The Roll to Freedom

The hustle and bustle of the café was all I’d ever known.  From the moment the bakers took me out from the oven, exactly 5 hours earlier, I have been sitting on this tin-baking tray.  Life can get pretty dull when you’re on display.  My job, and the job of my fellow pastries, is to look delicious.  It sounds easy, right?  Well it’s not.  It’s a tough competition.  All of us dream about getting outside of the display and living in the real world.  So we have to make sacrifices.  Like this morning, for example, me and my buddy Apple Fritter were getting baked in the oven, just chillen’, when the baker came to take us out.  He put us down next to each other on the tray, but it was the tray that stays put in the kitchen until all the other trays were empty.  Basically, the worst place you can be at this job where the biggest fear is being day old.  When Apple Fritter and me realized this I knew I had to sacrifice our friendship.  I could tell he was thinking the exact same thing as me and we both made the dive for the next tray. 

            “Nooooo,” he screamed at me, mid dive.  I pushed him out of the way and landed on the tray. 

Apple Fritter landed splat on the floor.  His glaze was flaky and cracked, the glaze of a pastry whose display days were long gone.  He looked at me with awe and horror.  I felt bad at first, watching the baker carry his damaged dough to the garbage can but I knew it was the only way out. We were like Gladiators; yes we sacrificed lives but only to gain our freedom.

I knew little of life beyond the wall of glass.  All I knew was what I could see through the windows of the café. Everything was huge, colorful, loud.  I knew about being eaten of course, I'm not that naïve.  But in the pastry world being eaten is so much better than being tossed in the trash, branded as no good even for a desperate, hungry stomach.  It was our reason for living and a lot of pastries wanted nothing else out of life than to sit happily chewed in the belly of a human.  But not me.  Cinnamon rolls are known amongst the pastries for having more ambition than a pastry is meant to have.  The others looked at me disdainfully, but it’s not my fault I wanted more out of life than being chomped to pieces by a giant mouth.  I wanted true liberty.

When I was just a twisted ball of uncooked dough the oldest cinnamon in the shop, Gandough, gave me and my fellow cinnamon rolls, a talk about our life and our reason for living.  I remember it as if it had only just happened.  We called him the great cinnamon roll and he was as intimidating as he was wise.  All of us rolls coward under his huge shadow, his stale sweet smell drifted over us, the smell of a roll worth respecting.

“You are all lucky.  Lucky, to be a cinnamon roll,” he said to us. “The first day after being baked is the most important day of your entire life, since after that day you will either be thrown out, eaten or old, like me, so you must live this day with no regrets.  We are born for one purpose.  We are born to rid ourselves and our fellow pastries of our confinement, to change our destiny and make a new life for pastries everywhere.  It only takes one grain of sugar to tip the scale.  Any of you could be that grain,” and I swear he looked directly at me when he said, “and become the one to liberate us all.”

            From that point on, I worked tirelessly to become irresistible to humans.  Human interest was the obvious way out, we all knew that.  There were some pastries that always ended up being overlooked, bran muffins for example, were only bought by the select few vegetarian, granola-eating types, they weren’t competition.  But others, like the donuts, were my toughest competitors, their pink frosting glowing in the bright lights of the bakery.  It made me truly sick that the donuts were always getting bought, their brains filled with cream filling and nonsense, with no drive for independence. 

 Once a donut was bought all of us cinnamon rolls would watch scornfully as the donuts coaxed the humans, persuasively saying, “Eat me.  Don’t I look good?   Yummm, you know you want to,” in their sweet soft voices and then gone they’d go.   A total waste of dough.

  I tried as hard as I could to look delicious.  I puffed myself up to my most scrumptious looking size but, unfortunately, I was a bit on the small side.  I was somewhat the runt of the cinnamon roll bunch.  I knew this gave the others a huge advantage over me and I was self conscious because of it.  It would be harder for me to get picked and everyone knew it.  None of the cinnamon rolls thought of me as any sort of competition, until they saw what I did to Apple Fritter.  I certainly wasn’t envied or anything even close to that, but the other cinnamon rolls seemed to accept me as one of them.  A roll with the ability and determination to escape, so that if I did someday get picked, they knew I would be strong enough to complete our mission. 

            After the lunch rush, the bakery fell into a quiet lull.  I sat on my tray restlessly observing an old lady walking down the street.  She walked slowly, so slow that people in the street walking around her looked as though they were speed walking.  She stopped for a minute to adjust her nylons, which even after she pulled them up showed far too much of her pale and veiny leg.  Ugh, I thought, if she was a pastry she’d be older than Gandough.  I laughed to myself and then straightened up when I realized she was coming into the bakery.  I could see her more clearly once she was inside.  She was wearing a knitted sweater, the stitches loose and awkward, obviously hand made herself or by someone who didn’t have any talent at knitting.  On her bottom half was what initially appeared to be a skirt, but when she got up to the counter I could see that the legs separated to make shorts.  She looked at each tray.  I looked at her wrinkles, all scrunched up like a dried out fruit tart.  I wasn’t even really concentrating on getting picked.  I was just thinking about the dribble of snot I could see forming its way on the edge of one of her nostrils.  Her nostrils, that were inches away, sniffing at us.  I kept thinking about it falling on me.  How will I ever get bought if I have a big gob of snot on my shiny glaze?  If the baker saw, straight in the garbage I would go.  My thoughts were spinning, worries filling me up as her snotty nose got closer and closer.  Then I felt the sudden warmth I hadn’t felt since I was first put on the tray all those hours ago, the warmth of a human hand.  I watched the faces of my competition as I was lifted from the tray into a white paper bag.  Some looked angry, some looked disappointed but at that point I really couldn’t care less what they were thinking.  The paper bag was my vesicle.  It would transport me out of this world and into a new exciting place.  At that moment, I couldn’t have loved the old lady more and I promised myself not to make fun of her wrinkles or veiny legs again.  I wouldn’t have to look at them for long; I’d be out of her grasp in no time.

My plan was to wait until the old lady took me out of the bag with the intention to eat me and then I would jump away from her.  Movement in front of a human was strictly prohibited, but laws are made to be broken and if the only consequence was a human gone mad, at least my human was old enough that with luck and dim lighting she might not even notice.  But, for the first part of my adventure I was just sitting in the bag, no real change just the usual waiting.  I felt myself banging against the old woman’s leg as she walked at her ridiculously slow pace.  I could hear the sound of voices and water sloshing close by.  Finally, the woman arrived at her destination and sat down.  She reached into the white bag and lifted me out.  I didn’t hesitate for a second; I skipped from her fingertips and landed on the table.  She reached for me again, but I was faster than her.  I rolled my body off the table and onto the floor.  I could feel human’s eyes on me and a few even tried to pick me up, but I was already out the door.  When I stopped rolling I was outside on a deck of a restaurant, facing me was a view I had never seen before.  Miles and miles of never-ending water stood in front of me.  Beautiful, blue and breathtaking.  This is it, my first taste of freedom, and it sure did taste good. 

I stayed on the deck for a while.  Too awed to do anything but stare.  I soon realized that we were no longer connected to land and we were in fact floating atop this giant body of blue water.  I waited there content with just witnessing this most amazing scene.  When the sun began to set I started getting bored and I realized there wasn’t much else going on in this place.  Attached to one of the rails I saw a smaller boat.   If only I had more pastries with me, I thought, then we could row the boat back to land.  I was in a restaurant, so I knew that more pastries couldn’t be too hard to find. I rolled back inside the restaurant and near the entrance was indeed a row of pastries.  They were laid out on trays, which were sitting on the counter; a short wall of glass divided them from that world and this one.  I pitied them, more than I’d ever pitied a pastry’s life before.  I had to help them, so I took a deep breath and jumped onto the bottom shelf of a passing pastry cart.  The cart went behind the counter and I climbed to the top, so that I was level with the trays.  When I was at a close enough distance I jumped on top of the counter.  I needed a tool, something to help me dump the trays so the pastries would fall on the floor.  I grabbed a spatula and positioned it under a tray.  With all my might I jumped on the end of the spatula and off sprung a dozen pastries.  I looked around and the cashier at the other end of the counter had headphones on and hadn’t noticed.  I jumped on the spatula again and again once more, until all of the pastries were sprinting towards the door.  I flead them back onto the deck and the cinnamon rolls greeted me like a hero.  I told them my plan and some of them were confused, wondering why they should help me and what was in it for them, but they agreed when I compared their life now to the adventure ahead.

            Together we pushed the little boat into the water.  We all jumped inside of it and spent the next half hour figuring out how to use the oars.  When we did, we began sailing toward the nearest shore.    There we were, renegade pastries, experiencing life.    I looked around at the land and the water, breathing in the sea air, I thought about how precious our short life was.  I couldn’t have been more content, spending my last hours sailing into the sunset.  I had discovered that a cinnamon roll is the pathway to freedom, long and twisted, but in the end perfect and sweet.