The Sensitive Spreader

Once upon a time, there lived a man. In many ways he was a normal man, living after the fashion of the people of his time. In one important respect he differed. This man had the ability to apply margarine and even butter to the softest and most brittle of bread products, be they toasted or untoasted. He was a Sensitive Spreader.

Nobody knows exactly how this talent developed, although it is likely that, in the manner of all athletic and artistic savants, it came through a combination of hereditary gifts and dutiful, loving application. Almost certainly he did not possess this talent as a child, awkward and still developing as they are, both mentally and physically. Yet we know also that few - indeed up until the Sensitive Spreader, none - of these children go on to acquire the ability to apply spreads in such a sensitive, yielding and successful manner.

The Sensitive Spreader lived for the most part a quiet and regular life, although his talents did not go unnoticed. Some marvelled, others disbelieved until they saw, some were jealous, and others were incomprehensibly indifferent. Within his inner circle, they came to take it for granted much of the time, until perhaps one of them ventured to apply a refrigerated piece of butter to an undertoasted and too thinly sliced sourdough - with awful consequences. These misadventures affected the Sensitive Spreader too, as he felt acutely the pain of a piece of toast run roughshod, ploughed with a butter knife beyond recognition and ridiculously uneven in its coverage. In times like this he would withdraw, sometimes for hours, but only after giving the toast its proper burial rites and offering to right this wrong with a fresh piece.

And so life went on for the Sensitive Spreader, until fate intervened one cool autumnal day.