Requested story elements: Angela Hoekstra-Steed; the Paper Bag Princess or Eeyore; a crazy Italian chef called Thomas; no two snowflakes are the same; there was an explosion in the spaghetti factory!
Splattered Dreams
The spaghetti factory in downtown Toulouse had three main levels. When Thomas bought the land for the business his neighbours jeered – the property that he swore would be his sustenance was only thirteen feet square, and so the man was labelled a “crazy” right from the get-go. The benefit of operating in such a small area was that Thomas’ taxes were very low – even for being downtown in such a popular city in France – but the disadvantages were painfully clear from the beginning of his project. And yet, with the blood of successful and very creative amateur businessmen of the past flowing through his veins, Thomas set to work laying brick upon brick until his dream structure had come to be a wonderfully unusual reality.
It was forty feet tall and a perfect thirteen foot square, right to the top. Because of the thickness of the walls (to adhere to the building codes), the interior of the building was only eleven feet and with the elevator taking up a quarter of that available space (as it was the only method of climbing the tower), there was very little room for a business. In spite of this situation Thomas remained a faithful optimist and he made the most of every inch of space he had, manoeuvring a sink and towel rack, a display case for his finished works, a cash register, a place for the cue line and a grand old wooden desk into the “lobby” of the bottom floor, still leaving space under the shoots to work on and package his goods. And now we come to the heart of Thomas’ factory: the shoots.
The shoots extended down from the very top floor and were made of a flexible metal, lined with thick fondant icing. The inner space was about the diameter of a Canadian loonie, and the colourful coiled wire around the outside of each tube indicated what kind of pastas would be coming down through it. The rose-pink shoot was strawberry flavoured pasta, the blue shoot was home to fish flavours (a blend of tuna and cod) and the bright yellow shoot was for the no-fat double-butter flavour, and so on. There were nine different shoots and three that were unidentified (for special requests and large orders). The top floor of the building was the laboratory where Thomas would spend many hours mixing and blending his secret pasta recipes and though no one could definitively say what was on the second floor most speculated that it was used for storage or that it was the bathroom or perhaps that the level was entirely empty. Even now there is some suspicion as to Thomas’ intentions for that mysterious second floor.
Three days before the shop was opened Thomas hired two employees. The first was a young girl named Aoibheann-Rani-Gimbiyan-Ameerah-Sarai Takarda-Jakar; to limit the time it took to address the girl they summarized her name and her job description to “the Paper Bag Princess” and called her Cessie for short. Cessie was responsible for running the till and packaging the products when Thomas was finished with them. The second employee was Eye-Ore (pronounced “Ee-yore”), an unusually stout Irish man who seemed to have glistening pieces of that legendary lucky loot hidden deep behind his pupils of blue. The contrast between Eye-Ore’s bright eyes and his boorish nature was a strong juxtaposition indeed, but Cessie and Thomas were very fond of him and together the trio was fabulously efficient and happy. Eye-Ore worked on the top floor managing the machinery that mix the pastas and making sure that the paste passed without problems through the shoots and down to Thomas and Cessie who resumed production at ground level.
Here our story must jump for a moment to Mrs. Angela Hoekstra-Steed, an avid Walt Disney fan who was in the middle of a European tour, visiting the cities that had characters named after them. She was exploring the Aristocats legacy in Rochefort, Belgium when she first caught wind of Thomas’ business. There was a poster in one of the cheese houses that read “Tu n’ai jamais vu de telle spaghetti dan ta vie!” Although she couldn’t read the French, she understood “spaghetti” well enough and based on the odd little statue in the photograph, Angela assumed that the company was some sort of dinner-and-art-show, which is more accurate than you realize. Toulouse was already on her list of places to stop and with her Belgian adventure wrapping up like a Babybel, Angela grabbed her Eurorail pass and headed south.
Before his adventures in the noodle industry Thomas had been a professional (and struggling) artist. Though his sculptures were indeed beautiful, not many in Toulouse were interested in sculptures of stone or ice. In a stroke of genius he decided to combine his two life-long passions: portrayals and pastas. It was this idea that sparked his entrepreneurial adventure into the world of linguine and penne.
At eleven minutes after eleven o’clock, exactly a week and four days after it’s opening, Angela joined the line of customers in front of Thomas’ store. As the cue moved slowly towards the door Angela began to smell all of the flavours that were pouring out from the shop. You could almost smell the colours of the pastas that were being made inside: green wafts of fresh spinach and deep purples of blackberry filled Angela’s hungry lungs. When she finally squeezed herself inside the tightly packed waiting area, however, she almost forgot her cravings out of sheer amazement. Behind the barrier of the large, mahogany desk stood a young girl with a very long name-tag. She was whirling around with first money then ribbon then long sheets of paper in her hands, quickly wrapping and cha-ching-ing the cash register. Over her shoulder Angela could see Thomas dancing around a tall pedestal-like table with two long shoots in his hand. One moment he was looking to a posted note and carefully taking in the details of an order then he was weaving and folding and shaping the flow of pasta and in the next second he was standing there with a blow-dryer, setting his masterpiece and then handing it over to Cessie who took a photo of it, wrapped and packaged and then sold it to the person who had done the requesting. It was like watching a beautiful clockwork machine whose revealed dials and tinplates and springs are just as fascinating and entrancing as the intricate carvings on its face.
“What can we make you today?” asked the girl with the impossibly long name. Angela had not been paying attention to the shrinking line in front of her. “Well,” she thought aloud, “what are my options?” Cessie smiled broadly – the same smile she offered to every customer – a smile that never seemed to tire in energy or generosity or genuine joy. “There is no limit to the answers I could give you to that question. Thomas’ creations are as different from each other as God’s snowflakes. Reach into your imagination – test your creativity. Really, the sky is the limit!” Angela closed her eyes to think, knowing that there was an unspoken time limit to how long she would be left to search out an idea. “Can… can I have a duckling?”
With a grin Cessie typed “baby ducky” into the register and printed out a receipt on carbon paper. One copy she slid to the end of the desk and the other she tacked up on the wall beside the elevator for Thomas. The slip above hers read “pirate ship” and to her ever-increasing astonishment she looked over to the workspace where Thomas was working on the finishing touches to a perfect model of the Black Pearl, complete with the Jolly Roger and a sour-patch Jack Sparrow. Angela was in awe.
As Cessie took the picture and then walked back to the desk with the edible replica, Thomas took a look at his new order. Looking up at Angela with a smile he reached up to the shoots and took one in each hand – the yellow butter and the orange caramel – and set to work. In a flash he was swooping and pinching, flicking and pulling and wrapping the soft pasta into the perfect shape of a duckling. Thomas guided the noodle in such a way that the little bird’s wings looked tuft with down; its bright orange bill and black dropie eyes creaded the cutest face she had ever seen – the perfect balance of an anthropomorphic smile and a soft, almost plush-like docility. Sooner that she could have believed he was drying it to set the pasta in place and Cessie was wrapping it in thin rice paper, trying it with a liquorice lace that matched the little ducky’s salty eyes. As Angela counted out the coins to pay for her “dinner” and Cessie took her receipt off the wall she noticed with alarm that the form under her “baby ducky” request had only one word written on it: dynamite.
A chill ran down Angela’s back as she handed her money to Cessie. The girl behind the counter was similarly affected and her eyes flicked uncertainly between the cash in her hand and the stranger waiting for his order to be filled. If Thomas had been an entirely sensible sort of man this order would not have concerned anyone (explosive-shaped pasta was a normal enough request, considering the rebellious nature of the French), but Thomas was not an entirely sensible sort of man. Thomas was the kind of person who built a forty foot tall tower with a thirteen foot base. Thomas was the kind of person who put a three-cornered hat on a sour-patch-kid for the sake of authenticity. Thomas was the living definition of eccentric, and Cessie knew it.
When the artistic chef had finished with the duckling and was ready for another challenge, he walked over to the elevator and took a look at the next request in line. Then he took another look. It did, in fact, read “dynamite” and after a moment of processing the paper Thomas calmly washed his hands in the sink, dried them on a towel, walked over to the elevator and pressed the up arrow firmly. Cessie had stopped counting change and Angela had stopped waiting for it back. Both of them – all of them – were staring at Thomas. The doors swooshed open and Thomas stepped inside. When those doors swooshed closed again he left the lobby behind and in a swoosh that startled poor Eye-Ore half to death he appeared in the laboratory holding a small red vial containing a few drops of mysterious red liquid.
“Eye-Ore, I need you to mix this into a special order batch. Be very careful not to touch it. Do you understand? Take the greatest caution. Send it down the third tube.”
The chatter in the lobby died down as soon as the elevator returned to the bottom floor and Thomas came out. He looked at the man in line and locked his gaze. “You want dynamite? I’ll give you dynamite.”
Thomas walked over to his table and took the third blank shoot in his left hand. With his right he grabbed a lazy-susan from under his desk and placed it on the pedestal table. With his teeth he picked up a pair of surgical gloves that had been hanging up on the wall, tossed them up into the air and in a move that is too incredible to describe in detail he slipped them on without even releasing the nozzle. With the tap of a toggle the shoot in Thomas’ hand started to squirt out bright red fizzing pasta. Cessie shot Angela a quick look and both of them glanced towards the young man in line. “I guess I should have asked for a basketball, oui?”
The lazy-susan on the table spun faster and faster as Thomas poured the pasta onto the platter like a potter working with clay. In a moment he had created a dozen cylindrical tubes that varied in size and length. The whole room smelled of sizzling cinnamon and the small lobby was packed with three layers of curious and slightly concerned customers. All were silent. All were waiting.
Thomas reached up above his head and pulled down the yellow and orange and green and purple and blue tubes so fast you could hardly keep up with the waving of his warms and the darting precision of his perfectly coordinated hands. He added lightning bolts and swirls, arrows and polka-dots and flowers so real you could smell them and indeed you could smell them – the whole building smelled of cod-flavoured blackberries, caramelized spinach, strawberries with butter and pickles and scrambled egg all swirled together in a sensory pandemonium overtop a thick cinnamon base that seemed to be growing brighter and brighter every second!
After three moments of chaos Thomas stepped back from his creations. With a shaky hand he took the cork out of a small red vial, identical to the one he had given Eye-Ore only moments earlier with the exception that this vile vial was full. A drop of the liquid fell from the cork to the floor and POPPED against the tile. This was no ordinary food colouring.
Thomas dipped the spaghetti fuses into the vial of liquid. He repeated this process thrice and on the third round he took his hairdryer and set them dry. His audience held their breaths in tense anticipation.
Angela noticed it first but there was not much she could do. Thomas had changed the design of his dynamite sticks and had managed to clock the alteration from almost everyone in the store. He had added cones to the end of each stick. Directional cones. Aerodynamic cones. Her heart nearly stopped. This was no ordinary pasta dynamite. These were rockets and they were already lit. Angela cried out!
“Aoib… Aoibheeee… Aoibheann-Rani-Gim… Girl behind the counter! This place is going to BLOW!”
Cessie gasped but there was no time to do anything else. Thomas, with a wild spark in his eye and a cackle in his throat emptied the remaining contents of his vial onto the pile of explosives and tore open a bag of Pop-Rocks. The customers who were close enough took cover under the large wooden desk and everyone else piled on top of them and plugged their ears, waiting for the bang.
BANG!
The whole building jumped. Eye-Ore, who had no idea what was happening below, was catapulted from his cushy office chair through the roof and into the next lot (which just happened to be a public swimming pool that was experimenting with Jell-o pudding as an alternative to the traditional water, so the impact didn’t kill him). Inside Thomas’ store was a different story. Cessie, Angela and about half of the waiting customers had their eyebrows singed off but not one of them even complained.
The explosion was the most beautiful sight any of them had ever tasted. By some kind of culinary miracle the spaghetti had cooked to perfection. It was inexplicable and wonderful; a truly sensational phenomenon.
Angela’s hair was filled with pasta but she couldn’t have been happier even if she had actually found Toulouse in Toulouse. It was the perfect finale to her European adventure, and perhaps the beginning of a career in travel writing. When her initial shock dissolved, a sort of wonderment overwhelmed her heart and her senses. She stood up, looked the now bald and beaming Thomas in the eye and began to clap. Soon the entire store broke into applause, giving Thomas a standing ovation and the celebration that began on that day has yet to temper in France. Thomas is a celebrated hero even in local circles as the crazy man with a crazy dream and the courage to take risks to make it happen. He was awarded the Golden Fusilli (the highest honour for Italian cuisine) after only one year in business, which is an unheard of success.
But what was in the vial, you ask? I’m afraid that has become a carefully guarded trade secret. Some say it is an edible nitro-glycerine kept in a vault on the second floor of Thomas’ renowned forty-foot shop, but not even Cessie and Eye-Ore are entirely convinced of that theory. Perhaps it will remain a true secret forever.
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