Bite-Sized Magic

by Kathryn Littlewood

  “I don’t like this,” Gus whispered. “What’s that on his fingers? What sort of grown man wears a maroon velour track suit?”

  Rose’s parents had always told her not to talk to strangers, but ever since she’d won the Gala des Gâteaux Grands, everyone knew who she was. There was no real point in denying it. “Yes, I’m Rose Bliss.”

  “I thought so.” The man gestured over the tranquil pastures of Calamity Falls. “You know what’s a travesty, Rose? The new bakery law.”

  Rose softened a bit. “Yeah, it makes no sense.”

  “Those people out there,” the man went on, sounding passionate, “they need cake and pie and cookies and donuts. Just a little sweet thing once in a while reminds a person of how sweet life is.” He rested his hand on his chest, like someone about to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  Rose nodded. She thought of the lives she had brightened this morning. The people she and her family had helped. But how long would they be able to keep it up? The Blisses had provided enough magic that morning to last the town a couple of days, but they couldn’t really go on baking and delivering everything to people’s homes without being paid. They weren’t broke, not yet, but they couldn’t support the whole town.

  “A life without the occasional slice of cake is . . . it’s an empty life,” he continued, inching closer. “Look out there,” he said, gesturing again at Calamity Falls. “Emptiness. That’s what’s going to become of all those lives.”

  Gus reached a paw out of the backpack and swatted Rose’s ear. “I don’t like this!” he whispered.

  The strange behemoth of a man bent over so they were eye to eye. “Would you . . . I mean, do you want to help those people?”

  “Of course!” Rose said. She thought of the wish she’d made. She didn’t really believe what the cat had told her (did she?). A wish couldn’t change the world (could it?). But even so, she would take it back if she could. “It’s what I want most in the world.”

  “Oh good!” said the man. “In that case . . .”

  He snapped his fingers.

  Before Rose could take a deep breath to scream, darkness closed over her and Gus as they were enveloped in a giant empty flour sack.

  CHAPTER 2

  Making the Mostess of a Bad Situation

  The two hours that Rose spent trapped in the burlap sack with Gus were by far the worst of her life.

  First of all, no one likes to be kidnapped by strangers and tossed into a bag. Questions such as Where are they taking me? and Will I ever return? naturally arise. Second, being trapped in a burlap sack inside a moving vehicle in summer feels essentially like being kept in an itchy oven. A bouncing, jouncing, moving oven. Third, the residual flour that dusted the walls of the bag mingled with her sweat to form a disgusting paste. She scrabbled at the neck of the sack with her nails, but it was firmly tied shut.

  Then there was the matter of Gus. “I have claws,” he kept whispering to her. “Just remember that, Rose. They are weapons of mass destruction, these claws.”

  Luckily, the man who had stuffed her in the sack seemed not to be able to hear the whispers of the Scottish Fold cat over the hum of the van and the honking of traffic. All Rose could do was keep her wits about her and, every so often, yell, “Where are we going? Let me out of here!”

  But there was never any answer.

  When the van finally came to a stop, a pair of sturdy arms lifted the sack containing Rose and Gus out of the van. She heard the opening of doors and felt a sudden rush of air-conditioning.

  Then the arms set her down in a chair, and the burlap sack was pulled away.

  Rose was instantly blinded by fluorescent lights.

  She found herself sitting on a rusted metal chair in the center of a room made of gray concrete. Feeble light peeked through tiny windows near the ceiling. At one end of the room was a gray metal desk covered in manila file folders. The wall behind the desk was lined with filing cabinets of rusted gray metal. The rows of rectangular fluorescent lights that hung from the ceiling sputtered and hummed in the awful way that fluorescent lights do, as if they were actually prisons for thousands of radioactive fireflies.

  The room smelled like metal and disinfectant, and Rose suddenly felt a wave of longing for the scents of home: butter and chocolate and cakes just pulled from the oven.

  “I don’t like this place,” Gus whispered, digging flour out of the spaces beneath his crumpled ears with his paws. “It looks like an office from a movie about . . . how terrible offices are.”

  She petted the cat on the head. “It’s okay. You’ve got those claws, remember?”

  “Indeed,” the cat purred.

  Rose shook out her hair. She dusted flour off her red T-shirt and her eyelids and from behind her ears and even flicked some out of her armpits.

  “Where am I?” she yelled.

  When no one answered, Rose spun around and saw two men standing by a grimy, empty water cooler in the opposite corner of the room. One of them was the hulking, squinty gentleman in the maroon velour track suit who had approached her on top of Sparrow Hill, and the other was a tall bespectacled man. He had a tiny face and a bulbous white head that was entirely hairless. He looked like an illustration of an alien wearing a suit.

  “Hello?” she hollered again. “Where am I?”

  Neither of the men so much as turned to acknowledge her—they kept chatting at the water cooler, sipping from little paper cones.

  “What is this?” said the bald man, gesturing at Rose, so that water splashed from his little paper cone onto the floor. “You were supposed to get the BOOK.”

  “It was a no-go on the book, boss,” the man wearing the track suit answered. “The bakery is closed. I couldn’t get in there. So I brought the cook instead.”

  Rose gasped. These two had been after the Bliss Family Cookery Booke—but what could they possibly want with it? It was bad enough when Aunt Lily had gotten her hands on the Booke, but when she’d given it back, Rose had thought that she—and her family—were safe.

  The wiry bald man refilled his cone of water. “No, not the cook, the book. What we need is the book.”

  The bulky man let out a long huff. “But, sir, the cook is the next best thing to the book. She won that French baking contest. She can do it.”

  The bald man goggled his eyes at Rose. “But she’s so young!” he said in a sharp, quiet voice. “So scrawny! And she has a cat in her backpack, with broken ears!”

  “I can hear you, you know,” Rose fumed. “I’m right here. And if you don’t tell me where I am, I will sic my cat on you.”

  Gus jumped out of the backpack and sat back on his hind legs, hissing and swiping, with his front legs extended and his claws bared. He looked like a praying mantis.

  “And his ears are not malformed,” Rose added. “They are a distinctive feature of the breed.”

  “Don’t worry, little lady,” said the thin man. “We’ll explain everything, just calm that old cat down.”

  Rose gave Gus a stern look. He shrugged and retracted his claws. “Good kitty,” she said, pulling Gus into her lap and petting him until he was purring. “There,” Rose said. “Now, I repeat: Where am I?”

  The two men inched along the perimeter of the room toward the desk, keeping as far away from Gus as they could.

  The bald man sat in the chair behind the desk, while the man in the velour track suit settled in behind him, leaning against the row of rusted metal filing cabinets.

  “Where you aaaaaare,” said the thin man, “is the finest bakery in the universe: the Mostess Snack Cake Corporation.” He tapped his long index fingers together and stared at Rose through his spectacles. He had no lips to speak of—it was as if the skin beneath his nose and above his chin just decided, at a certain point, to stop. “I am Mr. Butter, and my muscular associate, whom you’ve already had the pleasure of meeting, is Mr. Kerr.”

  “Mostess, huh,” Rose said. She had heard of Mostess Snack Cakes, of course. Everyone had. They were
the ones with the little white cow in the corner of the package.

  At school, Rose’s friends sometimes pulled out packages of Mostess Snack Cakes at the lunch table—little chocolate cakes stuffed with marshmallow, black cupcakes covered in white dots, vanilla cakes stuffed with chocolate cream—each with different names that bore no resemblance to the cake itself, like Dinky Cakes, Moony Pyes, and King Things. Rose never thought to try a bite of her friends’ Dinky Cakes or King Things, because her mother always packed her a delicious homemade treat, and anyway, the snack cakes were gobbled and gone in two bites.

  “Misters Butter and Kerr, of the Mostess Snack Cake Company,” Rose repeated. “Got it. Now I can tell the police who kidnapped me.”

  Mr. Butter opened his non-lips and let out a crisp ha-ha. “Kidnapped! Do you hear that, Mr. Kerr? The poor thing thinks that we kidnapped her!”

  Mr. Kerr stared nervously at Rose. “Ha,” he replied.

  “You carried me here in a flour sack,” Rose said. “Against my will.”

  “Oh, you’ve misinterpreted the day’s events, Miss Bliss,” Mr. Butter went on smoothly. “We haven’t kidnapped you, we’ve brought you here to offer you a job!”

  Rose furrowed her brow. “A job? What kind of job?”

  “We need help with our recipes,” Mr. Kerr said bluntly, rubbing his hands over the smooth velour of his track suit.

  Mr. Butter glared at Mr. Kerr a moment, then turned back to Rose, all smiles. “Yes, that’s the gist of it,” he said, tapping his fingers on the desk. “You see, Rose, we here at the Mostess Snack Cake Corporation were just as horrified as you were by the passage of the Big Bakery Discrimination Act. Of course, the law does happen to benefit our bakery, as we employ well over a thousand people. So we wanted to help a newly unemployed small-town baker like yourself by putting you to work for us.”

  Gus fidgeted on her lap. It suddenly dawned on Rose that neither of them had seen a bathroom for hours.

  “Think of it as an exchange program,” Mr. Kerr added matter-of-factly. His voice was so deep that it sounded like his throat was trying to swallow the words before they escaped. “Like you kids do in school.”

  “Exactly,” said Mr. Butter. “You see, Rose, we have something wonderful to offer each other.”

  “We do?” Rose said.

  “Mostess has the finest baking facilities in the world, thousands of square feet of floor space, the most cutting-edge machinery, and a staff of thousands of qualified baking professionals.” Mr. Butter paused a moment to savor the thought of it. “That is what you lack. You, Rosemary Bliss, are a baker without a bakery.”

  Rose hung her head. Mr. Butter was wrong. The Bliss family had a bakery; they just weren’t legally allowed to operate it. She thought of last night, how cramped and hot the tiny kitchen had been, and how little they could really afford to support the town’s baked-goods needs. How exhausted she and her parents were. They couldn’t go on like that.

  “What we lack is the kind of attention that you small-town bakers can afford to lavish on each loaf of bread, each crumpet, each swirl of cupcake frosting, each—”

  “I understand,” Rose interrupted.

  Mr. Butter bristled. “You know as well as I do that a perfect dessert sweetens life like nothing else. People in every town, students at every school, from every walk of life, they all depend upon that little bit of goodness that they can find within, say, a Bliss tart. Or slice of cake.”

  “Or a muffin,” Mr. Kerr continued. “Or a croissant. Or clafouti. Or—”

  “I get it,” Rose snapped.

  Mr. Butter cleared his throat and ran his fingers along the bald arches where his eyebrows should have been. “At the Mostess Snack Cake Corporation, we believe our snack cakes are nearly perfect, but our recent sales record has not reflected this. Our snack cakes can’t compete with the love and the . . . how do I call it . . . the magic that you small bakeries provide.”

  Rose eyed Mr. Butter suspiciously and felt something flutter nervously in her stomach. Magic? she thought. He couldn’t possibly know about the magic.

  “And shouldn’t every town have what Calamity Falls has? Readily available, forever fresh, fabulous, delicious gourmet treats?” Mr. Butter went on. “Before your fortuitous arrival, we had—”

  “You kidnapped me,” Rose said again. On her lap, Gus growled.

  “—we had the assistance of a master baker who had very nearly perfected our recipes. Sadly, she competed in a baking contest in Paris, and after events there never returned.” Rose immediately knew there was only one person he could be talking about—her devious aunt Lily. “And that’s why we need you,” Mr. Butter said. “To perfect the recipes. To make our snack cakes the best in the world. To finish what the previous director started but failed to finish.”

  Rose looked down at Gus, who stared back at her with wide eyes, as if to say, Don’t you dare. The point of his tail flicked.

  “Why me?” Rose asked. “Why not any of the other bakers at any of the millions of bakeries around the country that were just put out of business by that crazy new law?”

  Mr. Butter tapped his finger on the tip of his broad nose. “You come highly recommended.”

  “By whom?”

  “Well . . . Jean-Pierre Jeanpierre, of the Gala des Gâteaux Grands, of course. He selected you as the winner of the most prestigious baking competition in the world, didn’t he? Wouldn’t it make sense that we would seek your help above everyone else’s?”

  Rose blushed. It was flattering, if highly suspicious. Apparently she was never going to live down that competition. “But you said before that you wanted the book instead of the cook. What book were you talking about?”

  “We heard that at the Bliss Bakery you use a . . . special book that makes your treats magically delicious,” Mr. Butter said. “That the secret of your success is thanks to—”

  “Nope!” Rose lied. How could they know about the Booke? “No special book! We do all our baking from memory. Whoever told you about a special book was pulling your leg. Yanking your chain. Lying through their teeth—”

  “And that is precisely why we brought you here,” said Mr. Butter. “You are our only hope, Rosemary Bliss. We desperately need your help. Not just for us, but for the good of anyone who has ever turned for hope and happiness to a sweet baked good.” He removed his glasses and dabbed at his eyes with the corner of his handkerchief. “Will you help us in this, our time of greatest need?”

  Mr. Butter obviously cared about baking, Rose thought. True, he had kidnapped her, but her mother would never have let her go anyway, so in a sense, Mr. Butter had no choice if he wanted Rose’s expertise.

  And her family was going to need the money.

  Maybe she could do a little bit of good and earn some money for her family. True, she’d made that wish that she could be done with baking, but maybe baking wasn’t done with her.

  “I can help you,” said Rose. Gus dug his claws into her leg, which made Rose yelp. “I wasn’t done!” she muttered to the cat through her teeth. She turned to Mr. Butter. “I can only help if you if you let me call my parents and tell them where I am. They are probably insanely worried by now.”

  “Of course you can call your parents,” Mr. Butter said. “After you bake.”

  The hair on Rose’s neck stood on end. “So you’re holding me hostage!”

  “Hostage!” Mr. Butter laughed. “I don’t even know the meaning of the word. You’re free to go at any time.” He examined the fingernails of his right hand. “After you’ve completed your duties, of course.”

  “You can’t keep me here against my will!” Rose cried.

  “Against your will?” Mr. Butter fanned the idea away with his hand. “We are not holding you here. You may come and go as you wish. . . . once our five main recipes are perfected.”

  Rose was getting nowhere with this man. She thought of her parents, how Ty and Sage would have returned from their deliveries by now. Albert and Purdy would ask where
Rose was, and they would say that she’d wanted to make a few deliveries on her bike. It would be conceivable that Rose was still out and about. Maybe her family wouldn’t start worrying until sundown. She could finish the baking here by then, or at least find a phone.

  “Fine,” she said at last, gripping Gus so tightly that he knew not to scratch. “I’ll bake first.”

  “Come,” said Mr. Butter with a smile. “Let me show you where we work.”

  Mr. Butter led Rose down a bright corridor, with Mr. Kerr taking up the rear. From within her backpack, Gus leaned forward, both his paws on her left shoulder, the sound of his constant low growl a comfort in her ear.

  Mr. Butter opened a steel door and Rose was hit with the smell of sugar and chocolate and bleach, the heat of roaring ovens, and the sounds of industrial hissing and churning and buzzing and pounding.

  Mr. Butter led them out onto a steel catwalk—with railings, of course—overlooking a vast factory of gleaming stainless steel. Giant metal paddles churned enormous vats of chocolate. Dozens of hairnetted workers piped white dots onto hundreds of chocolate cupcakes that rode on a conveyor belt, like luggage at an airport. A monstrous mechanical press sealed snack cake after snack cake into plastic wrappers, then another conveyor belt dropped the packages into cartons.

  Rose stared down at the scene in distaste. She was used to individually packing each precious cake in a white box and tying it off with baker’s twine.

  “Gorgeous, isn’t it?” said Mr. Butter, inhaling deeply and spreading his arms majestically. “We produce eight thousand snacks of one sort or another every minute. Our facilities here are larger than the Pentagon, and we have more delivery trucks working for us than the U.S. Postal Service.”

  When they reached the end of the catwalk, Mr. Butter led Rose and Gus into a tiny glass-walled room that was suspended precariously over the factory floor. She looked down at the tangled mess of conveyor belts and was reminded of the stomach-churning feeling she’d had when she looked over the railing at the top of the Eiffel Tower.