Novel Ideas - a collection of short stories
an excerpt

There was once a man named Jacques. Actually, there still is a man named Jacques and if you looked at him, you would never guess that this extraordinary tale belongs to him. This is because Jacques is a very plain man. If you saw him in a crowd, you could not pick him out; in fact, even if you had met him once or even twice before, you probably still would not notice him. But if you ever heard his story, you would not forget it as easily as you would likely forget his face.
Jacques had an every day sort of job, one of those behind the scenes occupations that you did not realize was a career at all. But if Jacques or some one like him was not doing this job, it would probably inconvenience you more than you would imagine. Jacques is a pickle cutter. That is not slang for anything; it is a pretty straight forward description of his job. Jacques cuts pickles. He used to do it part time for a charming family restaurant. At a small restaurant a guy like Jacques could come in the morning and cut up a barrel of pickles in about an hour, depending on how experienced the cutter was, and that would leave the restaurant set for the rest of the day. But now, Jacques works at a baseball stadium for a concession company where there are games almost every night and that means he cuts pickles from the hour before the doors open right up until closing. He got the full time job by a lucky coincidence because a plain fellow like Jacques would never have withstood the interview process necessary to get a job with a company like MVP Snacks, Sport Concession Co. One day a company executive had come into the restaurant on the fly to grab a bite to eat. He took a single look and then a bite out of Jacques’s skillfully cut pickle and demanded to meet the man who had done such fabulous work. Jacques was hired on the spot and went to work just a few days later because it turns out that good pickle cutters are hard to come by.
Cutting pickles might seem like the kind of job that any ordinary Joe Shmoe could do. This is really not the case. There was a strict protocol for pickle slicing. Simply put, this was due to the fact that no company wants to give too much to one customer and slight another. Obviously it was undesirable to cut one slice too large and another too thin, but there are less apparent considerations that come into play when cutting pickles. For instance, some parts of a large pickle are crispier than others. Some customers prefer the softer parts of pickles while others, like myself, enjoy the crisp sections. Thus it is important that all customers receive a relatively equal distribution of soft and crisp in their slice of pickle. Also, you must consider the seed count per pickle slice: too many seeds will ruin the texture of the pickle, while too few will make it seem unhealthy and watery.
The cutting process is not the only responsibility of a pickle cutter, though. Perhaps you have not considered it, but pickles are not really the most attractive fruits nature has to offer. They are ungainly shades of green and brown, slimy and as much as we do not want to acknowledge it, pickles are in fact covered with green warts. When you think about it, pickles are the only appropriate accompaniment for something called a sandwich (often pronounced “sand-witch”) because the pickle has every outward attribute of a female fairy tale villain. Say you were given the task of turning a witch into a beauty contestant or swimsuit model – something appealing enough to sell. That was the profession of Jacques and the reason why good pickle cutters are in short supply. A good pickle cutter knows when a pickle is too short or too long, when it is too brown or too pale green, whether a bruised spot can be successfully separated from the undamaged parts of the pickle, how many warts are too many, how crisp is not ripe, how soft is too old, how much juice is too juicy… The list really goes on and on when it comes to judging pickles. Sometimes it is necessary to throw a bad pickle away because no customer wants a nasty pickle. But you can not throw away every sickly pickle that comes your way because then the company loses profit. No, when life hands someone like Jacques a gnarly looking pickle, he trims it into edible, profitable artwork.
Now I am sure you can see the importance of Jacques’s job. Everyone has been there: the refreshing crunch of a dill pickle after a tasty basket full of finger food (and if you say you do not really care for pickles, then you have never seen, felt, tasted one of Jacques’s masterpieces). You probably do not realize how much you actually look forward to that moment, but it really resolves the whole dining experience perfectly. Imagine if that glorious instant of satisfaction was impaired by a distressing off-coloration or sogginess or abundance of seeds or warty-ness or, God forbid, a concealed worm. No one wants that to happen to them and very few probably can honest say that it has. This is because it takes a certain level of dedication and watchfulness to be a pickle cutter which very few people possess and therefore most can not stick with the enterprise.
The proper pickle cutting procedure is as follows. Because pickles are more frequently than not a curvaceous fruit, the pickle must be orientated so that the convex side is against the cutting surface. The pickle is cut longitudinally and bisymmetrically down its center, producing, if done properly, two nearly identical halves. Each half is then cut again down the center with the sliced side on the cutting board, yielding quarters. The quarters are then stored for later use, popularly in another vat of pickle isotonic juice to keep them fresh and full of flavor.
You would be surprised how many complaints a customer can work up over a slice of pickle. Of course there are the above listed traits: size, taste, juiciness, too many seeds, seedlessness, color, texture, bumpiness… But there are plenty of other bizarre objections raised about the sandwich accessory that you would never even think about. Jacques’s favorite so far was an old woman who had to be forcibly lead away from the snack stand by security guards because she started screaming that her pickle was covered in denture adhesive and manure. After a careful investigation by the company into the complaint, it was found that the pickle supply contained no traces of feces, but the woman had dropped her pickle twice on the heavily trafficked bathroom floor while attempting to re-adhere her dentures. A close runner up was a man who insisted the cutter was under the influence of some kind of substance because his pickle was not cut perfectly straight. The truth was that when Jacques cutting that particular pickle, one of the home players hit a grand slam and a volley of fireworks were shot off unannounced. The great thing about being a pickle cutter, though, is that most of the time you are diligently at work in the back and never have to deal with customers face to face. Pickle cutters just are not the most conspicuous folks.
Jacques is afraid of ducks. Actually, he is really rather terrified of them, especially the yellow and white ones. This is because when Jacques was a toddler his mother took him to a duck pond and left him there with nothing but the clothes on his back and a bag of bread, which was quickly disposed of by his newfound feathered friends. The friendship was short lived, however, because once the bread was dispatched, young Jacques seemed to be the next most suitable food item in the habitat. Jacques suffered an unfortunate array of biting injuries, several of which left an array of strange scars on his neck, arms and legs, in the brief moments before a young woman and her daughter came upon the flailing, crying Jacques under a growing mass of hungry, ill mannered water fowl.
The woman and her daughter, who was about Jacques’s age, became Jacques adoptive family and turned out to be a much more suitable family than the one he had been dealt the first time around. And even though it was probably the best thing that could have happened to him, the memory of that occurrence stood out clearly in Jacques’s mind as the worst thing that had ever happened to him and understandably so.
Jacques was lucky in that aside from his mother (which is how he came to know her) and sister (as he came to know her) were two of the very few witnesses to this shameful humiliation he had suffered as a very small child. Aside from the ducks, there was one other present for the embarrassing scene: Ralph Reineck Caducci. He was a whiskery old bloke with big brown bags under his judgmental watery black eyes. His leathery face was covered with deep aged wrinkles and black moles intermixed with gaping pores. He had a saggy body covered in countless blubbery rolls. Against any competition, Ralph Reineck Caducci could be the winner of a Jabba the Hut look a like contest. His breath smelled horribly of fish and he had no shame about that or any other disgusting behavior of his. He farted and belched and scratched himself and he never wore clothes, even though he was constantly in the public eye. It was guaranteed that Ralph Reineck Caducci never brushed his own tusks, but perhaps he could be excused from that because it was hard to hold a tooth brush with flippers. Ralph Reineck Caducci is of course a blubbery old walrus who insists on being addressed by all three of his names lest you want to be honked at and have all sorts of negative attention drawn to your way. Ralph Reineck Caducci dwells in the same public park that our protagonist, Jacques, had the lowest moment of his short life thus far and seeing Jacques so humiliated, Ralph Reineck Caducci would not let the poor young man live it down...