It was a last-ditch effort the first time. No other options, no other thoughts in the head, no plan, no hope. Just a blind grasp for the first thing that might help.
And as the two world leaders sat across the table from each other, hands twisted into claws and mouths into snarls, a then-nameless member of staff ran in with a big plateful of grandma’s cookies.
Turns out it’s hard to hurl threats with cookies in your mouth, and harder still to stay in a bad mood. Threats turned into remonstrations turned into grumbles turned into mumbled apologies and once again, for the first time, the world was saved by grandma’s cookies.
***
The peak towered above, a fortress in slate-grey masked by a shellstorm of hail and snow that turned the whole sky into a no-man’s-land.
The guide swore, hands frozen and fumbling as they grasped and scrabbled at pitons that turned ice-slick even in the palm. Two people left on the mountain, tiny fluttering lives clinging to the last stretch, arms gone numb and red-hot all at once, brains fluttering, hearts guttering, left with nothing but hope for energy and even that dropping away.
And then the guide remembered the little pocket their husband had sewn into their jacket, and its emergency supply, and they reached inside and found – still not quite frozen as it rested in their palm – a single, perfect cookie from grandma.
They made the peak. They made it home. They made it known.
***
The house groaned and grumbled and fell over and in the distance down went her childhood home under protest and duress and the treads of a tank that looked almost as unhappy with the whole situation as she did, half a mile away and on a nicely-demolished bluff that looked entirely empty and entirely wasn’t because it was her and her gun that didn’t have the ammo.
But the tank didn’t see her.
But her gun didn’t have the ammo.
But the tank was in the open.
But her gun didn’t have the ammo.
But she had SOMETHING.
She put the last of grandma’s cookies in her mouth, bit down, pulled the trigger, and sent a swirling shrapnel cloud of shattered cookie jar ricocheting right off the tank’s hatch and into the cupola at the exact instant it flipped open so the commander could have a smoke.
It didn’t win the war by itself, but nobody could argue it wasn’t a necessary step.
***
“Forceps!”
“Staples!”
“Stint!”
“Scissors!”
“Mallet!”
“Pliers!”
“Glue!”
Every word and every action saw the patient slip still further away, heart crawling sluggishly against their ribs. The new blood was coming out as fast as it came in; spurting free of sullen and open arteries, soaking through cotton and bursting stitching and dying everything red.
“Clotting!”
Damn the supply shortages.
“CLOTTING!”
Damn them.
“CLOTTING!”
But he had the container of raw dough in his pocket, and he brought it out and shoved it into the surgeon’s hand, and by the luck of jesus and little fishes she didn’t pause to ask just shoved it into place and the extra tablespoon of chocolate chips grandma insisted on clogged the ragged edge of the shattered artery like a plug in a drain.
The blood stopped like someone had slammed a door in its face, the life stayed inside the body, and the patient’s existence continued.
If somewhat sweeter than before.
***
Too many leaks, too few patches. Oxygen, nitrogen, and nastier things that had no place inside a human lung. They were already wearing masks but at this rate they’d have to put on the suits just to keep the station habitable for another few hours, trying to plug a sieve with fingers wrapped in a suit of armour that made plate mail look like a body glove.
No more putty. No more sealant. No more hope. No more time.
One more thing, wrapped inside the snack compartment.
Each cookie was just firm enough to stand up to vacuum, each cookie had just enough of a soft center to deform to perfectly fill the damage.
It took sixty-eight of grandma’s cookies to plug every one of the holes the space junk had blasted through the ISS. Luckily, every astronaut had brought fifty, and had been saving them carefully. For special occasions.
***
A hint of stimulant, a drop of suppressant, the sweat and tears and genius and hard, driving work of thousands, all placed in a single IV bag, and then a single bite-sized addition ground into a gentle dust and sprinkled in.
Vein by vein, it spreads through the tired old body. Cell by cell, it gently meets the raging growth. Strand by strand, it mends the mess of DNA turned to malice and meat.
It’s faster than chemo. It has no side effects except for cinnamon breath. It has a one hundred percent success rate at all stages. It is adopted globally and no company lays copyright to it.
***
The plutonium is buried deep. The uranium is laid to rest. The rods and the water beds and the lead linings are stripped down and carefully stored and the reactor’s heart is filled with a gentle row of ovens at a stable, cautious temperature that will, when supplied produce a single batch every thirty-five minutes on the dot.
The soft warmth that emanates is gentler and milder than the rage of fission, but it doesn’t diminish with distance or time. Soon it fuels the world.
***
Seventy-eight years the ascetic sat on the pole, eating air and rain and the odd hailstone for birthdays, grasping at the sublime, waiting for the thunderbolt, looking into the universe harder and harder as their eyes shrank from disuse into deep pits in their wind-softened face.
One day, a particular young monk made the trip to their hillside and passed up a very small paper bag holding a single crumb.
It weighed on the ascetic’s tongue like a giant’s blow, it passed down their throat like gilded breath, it went in, in, in, in and in that moment the connection leapt from mind to body to soul to cacao bean to wheat field to sugar field to spice fields to farmhands to soil to sky to sea to horizon to BEYOND and
It worked on acolytes too. And it was a lot faster than seventy-eight years of sitting on a pole.
***
Grandma died peacefully in her sleep the very next year. Age ninety-seven, almost thirty great-great grandchildren, much beloved, much missed, fondly-remembered.
It turned out nobody wrote down her recipe
Things went a bit shit-sandwich-sideways after that.