David Wurston Quarters – son of Gnorman Wurston Quarters, son of Baobab Wurston Quarters, heir to the ‘donut throne,’ multibillionaire, and master of ten thousand terrible little outlets – slouched in a chair that wasn’t as comfortable as it looked and listened to someone who’d paid real money for a real degree they had to do real work to really earn tried to explain how he could make more money.
“So you put a burger between the donuts, is that it?” he interrupted. Manners were a sign of respect. David had last said ‘please’ at age four, and the memory was not a fond one. “We don’t sell burgers. How the hell is this supposed to work? It’s stupid. You’re stupid.”
“The ‘burger,’” said the bedraggled dweeb standing at the far end of the table, lost and alone before a slideshow, “is comprised of the same sausage patties we sell inside breakfast wraps.” She took a deep breath, the way people who are repeating themselves must. “Putting it inside the donuts creates a unique variant on the so-called ‘Luther burger,’ and-”
“Wait, some guy called Luther already came up with this idea? God, I hate lawsuits. They’re boring. Make this bozo go away and ruin her career a little, I don’t care how.”
David sank further back into his chair and picked at his eyelid. He hated product pitch sessions as much as lawsuits, but there was no escaping this one. Holey Donuts was in big, big, big trouble: it was only making the same amount of money it had before, which was as good as losing all its money immediately. More gimmicks. More ads. More eyeballs. More to make more, that’s what made things safe. “Send in the next chump,” he mumbled to the large, unpleasant men in sunglasses he employed.
They sent in the next chump, who was slim and smiling and moved like a greased snake and walked right up to him – not the projector! To him! The hell! – and said, confident and unstressed: “donut holes.”
“Huh?” said David, who was still trying to figure out how this had happened. “We already do those.”
“Nah,” said the chump, flicking his fingers as if shedding water. “You sell little round lumps of dough. You need to sell the REAL donut holes. Sell the hole from a donut’s center. Its soul. Its essence. Fry them. Box them. Bag them. Bill them. ‘True Donut Holes.’ Never been imagined, never been done, never been dreamed. And only sold at Holey Donuts.” His smile slid a few degrees west. “’For A Limited Time.’”
David’s own mouth was open, he realized. Wide. Round. Holy.
“Damn,” he said. “Make it happen.”
“Absolutely.”
“Not you. Someone I can pay less. Thanks for your time see you later.”
The smile moved around a little farther. “I’ll leave my card at the door,” it said. And was gone.
***
David called the number on the back of the card at nine AM the next day.
“What can I do for you, mister David?”
“How do you sever the hole from the center of a donut?” he demanded.
“Why, that’s simple,” said the chump through the soft static of his smile. “Simply make a donut, pop out the center like usual, then immediately pop out everything else. Catch it off guard. Do it in a temperature around eh….one hundred fifty kelvin. That should keep it stable.”
“Good,” said David. And hung up.
He called back six hours later. “Hey, how do you fry these?”
“Something with a very high smoke point. Refined safflower, I’d say. Immediately after separation from the everything else.”
“Great.” Click.
Ten minutes after that: “how do you put them in a box?”
“Tongs, made from alloys resistant to thermal shock – tungsten, maybe. Ask your engineers. And it should be done blindfolded.”
“Bye.” Click.
At ten PM: “Hey. What did you call these?”
“True Donut Holes. Tagline – ‘Only Sold at Holey Donuts: For A Limited Time.’”
“Great. Hey. I’m not paying you.”
“Mister David,” smiled the phone, “I’m not in this for the money.”
David Wurston Quarters grimaced and dropped the phone. “Throw it in the trash,” he told a nearby large unpleasant man in sunglasses. “That stuff’s contagious.”
***
The factories had been built; the kitchens had been stocked, the math had been graphed, and – above all else – the ad copy was finally almost finished.
Now there sat before the chair of David Wurston Quarters a humble bag of lowest-possibly-bidder paper byproducts and resins, holding a logo-stamped box, holding six True Donut Holes. The first to be sampled in all the world. Cameras were pointed at the occasion, which made David irritated because they belonged to people he had to pay money to.
“You sure this’ll only take a minute?” he demanded of the nearest small unpleasant man in a suit. He looked like he could be a secretary or something.
“Just one bite for one photo for each of us,” he said. His smile was profound and warm and loving and David knew this guy had been working for him too long to give it. He should probably pin something on him later. “Fine,” he said. He tore open the bag, wrenched open the box, fumbled around inside until his fingers were in a shape that felt right, put it in his mouth, and shoved the box to the next suited man down the line.
He bit. Chewed. Swallowed.
“I can’t feel a damn thing,” he said. “Wow. People are going to pay us money for this. What a bunch of….”
“Sir?” asked the maybe-secretary. The nearest large unpleasant man in sunglasses unzipped the cardiac event bag.
“I remember the day I realized my mother would never love me for she could see both my father and herself in my face and she could never forgive either of them for what they had done,” said David. “I will never experience genuine love in my life and wouldn’t know what to do if it happened. It’s too late for me to change and too hard for me to bear not changing. I should’ve eaten one more time at the club down the road and it’s been out of business for thirty-seven years. I don’t like this chair and if I change it people’ll think I’m going crazy. I hate the pills I take but if I don’t take them I wake up at four AM to pee and I can’t fall back asleep without remembering my younger brother and what I did to him and so I take the pills and sleep through the night and I piss myself and I pretend it isn’t happening and when that doesn’t work I pretend I like it, I pretend I like to wake up stinking and chafed, and I hire people to change my laundry every day but I can still smell it as I go to bed and drift to sleep. I miss my dog.”
David reached up to his cheek and touched the wetness he felt there. “I regret all of it,” he said, with a little surprise.
Then he crumpled into a small vortex.
The large unpleasant men in sunglasses stood there, rendered smaller and more vulnerable absent their center of gravity. The one with the cardiac event bag looked at it, zipped it up again, then open, then up again.
“Who’s in charge now?” he asked.
The small man who wasn’t a secretary raised a slightly-shaking hand. “I remember my cat Mittens,” he mumbled.
In the ensuring series of events, the box went missing. It was probably empty by then.
***
Billiam Pat McKrubbler laid his head on the table on the thick lush piles of double-sided coloured graphs and groaned. “No, that’s dumb. You’re dumb! We already MADE an inside-out chicken burger. Go away! Doesn’t anyone have any new ideas?”
A slim, smiling hand was raised halfway down the table.
“Go ahead,” he grunted.
“Mister Billiam,” said the man through a smile that tweaked gently as he wore it, ”you ever thought of selling REAL Buffalo Wings?”