By Prospero Dae
I love my toaster. I so look forward to getting up and having breakfast with you. And it isn’t the orange marmalade that is making my life so good—I’m using the same brand. No it’s the toaster. But lately dark clouds are forming and I’m growing weary. My toast is as cold as a marble seraph or as burnt as the lava scorched alders that once greened Mount Vesuvius. I’m tired of having to make excuses for you. Good God, you never used to be like that. It isn’t that I hate you. It’s that I don’t love you anymore.
But wasn’t the toaster’s love and attention toward you the first to begin to cool in this relationship? Seems like you are late to the party, here.
This is so beautifully written, in every way.
I know we discussed this one to death, Cynthia. Can we agree that the toaster’s name should have been Torvald?
Absitively, posolutely….and even Ibsen might agree you are doing something quite fascinating here….
Ibsen had enough trouble with his doll house when he first tried to present it to the public. He certainly didn’t need me, over two hundred summers later, to cast the prim bank manager as a toaster. But that isn’t it exactly either. Nora transposes her feelings, projecting her unhappy relationship onto the toaster. Sometimes she’s talking about the toaster, and sometimes she is not–and those goalposts seem to shift. But by the end, it’s not about the toaster.
Hence those beautiful last lines: ” It isn’t that I hate you. It’s that I don’t love you anymore.”
Absolutely love this! Brilliant, so well written and funny. Well maybe not quite, breakfast time, now sounds rather stressful x
Thank you, Helen. I’m not sure why, but toasters are funny. Our relationships, not so much.
Yes, once Mount Vesuvius lost her alders I noticed unconditional love went out of the window – I suspect your toaster may follow? 🙂
Lovely story!
Rob, I was not surprised that you, as a poet, would circumambulate, metaphorically, the Neapolitan alders.
For the love of toasters, or hate? I do love this short story on an ordinary appliance with such great range of emotions.
But for sheer melodrama, the onion dicer cannot be beat.
🙂 I only wish my appliances would take my constructive crits to heart;)