Buy or Die. There cometh a time of ruthless advertising - Theodor Ventskevich

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of confidence.

      “And if someone wants something harmful?” Twick retorted.

      “It is not!” cried Kwick with his lips treacherously quivering. “It’s the opposite. Oatmeal is killing us!”

      Mick frowned at this and began to push the plate slowly away from him.

      “Boys!” Tess raised her voice.

      “What?!” Twick exploded. “I can’t eat it, and that’s it!”

      “I can’t either!” Kwick joined hastily.

      Mick perked up and forcefully pushed his plate away, spilling the contents onto the table.

      “Me too!” he announced happily. “Me too cannot. Oats meal is a bad meal!”

      “Ma,” Twick whined, “why it is always a porridge? Why can’t we have, say, an omelette for a change?”

      “Omelette! Omelette! Omelette!” the trio began to chant.

      Y glanced at his watch and shook his head.

      “What’s an omelette? We are already late.”

      After thinking this over for a second, Kwick clenched his teeth decisively.

      “Then I will not go to school,” he declared.

      “If he doesn’t,” Twick added hastily, “I won’t either.”

      “Me too!” Mick yelled happily. “Never ever forever!”

      The adults exchanged glances. Y looked at his watch again, sighed, leaned back in his chair, and said casually:

      “I bet you can’t guess what I dreamed about last night…”

      The children froze.

      “Jack of Air?” still not believing his luck, suggested Kwick cautiously.

      Y raised his eyebrows in surprise.

      “How did you know? Right, it was Jack in person. And guess what happened this time!”

      The children, as if spellbound, slowly took their spoons, scooped up the porridge, and brought it towards their mouths. Tess turned away, hiding a smile. Jack helped invariably. He was always at hand – in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health.

      Jack was the hero of the book that Y had been writing for many years in the evenings after the work, regularly falling asleep at the keyboard. The venture was almost hopeless, but Y did not give up, and the work slowly moved forward. As far as Tess could judge, the book was going to be a good one, but even now it was already too large and intimidating. The book was about Jack, or rather, as Y had explained after taking in a serious extra portion of alcohol, the book was about all of us, born human and ceasing to be human gradually. So gradually that, going along this road, nobody sees the changes and only gets horrified at the very end, after turning and seeing the completed path. Jack had a model or, rather, two models, taken from the few men Y could more or less get along with. These two were himself and his friend, Z. More of Z, actually, as Y was well aware that he himself was too far from the generally accepted male format.

      Jack’s days, no matter how inspirationally Y colored them on the pages of his book, were coming out one worse than the other, as slow gray drops, flowing down into a common dead puddle. The nights were better. At night, Jack could fly in his dreams. In his dreams, he knew and could do things that he never thought of in daylight. In his dreams, he was light as air. Damn it, he was the air! And they called him Jack of Air in these dreams. At first, true, his name was Air Jack, but later, to avoid unpleasant allusions to that stupid device for lifting heavy objects, he became Jack of Air, the fearless and noble hero in a consistently good mood. Very canonical. And it was these very dreams that Y fed together with porridge to his children for breakfast in the mornings. All in all, it was better than just storing them in a drawer. Y strongly doubted that anyone would ever publish his book (that is, of course, if he ever finished it).

      ***

      “And guess what happened with Jack this time?” Y asked. “I must say, it was a rather nasty affair.”

      He paused, watching the children mockingly.

      “As a matter of fact,” he announced finally, “Rock Doc lured him to the factory of air balloons!”

      “But how?” Kwick gasped.

      “Outwitted…” Y cut off.

      “And not only to the factory,” he continued, “but straight into the machine that fills the balloons with air. Here it is. Jack hardly had time to look around, as he was already pumped into one thousand balloons. Or maybe two thousand. I did not count, you know. I slept.”

      “Bloody shit!” Kwick exclaimed.

      “Wha-at?” Tess drawled menacingly.

      “Nothing,” Kwick replied hastily. “Keep going, Dad. Keep going.”

      “So,” Y continued, “Jack was pumped into one or, maybe, two thousand air balloons, delivered to stalls all over the city and, in less than an hour, he was all sold out. At a discount. So he found himself in a thousand or, maybe, two thousand different places at the same time, locked securely in a rubber casing, dangling on a thin rope without the slightest chance of getting out… And do not forget your porridge.”

      Spoons obediently plunged into the bowls, and Rock Doc issued encouraging yet ominous (he was still a very bad guy) laughter: “A-ha-ha!” And then: “O-ho-ho!” And, finally, “E-he-he.” Why not? Nobody could prevent him from taking possession of the whole Earth now.

      “Doc started with a visit to a president. The president was watering his favorite ficus at the moment.

      “Hey, you!” Doc called from the doorway in a boorish tone. “Are you the big boss here?”

      The president paid him no attention at all, continuing to water his ficus as if nothing had happened. They, these presidents, had been taught not to pay attention to rudeness and criticism from their very childhood. But the Rock Doc was not a guy to be easily embarrassed.

      “Well now,” said Doc, “kindly leave the flower alone and get out of this nice place immediately. I’m the boss here now!”

      The president did not answer to this either. He just pressed the alarm button on the bottom of the ficus’ pot, a bit more nervously than before. Well, and he poured too much water into the pot. Trained as he was, he was not a superhero.

      Rock Doc saw that peaceful methods would not work, and calmly pressed his index finger to the wall. And we all remember why he is called Rock Doc, don’t we? Exactly! The moment his finger touches something, that something turns into solid stone immediately. So it did: right before the president’s eyes, a stone wave started to spread out from the finger on the wall like circles on the water. The next moment, all the president’s bodyguards broke into the room, waving with their pistols, and immediately turned to stone. The president saw his guards stuck in the most ridiculous poses, while the petrification steadily approached his favorite ficus. The president understood: sticking to the protocol somehow would not help today.

      “Okay, okay,” the president says in a great haste. “Why this terrible violence? It is absolutely unnecessary between the two of us. You won – I’m leaving. But remember: you will never get this wonderful flower. Never!”

      He jerked the ficus out of the pot (which was too heavy to be carried away) and plodded towards the exit sadly. At the threshold, he turned around just to say gloatingly:

      “We’ll see how you like this. The position is unenviable.””

      Y paused.

      “So, then what?” Kwick urged him on.

      “Well, it surely would have been the end of the story and, most likely, the end of everything else had Jack not recovered by that time.

      At

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