into town. It was a pleasant Autumn early afternoon, and the changing leaves in the trees made Mandy smile, while the crisp air cleared her mind, making her secretly grateful for the excuse of going into town on such a lovely day.
She rounded the corner into town and trotted up to the cash machine. Unfortunately the cash machine was out of order, and she was forced to queue up with everyone else inside. It was precisely seven minutes later, when Mandy was second in line from the front of the queue, that the gentleman directly behind her pulled out a gun, grabbed her arm, and announced to the bank that Mandy would die if they failed to empty their vaults.

The bank went deadly silent. However, before anyone could move a muscle in reaction, Mandy released an absolutely massive fart. She couldn’t help it, she was absolutely terrified. Ever since she was three years old and Greg Thompson had snuck up behind her, pulled her pig tails, scared her out of her wits and scarred her for life, Mandy had always farted when startled or scared. It had become a natural, responsive function, like blinking and tearing when you get poked in the eye. And now, seeing as how Many was absolutely petrified with fear, the farts kept popping and squelching out of her, one after the other with various levels of intensity.

These farts in particular also happened to be incredibly smelly in addition to incredibly loud, due to the fact that Mandy had eaten a curry for tea the previous night and had tucked into an egg salad sandwich for lunch, causing a noxious odour to permeate the air in a 10 foot radius around Mandy . The gunman, who was the closest to Many, and thus the most saturated in her bowel musk, stared at her with a look of shock and horror, frozen in a moment of stunned disbelief. ‘Oh my god,’ mumbled Mandy, ‘I am so sorry, I, I,I-,’ but was cut off by another explosive fart before she could finish her sentence. The gunman, overcome by the fetid stench emanating from Mandy’s rear, backed a few feet away and waved his gun-hand back and forth in front of his face in a useless attempt to escape the putrid odours.

It was at that exact moment that the gunman left himself open and vulnerable. Immediately he was tackled from behind by Mr. Greenblatt, the gentleman who had previous occupied the first place in the queue and who coincidentally held a rugby record back at college for his exceeding talent of tackling and inducing pain on the opposition. He quickly threw the gunman to the floor and kept him still in a one-armed, broke-back, nut-crunch, a move that had made him famous on the pitch.

Due to Mr. Greenblatt’s skill in violent sports, the gunman was quickly subdued, the police came, and everyone was taken down to the station to give their statements. By the time Mandy left the police station, it was almost 6:00 and the bank was closed. ‘Damn,’ Mandy thought as she trudged home empty handed, ‘I never got the butter!’