Ftrain, by Paul Ford

It's peculiar for a box of cereal to last as long as it has. Finishing it (all but an ounce today, which I left in the box instead of topping off the bowl), it feels like I have said a pleasant goodbye to a fine and fibrous friend.

Before now I might as well have shotgunned it, put my mouth under the bottom of the box and sliced it open, along with the plastic liner, so that the entire pound of starch went into me at once. Cereal walked into the house bright, shiny, full of dreams; an empty box walked out empty a day or two later, spent and worn, with its edges frayed, blinking, worn through.

I have an alcoholic friend and once we were talking about our various habits. "If I have a bottle in the freezer," he said, "it's talking to me all the time. I know exactly how much and when."

Yes. I'll be in the other room and hear the siren's call. Food just starts screaming out of the fridge and the freezer and the cabinets. I'll find myself under some power other than my own, legs moving into the kitchen, all contemplation shoved aside to make room for a terrible urgency. There's a fire to keep lit--but not the fire that keeps the body alive and moving.

"What are you doing?" asks my wife. An anti-siren.

"Just going out to mirblfrm," I say. "Gonna ulm some furfles."

"What?"

"Yes."

"No, what are you doing?"

"Going for srunble sanks."

I don't want to take the metaphor too far, though. The answer is not to lash myself to the mast; the answer is to wear earplugs.