Marshmallow Macabre
an excerpt

This story lies truly. Like all others before it within it born out of it, the story of the four presents surfaces as deceptively smooth as the cylindrical puff of the pristine marshmallow. Uncompromising in its pure, powdery smoothness, the static marshmallow appears to offer nothing but the clean caress of its synthetic white skin. The edges blend imperceptibly round at every juncture, retaining their solid commitment to the oblong, flirting with but not succumbing to the tyranny of the spherical. When pressed, these ambrosian bits of baloney bounce back into the sacred shape of the Ur-Marshmallow. It’s all a lie. Even as you peer lovingly at them through the clear plastic packaging, an uniquely complex molecular mess lurks below each and every of those casual bubbles of perfection. Did you think that marshmallows are the one innocent entity on the planet? Such a thought is only further endemic to the habit of the presumed innocence and guilty proof of our moral fragility, dubious sense of justice and retribution, our simple division of black and white that leads us docile into wars and tucks us incensed to our mothers’ bossoms. At the very concept of innocence, marshmallows open their maws to grin Cheshire-wide and devour whole villages. Smirk if you will, but those minxy morsels clammer about 150 to a bag just waiting for the right moment to overturn expectations and glom onto available surfaces of any substance imaginable. Destroyers of symmetry! Mutant mercenaries! State-shifting fiends! Changelings of the baking aisle!