by David S. Atkinson

I can’t believe no one ever made a breakfast cereal that tastes like baloney. There’s one for everything else, Graham crackers and French toast, so why not? This is America, you’d think we’d have something like that handled. Just think of it: cereal, but flavored like baloney.

I’m going to make Baloney Sandwich Breakfast Crunch cereal. Each bite will be full of little baloney sandwiches, no lie. Baloney and American cheese on some crappy white bread with no nutrients. It’ll be great. We can have different varieties for each of the possible topping combinations — mayo style, mustard, or ketchup.

There’s not going to be fakes either. This will be all real baloney sandwiches. We’ll make them in big batches and shrink them down, dried. The dehydration process should make them small enough to fit into the boxes. If not, we can always go to Rick Moranis. You know that machine was real, right? That’s why he stopped acting. He got too busy shrinking foodstuffs for breakfast cereal. Cookie Crisp and Cinnamon Toast Crunch alone turned him into a made man.

His dreams always lay in edible industrial engineering.

Frankly, my biggest problem will be assembly. I have to have people to take off the plastic red edges from the baloney and unwrap the slices of cheese. Someone has to spread the bread, and others to stack it together. That’s a heck of a lot of workers, and it’ll take a ton of sandwiches to make a single bowl. Given that boxes usually only go for a couple bucks, I’m not sure how I’m going to financially cut it.

Maybe I can apply for some kind of breakfast subsidy grant. Those are the big new thing these days.

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David S. Atkinson is the author of books such as Roses are Red, Violets are Stealing Loose Change from my Pockets While I Sleep and the Nebraska book award winning Not Quite so Stories. He is a prose assistant editor for Digging Through The Fat and his writing appears in Spelk, Jellyfish Review, Literary Orphans, and more. His writing website is davidsatkinsonwriting.com/.