In a little old house on the edge of the woods, an old woman took a tray from the oven. The delicious smell of gingerbread wafted up to her nose. She laid the tray out on the countertop and then went to sit down in her chair to wait for it to cool.
No sooner had she turned her back, though, when a little figure on the tray began to stir. It lifted first one arm and then the other free of the baking pan, and then used these to push itself up into a sitting position and free its legs. Pleased to be separated from the still-hot metal, the little gingerbread boy did a little dance… or maybe he was just trying to keep his feet from being burned. Either way, he hopped and he danced right off the edge of the tray and onto the clean countertop. He felt spry and springy, full of the energy of youth, full of the magic of life. He felt like he could do more than walk and dance… he could run if he wanted, run like the wind, run circles around anybody and everybody.
It was time for him to begin his life, to go out and see the world. He wasn’t going to stick around to be eaten, nor even to be cherished by an old woman who’d never had a child. He was meant for bigger things than that, better things than that. He knew it. He ran to the edge of the counter and looked for a way down. There was nothing there. It was a fair ways down to the hard tile floor, and he knew that he was brittle, but he was also smart. He looked around. A towel hung from the knob of a cabinet beneath another section of the counter where the freshly-washed implements of his creation were drying. He could use that to climb down, maybe, or grab it to slow his fall.
He raced over there, running and running as fast as he could. He stepped over the handle of a whisk and around an upturned mixing bowl. He pushed a measuring cup out of the way. He stepped over a sort of low metal wall… then something caught his eye and he looked down. The thing that he was stepping over was shaped like himself. It mirrored his form exactly… the arms, the legs, the circular head. It was him.
The implications of this stunned him. He jumped back, chipping his foot on the edge of the thing, and then clambered back past the other implements and limped back towards the tray from whence he had come with a sense of certain dread. He suspected what he would see, what he had missed in his jubilation at being alive.
The tray was full of gingerbread people, each one exactly the same as himself.
“No, no,” he squeaked. “I’m different. I’m not like them! I’m… I’m alive.”
A couple of the inert-seeming cookies lifted their heads up at the sound, looked at him, and then sank back down on the tray to wait.
The gingerbread boy let out a strangled sob.
The old woman, startled by a sudden clatter of sound from the kitchen, came racing in to find pieces of broken cookie scattered across the tile. She stared at them for several seconds before getting the broom and dust pan. Once it was all cleaned up, she turned to examine the rest of her creations. The missing one vexed her… there was no accounting for how it could have fallen… but she resolved not to let it trouble her.
She had a lot of work to do, after all. She picked up the icing bag, enjoying its weight in her hands.
“Let me see, I think I’ll make the first one a clown,” she said. “And then maybe a rock star. Oh, that’ll be something.”
She prided herself on making each of her gingerbread men special.
Oh wow…this one really strikes me…