A literary work-in-progress blending magical realism, absurdity, and cultural reflection by Ardan Michael Blum.
Note: Though you will encounter speaking stuffed animals, World Breakfast is not written for children. It is an adult tale made to explore a dream-state.
How many words could he manage before the tide left? The idea was a chapter with one word or one sentence or maybe two for each time the waves came onto the beach where he, Pigott Deroller, was huddled with the audio recorder going on and saying something. The tide changes at that beach were the chapter changes.
He had a book bag. In the bag there was a little world. The center was a manor house. He carried the book bag everywhere he went or hid it in his village at the bottom of the old, covered dry well.
In the manor house, part of the microverse inside the book bag, stuffed animals and angels are asleep. They are still sleeping as Pigott Deroller says his last words into the portable sound recorder and then he says a friendly “Caw, caw, caw” to his friend the crow who always watches him at the beach. He speaks in crow at this point for a few minutes. The bears are woken by this sound and complain loudly to the angels who are now woken by the bears. Meanwhile, Pigott Deroller makes it back to his village home and his prose ends for the day.
At home his attention is fixed on archiving letters, documents, plays, and anything written into one of two categories. There was the “Ops” pile and the “Research” stack, and both had at the very top the “best of the best” in their respective work. He used a high ladder to place documents on one of the two piles.
The top of the “Ops” pile was for writing that required urgently that something be done, and the best of the “Research” stack was anything that most needed to be understood.
He was the son of several generations of people who stacked things to do in two piles but did none of those things.
It was just about then that a passing train blasted its horn and signaled that there was more to the world. The railway line ran about half a mile from his village home. People were riding the train to the last stop on the line where the engine was turned around (facing the way it had just come). Everyone got out for an hour: driver, first class, second class, and dogs.
The beer hall served large French fries, steaks, and not surprisingly, beer. Lots of beer. Dogs got steak bits and fries and water. Joy spread. The driver sang a song. People applauded.
The end-of-the-line bistro was a favorite with the town of M___ up the track.
For the train ride, the town stole pages from the archive. The reading could be legal matters, folk tales, a style manual, a page from one or another. A biography would do fine. The town would have to distract Pigott Deroller.
Sometimes it was up to a few young women to put on a dance show of light sensual dimensions accompanied by a lute or flute, and other times it was just someone claiming to have found a trove of documents in their attic, and with Pigott Deroller out of the way, the town would go in and select reading material from the lower levels of the “Ops” pile and the “Research” stack for the train ride to the beer hall; Once read, these pages – the paper – were used to wrap greasy food for the next day’s lunch. The town was slowly destroying the world’s books and all stored knowledge.
The following night, Pigott Deroller decided to go back to the beach. "Sometimes I think I am most happy when I have slipped away", Pigott Deroller thought. He left the village of M___ as everyone was on the train, so no one knew. He went the other way from the restaurant, walked into the woods and on past the woods to the ocean. He sat down and took out a tape recorder and for each time a wave came onto the beach he said something and waited for the universe to help him write. He soon gave this up.
There was a sliver of moon between clouds. The water was dark. He could not see much. He lit a candle and started to read, choosing a book from his bag. 30 minutes per book. He had a love for John Steinbeck, old chivalry tales, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and wonderful Shakespeare.
The books would grow and shrink as they came out of the bag. In the bag, they were kept in the also very much shrunken manor house that housed the angels and stuffed animals.
The bears lived rent-free, unaware of the town of M___. The angels got to go up to Heaven from time to time. They got Tuesdays and some Sundays off, when they left the bag and passed through the world as we know it.
Angels tuck the bears in for the night, and then go downstairs to sit on either a large red plastic exclamation mark or on a large red plastic question mark, both stuck to my writing room wall.
We are in the fourth chapter of World Breakfast, in a shrunk manor house, and outside the window, we can see the top of an open book bag. "There is candlelight! The bag is open. We can read!" was news shared from one angel to another.
Now the reading started: "Experienced inspectors are employed to inspect, pass, and brand all timber", and the head librarian stopped and looked up at me.
"Can I read this again, sir?"
"Yes, sure, read it again". So the librarian read: "Experienced inspectors are employed to inspect, pass, and brand all timber". All the angels put up their wings (one wing for each) to signal interest. It was a voting process that went on at every new sentence. A low wing approval meant that I, Ardan Michael Blum, at my desk, had to spring into action on the writing front.
At times, Pigott Deroller would pause to listen, his ear attuned to our microverse. When he shouted corrections – petty typographical fixes – the angels bristled, their wings quivering in such a way to not be confused with a vote. To them, such nitpicking over words dulled the sincerity, love, and soul they were helping to ensure appeared in my writing.
I wanted to shout up to Deroller to stick to his own writing and not bother us. I said nothing. I did not want to risk our being left for days at the bottom of the old, covered dry well in the center of M___. We put up with his comments for fresh air and good lighting.
Wood was checked, books made, library shelves set up. A pony was hooked up to a cart and books went out for home delivery of plays and novels. How many homes were there? No one knew. The homes were in the books.
There were graves too. Village graves. Stormy nights where friends with lanterns came to cry. Memories. Love of friends. Tears.
Some graves were for fictional characters. There were clear rules about fictional resting places. The Republic of Letters had lots of rules. For example, Grammarians wanted no words between "to" and a verb in their communications. When a Grammarian ordered the best wines, the best tea, and the best cotton, it was essential that good writing should be produced by the seller.
Then words started to vanish! At first, it seemed random: "Weight", "Grey", "Shine", "Light", and "Wind" went missing.
Was it the action of an inhabitant of the frozen zone?
A team of one (stuffed) bear, one angel, one Grammarian, two police officers, five cooks, thirty dogs, and one author was going to head to the North Pole and cross the ice, at some risk, to see the chief of the frozen-zone peoples. He had no phone.
"I will tell you, the preservation of known words is the subject of our visit". No, that sounded too formal. "Are we not right in saying that words matter?" Yes! "That is right", the author thought. He was in the lead sled; the book-cart was attached to the back.
The trip would take days to reach the only likely culprits.
What was known: The northern peoples were thesaurus publishers, and they were also known to create golems, hulking clay beings made from magical words.
The current belief was that words left books and correspondence when no one was reading them and went on trips. The main destination for wandering words was "North". The zone was known as "too silly for words". It was a place where clowns entertained the visiting letter combinations.
On the way back, at the border of the Republic of Letters, golems stood around and scared "Weight", "Grey", "Shine", "Light", "Wind", and other words, which would shrink in terror and then rush back to their proper places of residence as vague dots that trembled.
The next words to be influenced and frightened were “Nearsighted”, “Drunk”, “Fog”, and “Idea”. Clearly, it was no longer random. Perception, judgment, physical experience, and thought were under attack by golems. How could existence work when the word “Idea” was missing?
Mass printings of thesauruses were being shipped by sled, boat, and other forms of delivery, all meant to reach the citizens in the book bag and beyond. Words that changed and vanished in the microverse also changed or vanished in the larger world of M___ and beyond.
A thesaurus was key to continued existence!
As it happened, a sled driven by two elves met the caravan train heading north to meet with the leader of the northern peoples. The elves were going south to sell thesauruses, while the group was going to negotiate an end to this outrageous vanishing of words, which the northerners had organized by having golems scare the words into small, shrunken, trembling forms until they vanished from the mind as well as the page.
This was key. No thesaurus would be useful if the core word did not exist!
The elves, heading south into the Republic of Letters, were given a secret mission. This was to make the scared words partially reappear by offering them comfort. So, under the pretext of wanting a warm cup of tomato soup, elves made it into the kitchen of the manor house inside the book bag and struck up a conversation with the words, trembling dots, which appeared in a cookbook. An elf went over with his tomato soup steaming to comfort the word “Idea”.
Idea was a lonely fellow at all times. As the social life of words goes, Idea was associated with Introvert, Concern, Self-Love (a rare two-word formation), and Beauty, Creativity, and Charity.
Idea was skeptical, empirical, and overworked. So the elf came over to Idea and started with an observation about the weather. “Lovely season this is”, said the elf in the manor house of the book bag microverse. Idea was still shrunk and trembling, yet somehow got some courage and enlarged its size to say “Indeed”.
The elf then read out the explanation of the situation from his written instructions. It, the elf, had come from up North to sell thesauruses already in crates which he had brought by sled, then boat, then van, and now no sales were possible since the impact and effect of the golems’ actions had made key words vanish from existence. "Both on paper and in the mind", said the elf. “Indeed”, said the word Idea.
Following his written instructions, the elf now told the word that if they would only partially reappear, then the business of selling thesauruses would boom. People would see and recall the main word, note that it was not in its full usual shape, and seek a replacement: another word from the thesaurus.
The elf’s instructions proposed a 100-dollar gift card if Idea were to enlarge just a bit. Idea refused.
After this the elf went to the other words. A secret plan was accepted by “Fog”, “Drunk”, and “Nearsighted”, but without Idea, no one knew how to turn the plan into a contract. Not even the elves knew how.
In town, a whole day had passed. People had lost direction. Without Idea, people retained knowledge and memory but could not turn either into purposeful action. They no longer went to get pages from the archive, and the train did not head to the restaurant. They remembered eating, reading, and using pages from Pigott Deroller’s home as oily food wrappers, but they could not form the intention to do any of these things. So parts of plays, sermons, letters, and all manner of book pages were not stolen. Idea gone, knowledge was untouched by civilization. Chaos was spreading.
In the book bag, in the town of M___, on paper and in the memory and thoughts of all, there was a dull panic that was felt, not understood. Something was missing. What was it named? It would have been the end of this story for both the microversians and the Minasouytuniums. Yes, the people of M___ had a name after all, but it was too complex to be used often. It would, as I am telling you now, have been a great chaotic end to all life had it not been for the routine established by stuffed bears since fairy tales first started.
The bears had learned to hold near to them a dictionary in case they woke from hibernation or just a summer nap. As it happens, the bears in the manor house followed this practice. It was thought that bears of old got into keeping dictionaries as a way to join civilization. Now, if not for this tradition kept by the stuffed bears on the second floor of the manor house in the microverse world of Pigott Deroller’s book bag, the word IDEA would not have been preserved. Thanks to the bears, IDEA could reappear without making a deal with the elves.
Reader’s note: By ancient routine, whenever bears wake, they look up certain key words in the dictionary and always read the meaning of “Idea”. The growing panic woke the bears, and they followed this routine without needing to understand what was wrong. IDEA had remained full-sized because of honey on the volume. The bears’ sticky paws had sealed their dictionary shut. Its words therefore could not go visiting the North when nobody was reading them and never encountered the golems at the border. Every word inside remained intact. The bears licked away the honey, opened the dictionary, and read “Idea” and its definition aloud.
Further note: Under the rules of the Republic of Letters, a word spoken from an intact dictionary could call all its other appearances home.
The bears would bring Idea into all the homes, all the pages, and all the books in the bag and across the whole tiny Republic of Letters, and then beyond, up out of the bag to the town of M___ and the world. So Idea was now to return to books, to pages, to the minds of the people in M___, and it now became clear in the minds of the elves themselves how to draw up a contract with “Drunk”, “Nearsighted”, and “Fog”. The townspeople rushed into routine once again. Bears would guard all the words of the world and wait for the return of the expedition that had left some days before to meet the leader of the people of the North.
Then an elephant appeared in the manor house. It was a real elephant, not a stuffed one. No one knew how it had entered the book bag, which was itself the first logical flaw it had come to investigate. The elephant carried a large ledger titled Elephants in the Room. Every unresolved contradiction made the elephant grow. Every correction made it slightly smaller. It opened the ledger and pointed its trunk at the first entry.
The problem concerned the elephant itself: there was a maximum safe size for any creature living inside the book bag. If the elephant continued growing uncontrollably, the bag would soon become too heavy for Pigott to lift. No one knew how quickly the elephant would grow or what would happen if it became too large for the manor house. But one danger was clear: if this story made no sense whatsoever, then the elephant would take over the whole bag and the microverse would be destroyed!
This particular elephant was extremely fond of pizza, which was fortunate. Orders were given to bake large numbers of miniature pizzas for the elephant. The plan worked at once. The elephant was aware of its own growth and understood the danger it posed, so it settled down to eat the pizzas instead of destroying the kitchen. It would take on a bit of weight but nothing allegorical.
The elephant finished its miniature pizzas and poked Ardan Michael Blum with its trunk. (Yes, as you may recall, I am the writer inside the book bag.) Then it pointed to the first unresolved entry in this story.
“You wrote this”, it said. “Every word in the bears’ dictionary remained intact. You also wrote that an intact word, read aloud, could call its other appearances home. Why, then, did the bears stop with just the word ‘Idea’?”
More pizza arrived. The elephant ate and said nothing more about its notes from the ledger. It just ate and ate. Lemonade was brought in, along with a napkin. The elephant drank slowly and burped and asked me to scratch the burp from the story.
I told it that it was too late. It was there. It was here. The world would know! This would be embarrassing. Everyone would laugh at the elephant and call it “Burpy”. And worse names too. The elephant at once asked to be deleted from the story.
“Nothing you do should be deleted”, I said, and I looked at the entry. Then I called the bears.
“Read the other missing words”, I said.
The bears opened the dictionary again.
The elephant's cousin arrived in the room. He had heard at once of the new name. So, he shouted a mocking “Beeaerpi”, to which the bears looked about in alarm.
“What is a Bear-pie?” they said. “Are they planning to eat us? We must escape!” And so the bears, without waiting for an answer, left the room at once in a great hurry.
The cousin, our main elephant, and I watched the bears grab their dictionaries and run towards the South of France.
Under an archipelago of small hills, a small white van was delivering melons and croissants to the hotels at dawn. The people in the south of France had the good life. The bears set up in a Greek villa in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, which is known simply as Beaulieu, and is a lovely seaside commune between Nice and Monaco.
They would eat at the African Queen at the harbor. Each of the bears ordered a large niçoise salad. These originated in the French city of Nice. (It is traditionally made of tomatoes, boiled eggs, olives, anchovies or tuna, with olive oil).
After the salad, they asked for a refreshing, dairy-free frozen dessert made from fruit puree, water, and sugar called a “sorbet”. They looked up the word. It was known, according to the dictionaries, to come in several flavors. Raspberry sorbet was mentioned. Then lemon sorbet was eaten.
They went for a trip to Africa.
They then sailed back to Beaulieu and arrived at the Greek villa at dawn, in time for breakfast tea, which was always served whether people, animals, or angels were there or not.
Lots of tourists gathered here at dawn to watch the magical tea set appear and invisible hands pour the brew. No one knew how this worked.
Some thought that the tea was always there and simply switched from invisible to visible between 5:45 and 7 AM. Others thought that the tea was visible all the time, but no one paid it any attention the rest of the day.
The bears began to argue over whether the tea was magical, enchanted, miraculous, or merely unusual. Each bear consulted its dictionary and found evidence that it was right. This made the argument worse. What they needed was a thesaurus.
Luckily for them, an elf happened to be passing the Greek villa at that moment with a crate of thesauruses for sale.
(...) -------------> More soon.
Last updated: August 12, 2026.
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World Breakfast is a work of fiction containing occasional references to actual people, places, institutions, cultural works, products, and historical events. Such references are used for literary purposes. Except where expressly identified as real, the characters, dialogue, organizations, and incidents are imaginary or are presented fictitiously. Any unintended resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events is coincidental.
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Again, as stated above Chapter One: Though you will encounter speaking stuffed animals, World Breakfast is not written for children. It is an adult tale made to explore a dream-state.
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