A well baked Stephen King recipe
A magical cookie jar that is always full of freshly baked cookies and magically fills up no matter how many cookies one takes out to eat. Crispy, crumbly and an array of choices to pick from. This could be what every child dreams are made of.
For Rhett and Jack Alderson this was a dream come true. Their mother has one such jar, a blue ceramic cookie jar, from which she treats her boys with sumptuous cookies to eat and memories of happy hours to keep. After his mom passes away, Rhett inherits the cookies jar. The brothers then discover the magical secret of the cookie jar but they continue to eat from it. One day Rhett upends the cookie jar, to literally unravel the mystery at the bottom of the Jar. What he finds is beyond bizarre.
Stephen King's Cookie Jar is perfect for a quick read. Being just twenty odd pages long, the narrative is the retelling of a tale by an older Rhett Alderson to his great grand son. The tale is set against the backdrop of major wars that rocked the twentieth century, especially WWII.
The Author treads a fine line between fact and fantasy. The Cookie Jar is perhaps an allegory that Stephen King uses lest the memory of the brutality meted out at the Nazi concentration camps fades with time. Having read the short story, what remains undecidable is "what is more horrific?". The acts of barbarity in the western kingdom of Lalanka or the depths of human depravity in our world. Either way, the point to remember is that how we choose to write our history is up to us.
The story appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of the VQR Magazine ( a delight to all readers, me included..YAY ) and I now hear that it has also been included in the October 2016 paperback edition of Stephen King's book, Bazaar of Bad Dreams.
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