Fuck the Bread. The Bread Is Over (2020)

"Your final task," I imagine the dean saying, "Is to make a rope out of these ashes. Do it and the job is yours." "Who is watching your sons right now?" he asks. In between teaching my sons the difference between a scalene triangle and an isosceles, and moving my writing workshops from my garage to pixelated classrooms, and cleaning my house, and going nowhere, and being scared, and looking for bread flour and yeast, I can barely remember what it felt like to plead my case for three straight days. In the Brothers Grimm's "Cherry," an old king with three sons cannot decide who of the three should inherit the kingdom, and so he gives his sons three trials: the first, that they should seek "Cloth so fine" the king can draw it through his golden ring. If you don't spin the straw into gold or inherit the kingdom or devour all the oxen or find the flour or get the professorship, you drop out of the fairy tale, and fall over its edge into an endless, blank forest where there is no other function for you, no alternative career. The future for the sons who don't inherit the kingdom is vanishment. Tomorrow, on day fifty-nine, I will ask my sons to "Find me an acre of land / Between the salt water and the sea-strand, / Plough it with a lamb's horn, / Sow it all over with one peppercorn, / Reap it with a sickle of leather, / And gather it up with a rope made of heather." I will tell them if they perform each one of these tasks perfectly, they will be rewarded with more tasks.