Chapter 1. A Not-So-Sudden State of Depression
Miss Pumpernickel Bread first sunk into a deep depression and then sunk an egg into a bathtub of boiling water. She’d started the water on the stove then submerged a hot plate in the tub to keep it boiling.
There was a period of frustration, stress, and depression — the kind in which a scream never escapes the mouth, but dispenses itself throughout the body, causing the skin to vibrate. The pores offer no relief. The impulses continue circling and ricocheting around the body, and release only through hand gestures, other bodily movements and subtle selections of polite adjectives and adverbs.
“One, two, three, four, five, six,… twenty-three,” Miss Pumpernickel Bread counted. One short of two dozen eggs she put in the boiling bath water.
This depression, intended to self-destruct, had merely been transformed — not transformed, hidden by an immediate sense of pleasure and creativity.
“Soup,” she pointed upright. The refrigerator offered a week’s rations of vegetables and lamb. And with the plunger she stirred and stirred until the bottles of spice she’d emptied and the bouillon cubes had dissolved into a soft transparent broth which she would most certainly offer to her friends and neighbors. Conveniently, her sister was out of town. She would have felt responsible and embarrassed to see Miss Pumpernickel Bread in such a state.
Seven guests spontaneously accepted after phone calls. Those seven solicited sixteen more. Miss Pumpernickel Bread requested they inform only twenty-three — one for each egg. She represented the exiled egg of the two dozen.
She decided to wait until all the guests arrived. Then, she would submerge herself naked into the tub with a ladle. She would call one of them to tell the others to bring their bowls in.
“Soup is served!”
Chapter 2. Soup is Served
And it was. Her pink bathing cap protected it from taking on hair. Pubic hair was of little consequence.
The guests thought it simply startling at first but quickly adapted. They would remember it as one of the most exhilaratingly strange events ever to be taken so nonchalantly. Many towns elsewhere would hear about it, and, for years to come, the event would be used by advertising companies and real estate firms to attract buyers to the area, not unlike the use of amusement parks, large universities, or military bases: “Miss Pumpernickel Bread's Tub.” Derivatives of her name would appear as soup kitchens, bakeries, pastry shops and more.
At the time, her guests remarked at how her skin seemed to absorb the soup like the pumpernickel bread she’d served with it — the very bread she’d earned her name from. As she emptied the ladle into many bowls, each recipient reacted by holding theirs under her flabby upper arm and saying, “I want all of Miss Pumpernickel Bread I can get!” — almost expecting little chunks of soggy, pore-ridden skin to plop off into their bowl.
Dinner was served and a feast was had.
Uninvited guests strolled in, bowls in hands, to try to get some of that soup. Miss Pumpernickel Bread ended up serving two-hundred and thirty-nine bowls of soup that day. Well, actually, two-hundred and forty bowls including the one that was served in this way, the one that would refill her empty seat in the egg carton to complete the twenty dozen:
A boy of seven, little Kevy by name, was the last to receive soup. He found Miss Pumpernickel Bread lying in the empty bathtub. A film of spice and a few celery skins remained stuck to the side of the tub. He smelled something still cooking.
Kevy looked down at Miss Pumpernickel Bread in the tub. Her eyes were slivered open as if she were about to enter a dream. The tub alone supported her exhausted body. The weight from the mass of her body, her physical pain, and the depression that first inspired her pulled her down in the tub like a mound of wet dough.
They were alone together. Kevy found it in him to ask, “Isn't there one bowl of soup left? Just a drop?”
Miss Pumpernickel Bread, being a generous woman, forced a smile and tried to rise.
“Let me see what I can find,” she may have said.
Little Kevy smiled too and outstretched his bowl to her with both arms. Hers received it. Then in a sluggish motion she rubbed her finger along the spice ring around the tub and then rubbed it in the bowl like Kevy had often done himself with a booger. She picked up the celery skins and a small piece of lamb fat that had been caught behind her knee and put them in the bowl. Realizing in the dry tub that the only soup left had been absorbed through her body, she held the bowl between her legs just above the hot plate she’d been sitting on the entire time and urinated into it producing a steamy fragrant broth. Kevy’s height and Miss Pumpernickel Bread’s position forced them to see eye-to-eye. This she delivered as the last bowl of soup.
Kevy took it ecstatically, entered the main room where the rest of the guests were finishing their meals and impressed them with the miracle Miss Pumpernickel Bread performed. The company watched Kevy take the first sip and clapped in approval.
“Yes, this is the grand finale, the ultimate encore.”
They waited for Miss Pumpernickel Bread to come out to take her bow, but she didn't come. They kept clapping, but she didn't show.
“She's cleaning up,” one said, “I'll go and get her.”
She found Miss Pumpernickel Bread unconscious in the bathtub with the hot plate still red hot, scorching the already charred flesh of her buttocks like two slices of burned toast. (This would become the bakery’s logo). The extension cord no one had seen earlier stuck to its socket.
Later, many would comment about not even having seen the hot plate, “The soup was so dark and rich with spices that it was hidden, and, she was, well, sitting on it. Rest her soul.”
The ambulance arrived while Miss Pumpernickel Bread was unconscious but still alive. The electrical current from the hot plate and the water, plus the sheer heat, tripled by the intense psychological strain of holding back the agony, not to mention the weight of her depression, “and smiling no less, giggling as if she were being tickled by the noodles themselves,” had caused a coma which lasted ten years.
Chapter 3. More Soup is Served
Two months after the party, the first soup kitchen opened in her honor: Miss P’s. National advertising brought people from all over. They came to enjoy the experience of eating soup under circumstances as close as possible to the actual event. The soup kitchen did everything in its power to insure satisfaction.
The restaurant was designed in-the-round with the kitchen in the center of a circular bar. Beyond the bar and stools stood round tables with red and white checkered cloths. Waiters and waitresses worked inside serving soup to thousands of customers daily. Just above eye level of the patrons, Miss Pumpernickel Bread reached omnipotence. The hospital agreed to bring the body to the restaurant for display. She sat in a replica tub above the kitchen.
Sarah FoldEconomy, as she would later be called, Miss Pumpernickel Bread’s sister and only living relative, was powerless in preventing this. On the one hand, when the soup kitchen tried to get the actual tub, the state denied the acquisition. They deemed the house, which Sarah now owned, along with everything in it, including the tub, private property: “She depends on the tub for cleanliness.” The decision was final. On the other hand, when Sarah tried to stop the hospital, which the state ran, from displaying Miss Pumpernickel Bread’s body in a restaurant, she was told that the body was public property from the moment it left the house. Because of the scale of the party and the national attention brought to it by the media, they declared her body a national icon. All rights immediately went to the state. Sarah, they explained, due to her age and the threat of senility was considered unfit to handle these responsibilities. If Sarah had originally consented, she would have kept custody and the decision would have been accredited to her. Since she opposed the use of her sister’s body in public, the state became Miss Pumpernickel Bread’s legal guardian and took complete control. This decision made way for the restaurant’s most ambitious attempt at authenticity: to serve soup directly from her body.
The mayor understood the cultural importance of this and accepted it as long as her genitals didn’t show. So under the guise of protecting women and children, the owners of the restaurant found a flesh-colored bikini that would cover her private parts. The color maintained the illusion of authenticity — Miss Pumpernickel Bread was nude the day of the party. Although they weren’t a central part of the display, her breasts were covered with the bikini top because the owners agreed that children shouldn’t have that kind of access to nipples.
A biourinary specialist was commissioned to design a way to get soup to flow from her urethra. First he explained how a thin plastic-wrap-like tube would be inserted into Miss Pumpernickel Bread’s mouth. It would be digested like a normal piece of spaghetti. The specialist would activate the automatic swallowing mechanism in Miss Pumpernickel Bread’s pharynx and feed the tube along its natural course. The material was indigestible, so it would take several hours to work its way completely through her still-independently functioning gastrointestinal tract.
“The only additional invasion,” the specialist said, “will be the rerouting of the tube, because it is solid material, from the direction of the rectum to the bladder. But, once in the bladder it will eventually emerge as a common stream of urine.”
Soup would then be pumped from a warming pot on the stove into the tube irritating her urinary track which would cause her to urinate as if it were natural.
One concern the board of directors at the hospital had for the system was the temperature of the soup running through Miss Pumpernickel Bread’s body and the effect it would have on her organs. The specialist defended his design by stating that the soup, at the moment of entry into Miss Pumpernickel Bread’s body, would not exceed 90° F and would then be slowly warmed to body temperature by Miss Pumpernickel Bread’s own apparatus. Thus every bowl would be served hot at no offence to the body — Miss Pumpernickel Bread’s or the consumers’.
Their second concern was chunks. “How do you expect she will pass those large lamb and vegetable chunks? A tiny kidney stone, we all know, can be very painful. She may be comatose Doctor, but she is human.” To this the specialist proposed that further operations would be needed to enlarge the urethra. Also, infections caused by the foreign implant would be handled by antibiotics intravenously injected daily.
This first proposal was rejected. “It just involves too much cutting and pasting. Can’t we come up with something more natural?”
Finally, seven people from the community who had attended the party wrote a letter to the hospital board suggesting that they make a soup stock following the recipe as they remembered it and feed it from a pot on the stove directly into Miss Pumpernickel Bread’s mouth. Then she would urinate only the natural byproduct of soup.
“Brilliant. They’ve really tapped into something,” the head doctor said. He added the necessity of reinforcing the soup stock with the same ingredients that now fed her intravenously. This would increase the nutritional value for the customers as well. Then to make the plan perfect, he would insert a catheter into her bladder which would allow urine to flow from her body at a steady rate proportional to the rate of the soup entering her mouth.
A tube led from a large caldron in the kitchen up to Miss Pumpernickel Bread’s mouth and discharged soup. When a customer ordered a bowl, the wait staff partially filled it with the main stock containing the solids of vegetables, lamb, egg, and noodles from the pot on the stove, then placed the bowl on a hydraulic lift that raised it between Miss Pumpernickel Bread’s legs, and released the valve on the catheter. This stuck out the bikini bottoms. Before the audience of customers, steaming soup would drip from between Miss Pumpernickel Bread’s legs.
Every night a manager would turn off the pump from the soup to her mouth. Then he would attach a tube to the catheter that would lead back into the caldron so Miss Pumpernickel Bread could flow all night. He would leave the neon Miss P’s sign on to comfort her and to let everyone know what she was doing.
The mayor came on opening day for the soup breaking party and press conference. He tasted the first bowl before an audience of three hundred. After ecstatically grunting praise from his taste buds he spoke into the microphone. “Welcome to Miss Pees,” he said and the pun caught on nationally.
One reporter asked him to comment on the nutritional value of the soup. The mayor smiled pulling a chive off his tooth with his tongue. “Nutrition?” he said. “Sure, vegetables have a lot of vitamins.” The audience cheered his shameful wit and celebrated the quote in the newspaper.
Another reporter asked him if there weren’t an ethical side to the issue of using her body as a carrier. To this, the mayor soft-spokenly stated that he was aware that a life was at stake. “A life,” he repeated, “Not a death.” He held up his hand and explained, “I have written proof from specialists in five cities and six universities saying that if she were to remain in a hospital with intravenous feeding the coma could continue for twenty-five years or more. But here, in public, in an environment she’s familiar with, performing activities she’s familiar with, with people she’s familiar with, these same specialists agree that she could be out in two years. If this were to happen she would be up in no time making soup in her own kitchen, or in Miss P’s itself.”
At this, the mayor called the owner of the restaurant to the microphone. They revealed a written and signed contract declaring Miss Pumpernickel Bread a life-time employee of the restaurant. It stated her wages, benefit plan, and uniform size. “This only lacks her signature,” the mayor continued. “If she were to recover in the restaurant, she could sign it on the spot. She needs a job like everyone else. She is still human after all. And we intend to treat her that way. Her generosity is world renown. All of you ethical sticklers should ask yourselves this: Do you think she would prefer sitting in a hospital using all of the community’s tax dollars and not giving anything in return or serving soup to thousands of people who love her?”
He paused to let the idea sit. “One thing all of us should remember most about Miss Pumpernickel Bread,” he continued, “is her dedication to the idea that ‘The soup must flow on!’” The true ring of this made it unnecessary for reporters to scribble it in their note pads. It would be remembered by all for ages.
The hospital profited from the rental fees of the body and the necessary life support systems. They contracted a five-year tour in restaurants and other companies that could afford the fees. Despite high bids from international companies, the state wouldn’t allow her body, as a national icon, to leave the country. The hospital’s success was so overwhelming that, after she died, and after the Food and Drug Administration refused to allow them to maintain her decaying body in a restaurant, they had to expect a loss for the next fiscal year.
Miss Pumpernickel Bread, only once, escaped from the coma. Bits of fragmented information were constructed when she was asked if she had tried to kill herself that day. No one ever suspected murder, but some suspected suicide. Most took it as her way of getting wholly involved with what she was doing. Ending her life had crossed her mind, and it had been her intention when she first put all her eggs in one tub. But, as she attested, it is easy to be swept away by the pleasure of outrageousness. She quickly forgot her original motivation. Only once did it occur to her when she was in the tub that she may have made a mistake. But even then, her pride, self-confidence, and generosity prompted her to accept her destiny.
She was in the pastry shop at the time. Her eyes lit up and a pastry was brought to her — a berry turnover. The guests in the shop felt they had been chosen to experience this miracle. She ate it and fell back into the coma and died exactly one year later. Many thought the nutrition from the pastry had finally worn off and allowed her to die.
This berry turnover became a delicacy and the most expensive item in the shop: The Miss Pumpernickel Berry Turnover. It was believed to have the miracle of one more year of life.
"One a year, and you'll never die,” went the slogan.
So the shop made each customer record the day and time the turnover was eaten. They would advance the date ten months and give the customer an appointment slip reminding them to come on the date written. Three weeks before the appointment, the staff would notify the customer through the mail and continue until they responded. Occasionally, they would telephone or go to the customer's home if the one-year mark were approaching.
They devised a mail-order plan for customers who lived outside of town or abroad. The membership fee was reasonable and included the price of the pastry. One could get child, family, student or senior citizen discounts. Payment options came in three-year, five-year and even lifetime plans.
Chapter 4. Kevin
Kevin, the recipient of the final bowl of soup, came out of nowhere. No one had ever seen him before. No one claimed him nor knew his parents. He walked in as an orphan — some dreamed from a story they’d never read before. Nevertheless, he received more than a full belly of delicious soup.
He wasn’t aware of it at the time, but he also received all of Miss Pumpernickel Bread’s ideology and character traits. The soup she had pushed forth had entered through her pores, traveled through her skin and blood stream, run through her brain, and heart and mixed with her DNA. Then it left her body and entered Kevin’s bowl and, triumphantly, his body. Far from a tasteless broth, this soup contained the richness of identity: Miss Pumpernickel Bread’s. Her consequential coma and eventual death made her loss obvious.
This was not necessarily a positive gift. Miss Pumpernickel Bread had no ideology or established code of being she could speak of. All of her decisions came from a place which she trusted as intuition or human nature. She never questioned the foundation of her instinctual bent or ever considered it a bent. She was unaware of the external influences that made her the person she was. The character traits she was most known for were her altruism, incapability of self-analysis, and naiveté: all of which were self-destructive. This is evidenced by her end in the tub.
Now these ingredients would mix with Kevin’s previously installed system and produce a new being.
Without getting too far ahead, it should be noted that this transfer is only conjecture. No one could be certain. The notion began after Miss Pumpernickel Bread was taken away in the ambulance. Rashly, everyone at the party assumed she had died. Many began claiming they saw a translucent cloud hovering above the precious bowl. Others said they’d seen it too, at first it didn’t seem out of the ordinary. But, looking back, they remembered the peculiarity of the steam. It seemed mystical or miraculous.
Some even claimed they saw images in the steam. One said she’d seen Miss Pumpernickel Bread’s moral center enter Kevin’s nose as he whiffed. When asked what form it took, the woman drew a Yin and Yang symbol with the “F-word,” as she wrote it, in the center of what she called, “The Clouds of Heaven.” The other side demonstrated the opposite but with the added, “S-word, B-word and etc.-words” surrounding the small cloud. She apologized for the poor drawing saying that words or illustrations couldn’t describe the form this took. “But I knew what it was the minute I saw it.”
Others claimed they’d seen images of Miss Pumpernickel Bread in almost Super 8 format. “She was making bread at the Salvation Army bake sale. I could smell it. Her hands were floury and kneading. Then it flipped to the supermarket, she was in the produce department. Then the park at the swing set, she was pushing children. I heard them giggle, I swear. I’d never seen anything like it.” The woman telling her story turned to her friend cursing that she hadn’t brought her video camera. “Imagine if I had that on tape.”
Still others claimed they’d seen a toe and even her nose enter Kevin’s mouth. But these claims were later rejected by a metempsychologist as euphoric projection. She stated: “Actual body parts could not and need not be involved in the transmigration of a spirit even if it were planning to establish permanent residence.” The other claims were recognized as valid since so many people had seen something. But no one could agree on what. This was explained as: “The multi-dimensional nature of the soul as it manifests itself into the memory and individual consciousness of each person.”
The ambiguity of the answer to this question — whether her soul actually transmigrated into Kevin’s body or Kevin’s community forced the transmigration — left Kevin in a permanent unstable state of mind. The community had already come to their conclusion. The Yin and Yang sketch appeared on the front page of the newspaper. Kevin, for himself, had to understand his responsibilities. If the transmigration had occurred, her influence was guiding him. If it had not, then all of his decisions and actions were his own. Should he then follow her model or disregard her existence? To answer this question, he would have to analyze himself. First he had to figure out if he, like Miss Pumpernickel Bread, lacked the ability for self-analysis. This question alone could keep a dubious person busy for a lifetime.
Again, we are jumping too far ahead. Kevin wouldn’t be able to ask himself these questions until much later. Even then he wouldn’t be aware of his asking. Instead, as any young child having experienced an anomaly, he wanted to share it with his friends and to elaborate the already elaborate and bizarre story. He had finished dinner and wanted to go out and play.
Chapter 5. Miss Pumpernickel Bread
The City Hall Office of Public Records sent out a survey to all witnesses and/or friends of Miss Pumpernickel Bread requesting documentation of her life. Originally the idea came from someone at the party as a way to create source material for Kevin to understand Miss Pumpernickel Bread’s life and, through it, his own. Spiritually, everyone believed he had become her child, so, because he was an orphan, consensus made Miss Pumpernickel Bread his legal guardian. Until she recovered, he would be in the care of the next of kin, Miss Pumpernickel Bread’s sister Sarah. But the entire community adopted him as their own. City Hall accepted the survey project because it could benefit everyone. Miss Pumpernickel Bread’s life was now, after all, one that all could live by.
They had compiled a list of topics to be addressed which included, but was not limited to the following: Education, Religion, Love, Self, Pride, Dignity, Trust, Generosity, Death, Nature, Truth, Friendship, Fortune, Fame, and Beauty. Very little written information about Miss Pumpernickel Bread existed because she had been a normal citizen. She became a celebrity only in death.
The forms included an anonymous waiver but asked each person to describe their credibility for the information they gave. The Office planned to make this information public in book form. Due to the quality of the material they expected to receive, coming from different levels of literacy, they commissioned a local story teller and university professor of folklore to edit and retell the submissions. This, they believed, would make the accounts less clinical and more understandable and pleasurable for all readers.
The following is a portion of that collection:
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