Breakfast, the usual morning ritual of scooping heaps of dried cardboard, recently dampened, into my gaping face hole while my body still sheds the night’s dream trauma. I’m certain an anthropologist would agree with me that this is a practise that harks back to the age of the cave.

There we were.

Huddled around gloops of mud and kindle from last nights tomfoolery, warming a couple toes, and smashing fistfuls of dried cardboard into our gobs.

If I’d known any better, I’d have believed the stuff grows on trees. Thousands of them! All equidistant, in rows and columns, a collection fit for an orderly giant. “Wonderful trimmings,” the giant’s friends would say when they come by and he shows them how his collection is getting on. What they really were thinking is that the whole thing was drab. How can a giant such as Brow-Bash bow to the mundane of building a geometric arbory of such similitude that would make a cow appreciate its hourly change in the ambient light of the grass.

Brow-Bash was the harvester of the cereal trees.

I was the mouth that put the tree’s offering into its gob after dousing it in enough milk to mask it’s dry, dusty, decadence. It’s worth appreciating that the brain, in all its splendour, probably displays the most incredible feat of commitment when cereal is placed before it. The idea of someone walking around the grounds and then quite suddenly pausing, bending over, and then grabbing a healthy handful of soil and ramming it into their open face hole is, within a margin, indifferent to the consumption of cereal.

I have nothing against cereal, cereal and I are great friends.

I possess a disposition to dive into my psychological relationship with cereal, my cereal-psychosis if you will. The Institute of Psychocereal, you’ll find me there if my ideas break into the academic conclave.

Discussions on the psychological and pharmacological effects of cereal is something I general keep within close circles, circles so close their radii only go from my lips to my ears. But context was in order for you to understand my reaction to what happened to me this morning.

Like a vanilla fool, I always set out my cereal the night before, cradled in its bowl like a hundred little tightly-packed babies in a crib, spoon set to the side in its slender, silverware anticipation. (Is it me, or is there something exceedingly sexual about the geometry of common utensils?) I prefer this setup because the moisture from my mouth breathing during the night generates a mild mist throughout my house, which settles on the cereal and softens it like a flower awaking from a deep freeze. Then, when I awake from my slumber and my brain takes charge over my recently rec-conscioussed meat heap, down the stairs I rumble and the ritual begins.

Today, though, as my left foot hit the last step before the ice sheet of the kitchen floor, an alarm sounded. In my head, of course, but it was an alarm of the sensory level, one that tickles a this neuron or that, drops a pebble in the ocean only to trigger a tsunami.

I don’t take myself for a being particularly endowed. My father wasn’t, his father wasn’t, and his father lacked much either. The exception being my great-great-great-great-grandfather who was known around town for being as adept and rough as a bloodhound. I’m referring to the olfactory senses that is.

But despite my lacking in the smell sector, that heavy, black scent of something having been left in the toaster for too long is too pertinent to overlook. It came at me like cereal, mixed with burned toast, mixed with the mouth breathing dew of the night before.

“Had I left my cereal in the toaster too long?” was the first thought that boil up from my subconscious chatter to my conscious. I told my subconscious to stop being silly, it wasn’t dream time any more.

Nothing, I decided, would provide me answers unless I investigated. And so I stepped onto the ice rink and peered around the wall at the table where I’d set my alter up just eight hours ago.

My table is round and it has two seats, facing each other, ready for two chess grandmasters to have afternoon tea and scones. This morning, it appeared, I had a guest at my table.

It was a robot from foot to head, not a slip of flesh on the bipedal form.

The metallic creature was sharp and bulky, like a low-poly Statue of David. It was fidgeting with its thumbs, perhaps out of boredom, possibly out of habit. Everything about my guest was different hues of grey – a monochromatic heavyweight champion – apart from some red text tattooed across its upper arm, from shoulder to elbow, which read, “Megaladon-5000.”

“Ahem,” I coughed something dry, a gesture of peace. I hoped.

The machine spun its head with the precision of a pin and looked at me with its stony eyes. “Good morning.”

“Um, good morning,” I replied. “What is that smell?”

My table guest got up from his place at the table and came towards me. I now saw that the waist of this goliath was where the top of my head stopped, it had to hunch its back to fit within the confines of my kitchen ceiling. If I’d been allowed a few more minutes of morning reprieve, fright would have kicked in sooner, but my brain was still contemplating the possibility that I was tucked in bed and dreams were involved.

The machine came within arms reach and stopped. It reached out a hand in the colloquial, western gesture of introduction, and spoke, “Megaladon-5000.”

“A pleasure to meet you,” I took the hand, and it tried its best to be gentle and smooth with the shake but clearly needed calibration on its torque controls. The ride was rigid and rough.

“What is that smell?” I ventured to ask, feeling more brave after the friendly introduction.

“Your cereal.” said Megaladon-5000, as if he was asking for my signature for a delivered parcel.

“Is it okay?”

“No, I destroyed it for you”

I walked past Megaladon-5000, who stood there pinned between ceiling and floor like an expressive house column, and went to where I would normally sit to begin the morning ablutions. The spoon was there, capturing the room inside its raunchy, reflective curves. The bowl was there, plain and white in its ceramic boredom. The cereal, its hundred-piece pile of crunch and disappointment, was not there.

In its place was a pile of black, granular as million-year old sand.