The Most Important Meal of the Day

The paper detailed the recent string of murders that have been puzzling detectives. The first body had been found by the lake, mouth stuffed full of corn flakes. The second was found lying face down in a bowl of Cheerios. The third, covered in pop tarts.

“Those fucking idiots!”

Ernie slammed the paper down onto his kitchen table as he shot up. Orange juice splashed up out of the pitcher and the droplets that escaped sprinkled the stack of heavily syruped pancakes to the right of it. He picked a piece of bacon up and started gnawing on it as he paced back and forth.

“They’re calling me the ‘Cereal Killer’? What idiots do they have working on the force nowadays?” He used the rest of the bacon in his hand to point at the empty box of poptarts peeking out the top of his trash can. “POPTARTS ARE NOT CEREAL!”

Blood rushed through Ernie’s translucent face, turning him into a veiny beet. He bent forward and ran his sticky fingers through his hair. A set of raspy laughs escaped him. Suddenly, as if his spine was a snap bracelet that a child had straightened back out in order to whack onto an unsuspecting wrist, Ernie rolled his body up and gently sat back down. The chair screeched as he scooted in towards the table.

The white returned to his complexion in splotches. He poured more syrup onto his pancakes and feverishly drank the remaining OJ in his glass before filling it back up. Ernie stared straight ahead and finished the entire spread he had spent two hours preparing. Pancakes, bacon, scrambled eggs, corn flakes, and french toast. After every dish had been cleared, he patted the edges of his lips with a cloth and went to the pantry.

“Maybe this will set the record straight for them.”

Ernie operated like a mad scientist. Ingredients flew around him and sizzled onto the flames of the stove as they poured over the edges of the pot. He poured the steaming contents into a large bowl and tossed the pot into the sink, missing, getting splatter all over the cabinets and walls.

He opened a door near the kitchen. It opened into darkness and a descending staircase. He switched the lights on and made his descent with a steaming bowl of cinnamon raisin oatmeal.

“Did you hear what they’re calling me?” He shouted down the stairs.

At the bottom of the stairs, in the corner of the basement, sat a terrified woman. She was gagged, on the floor, with her hands tied around a pipe. When Ernie approached her, she began flailing her legs and trying to scream through the cloth filling her mouth. Streaks of where old tears had removed her makeup obscured with the flood of new ones.

“‘Cereal Killer’,” he laughed. “Can you believe that?”

He set down the bowl of oatmeal on top of a laundry machine. An axe leaned against the wall near a blade sharpener, which Ernie fired up as he grabbed the hilt. The woman grew hysterical, but the sound of metal against metal drowned her out.

“I’m obviously using ‘breakfast foods’,” he shouted. “You would think that the poptarts would’ve clued them in.”

When the axe achieved satisfactory sharpness, Ernie turned off the sharpener. The woman’s throat had grown raw and her shrieks were no more than painful whispers.

“If that didn’t do the trick, then perhaps oatmeal will. It would just be inaccurate to continue calling me a ‘Cereal Killer’ after this.”

He turned to face his next victim. He turned the axe head side down and leaned against the handle.

“Hmmm, I’m thinking I’ll chop the top of your head clean off and empty your skull to make a sort of bowl to put the oatmeal in.” He knelt down to remove the woman’s gag, “what do you think?”

Dumbstruck, the woman just stared at Ernie with her wide dark eyes. Her face unfroze and she was able to make sounds come out of her bleeding throat.

“Isn’t oatmeal just…hot cereal?”

Ernie’s axe came down, silencing a debate that had barely just begun.

The paper that hit Ernie’s doorstep two days later would answer the unfortunate woman’s question. The headline read:

“Cereal Killer Strikes Again: This time using hot cereal as the cold front comes in.”

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