The day Fill completely lost it, a stray Calico had rubbed against his leg and he had launched the poor kitty in a lovely rainbow of an arc with a flick of his foot. The cat was oblivious to Wantless’ aversion to flea-covered wild animals brushing against his calf. Fill’s response was akin to reacting to the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard.

 

The cat opened its legs like a flying squirrel and howled like a, well, like a cat, as its mottled fur twisted and turned to alight across the alley on a garbage can. The lid rattled like a struck gong and the cat leapt smoothly off and gone.

 

The day Fill lost it had been begun innocently enough. The cat catapult only presaged the trials of Job.

 

It was one of those cool summer mornings when the overnight air has refreshed everything after the previous day’s scorching heat.

 

But today would scorch, too, Fill thought as he slurped his oats and milk. He had poured his cereal into a bowl, cursing the calico, but his thoughts soon drifted as they always do. He went back outside and sat down on a narrow, fold-up camp chair. He looked around to make sure the cat had scampered though he suspected it would be back to beg to lick the emptied bowl.

 

The back patio faced the alleyway. A boarded-up brick building across the alley provided no visual stimulus. Some doves cooed down the alley and a bluebird or robin would alight around the trash cans before a murder of crows chased them off.

 

The day was otherwise quiet. He could hear the lorries and cars lumber past the house on the front street but the sounds were muted back here. He could forget the cat, the dreams, his dinner last night, yesterday’s foibles as he communed in peace with his bowl of cereal.

 

“Cereal bowls never complain,” he said out loud for some reason.

 

This was exactly the worst thing he could’ve said right then. Unbeknownst to him, his words were identical to an ancient spell by a long lost Atlantean civilization of cereal worshippers.

 

He absent-mindedly dipped his spoon in the bowl as he scanned his smartphone. He raised the spoon to his mouth. Empty. He looked down. He had just begun to eat the cereal. Plenty. He dipped the spoon into the bowl and swirled the milk and oats. He raised the spoon. Empty.

 

The ingredients simply vanished as the spoon arose from the pool of milk.

 

He put the phone down and lowered the spoon again. Mindfully. The mix moved away from the spoon like negatively charged iron filaments from the negative end of a magnet. No matter how he manipulated the spoon, the milk and cereal escaped. It would roll up one side of the bowl, flow around the rim and fall back into the bowl, splashing to the bottom as the spoon sought its purpose.

 

“Bloody hell,” Fill muttered. The milk stopped. The spoon stopped. His breathing stopped.

 

A faint ripple murmured over the surface of the milk and cereal. Wantless wasn’t sure he’d actually seen that, but moments later, things got real.

 

The cereal began to slosh from side to side in the bowl. On its own. Fill held tight on the bowl – it wasn’t him moving it. The milk and oats sloshed up one side and across to the other. The oscillations grew stronger and soon the milk spilled on Fill’s hands and pants and hair and table and face and floor.

 

As the cereal struck the patio tiles, Fill saw it scurry down the grooves between them on a river of milk. The cereal escaped under the back fence where the cat waited.

 

“Well, can’t cry over spilled milk,” Fill said. But little did he know that those exact words said in that exact order with his exact pronunciation and cadence and accent was also an ancient incantation of the ancient cereal cult.

 

The bowl, now empty of all but a few drops of milk and flakes of oats, began to quake. Fill quickly set it down, now very alarmed at how the day was progressing. Or regressing.

 

The bowl vibrated quietly but the motion stirred the table to shake. Its legs carried the tremor down to the patio. The tiles began cracking as the bowl quake hit. The fence on the alley swayed to and fro like Little Stevie Wonder singing one of his songs.

 

Soon, the entire ground shook. He arose from the chair, knocking over the small breakfast table. The bowl fell and shattered into a million pieces. The shaking ceased.

 

“Everything ends,” he shouldn’t have said, at least, not out loud. Sure enough, the ancient cereal worshippers used those exact words in their mystical ceremonies.

 

Fill glanced down at the myriad shards of the bowl. He watched them float up from the patio, moving toward each other like a collapsing Red Giant. They puzzled themselves together like a colony of bees or a hive of ants.

 

The bowl materialized from the shards and hovered at the exact spot it had sat on the overturned table. The bowl began spinning there creating a whirlwind that picked up the table though the bowl sat there as if nothing had happened. The spoon clattered into the porcelain vessel.

 

All Fill could think about was that he hadn’t finished his cereal and that he would now be late for work. All because of a mystical bowl he never knew he owned nor that it even existed (though he had been cured of a bowl fetish when he was but a lad but that was something entirely different). For some reason, when he was about 12 years old, he got hooked on making clay bowls at the school art studio. He wouldn’t stop making them. He made so many that no one would buy another one. Everyone in town had been gracious for some time. They bought his odd-shaped and weirdly colored bowls to humor the hyper child but he had glutted the market. Many of the bowls wound up being used as dog bowls, drip basins and other uses. There were so many, a number of them were piled up in a retaining wall

 

The bowl – this bowl – the one serenely sitting on the table after a hissyfit over a couple of incantations unknown to Wantless, now began to slowly spin. The bowl was somehow lopsided now, though, so its movements made the table lurch like an off-balance washing machine.

 

The reassembled bowl arose from the table, though, and then darted without warning straight toward the brick building in the alley. It smashed through the brick like butter and disappeared. He could hear it striking things – glass windows, wood panels or drywall, a metal bucket, a street sign – as it departed.

 

“Good riddance,” he muttered. Luckily, the bowl was way out of earshot by then.

 

Fill leapt up to see the hole the bowl had seared through the building. He thought he could see all the way through the structure to the street on the other side – maybe further.

 

The bowl had zipped in a straight line due south, covering the length of a football field in a few seconds. It was long gone, somewhere over the next neighborhood, he thought.

 

He heard on the radio later that day that the damn thing had been spotted two counties away.

 

That was the day Fill lost the bowl and he’s been looking for it ever since because everything that happened after the bowl skedaddled must’ve been caused by the ancient bowl.

 

It was the bowl from which all the other miseries cascaded. He was sure of it. Without that talisman in the cupboard of his quaint house, his Chi would never be the same.

 

The bowl was indeed a talisman, an ancient artifact capable of impersonating a modern bowl right down to the rim chips. The bowl had survived for centuries by taking the shape of other bowls. Somehow, the bowl had wound up in his collection of handmade bowls. The environment was a perfect place to bide its time until being awakened by the cereal worshippers’ incantations.

 

He might have found the bowl one day when he noticed a pile of his bowls thrown out by one of the neighbors. That’s when he learned he had glutted the local market for handmade bowls, right before his parents sent him to therapy to break his bowl obsession.

 

But, never mind, that’s ancient history. Our concern here is for our character, Fill Wantless, and his next miseries, for there will be many.

 

He didn’t immediately start looking for the bowl once he realized it had magical powers. He had to get on his bike and off to work to work another long factory shift making thingamajigs for the whatsit. The mundane work suited his dull personality. He could stand there punching out thingamajigs all day long without thinking about anything else.

 

Well, that was before the bowl.

 

He hopped on his bike and began pedaling to work. He headed east down the alley, then turned right onto the main road. Cars and trucks whizzed by in the cool early morning air as he headed north to the factory.

 

Unfortunately, the bowl had reversed its earlier trajectory and the damn thing suddenly shot straight into his middle back as he pedaled. The force knocked him from the bike and continued on toward the river and the distant mountains.

 

That’s when Fill lost it. His glasses, that is, lost them. They flew off his face as he fell off the bike and struck the pavement. He somehow heard them clatter somewhere over there despite the scraping noise of the bike and the shriek he howled as his shin skinned on the stones. He was blind as a bat, they would laugh. He could see shapes and colors but he had no way of distinguishing one shape and color from another. He rolled the bike off his shaved shins and sat up. The bike’s front rim had been curled in an ugly twist when it struck the curb.

 

“What the fu…?” Fill swore.

 

He had seen the bowl fly that way, a long way away, in that direction. He thought it long gone when he climbed on his bicycle. How it had somehow switched direction and came to strike him from his bike was a mystery. Besides, hadn’t it headed due south along a trajectory about a tenth of mile west of the main road? How then did it fly straight south, then fly straight north, but not on the same line?

 

These weren’t matters Fill contemplated, though. Once the bowl had disappeared up the main road, he wanted nothing more to do with it. He could do without a magic, flying ancient artifact disturbing his life. No, thank you, ma’am.

 

But he didn’t know then that he wasn’t well rid of the bowl. After all, it was his voice which awoke the thing. It would only be his voice that might be able to control it. At least, that’s what the FBI and CIA and NSC told him when they arrived at this doorstep weeks later as their investigation put some pieces together. (They claim they figured out Fill’s connection to the bowl through meticulous research and interviews, but what really happened was one of the team members grew up down the street from him and he knew well the factory worker’s fetish for making bowls.)