[Today is National Donut Day! So here’s a bit of festive flash fiction for you. Tracy and her friends are characters in a book I’ll be releasing soon, A Dazzle of Zebras. Here’s your chance to meet them in advance—I hope you like ‘em! I mean, like…I really hope you like them. If you don’t, that’ll be…a significant bummer. So…fingers crossed!]
A fan is humming when we walk into Duchess Donuts, but I’m not sure it’s doing much to cool the place down. The air is thick and sticky with sugar; the homey scent of yeast ushers us farther inside the little shop. I run my fingers along the glass display case, all the shiny donuts waiting there in rows to be eaten. By meee!
“Hey, Hank,” I say to the droopy-eyed man behind the register. “A very merry Donut Day to you.”
He nods. “Traaacy. Your usual?” He’s already reaching for a pink cardboard box.
“You know it.”
I lean against the counter and look back at my friends. Sophia smirks at me.
“You know the donut guy’s name?”
“You have a usual?” Alfie says.
Nick says nothing. He knows me too well to be surprised.
“Oh, yeah,” Hank says with his light Cambodian accent as he loads sprinkled cake donuts into the box. “Tracy’s been coming here for years. We’re like family. My wife’s like her second mom. What can I get for the rest of you?”
“I’ll take one of everything,” Alfie says.
Hank looks at me and I shrug like, What do you expect? The boy has taste. “It is National Donut Day.”
“We’re gonna need a bigger box,” he says.
Nick leans over to me and mumbles, “I’m getting a Snapple.”
As he slinks over to the fridge, I announce, “Nick’s getting a Snapple!” to the entire shop.
“Congratulations,” says Hank.
Nick glares at me over his shoulder and I say, “Sorry. I’m all hyped up.”
Scooting into one of the booths by the window, Sophia says, “Nick, you should work here this summer.”
“That means we’d get free donuts, right?” Alfie slaps his palm on the counter. “Hank! Get this man an application!”
“He’s too tall,” Hank says. “Make me look too short.”
Nick gives me a look like, Who is this jamoke? But Hank has a point. Nick was five-foot-six in third grade, and he’s only grown taller since then.
Alfie helps me heft the two boxes of donuts over to the table.
“So what’re we planning to do with these bad boys?” Sophia asks as she opens the lid and picks out a sour cream donut.
“We are going to sit here,” Alfie says, “until we finish every—single—one.”
“Then we can have dessert,” I chirp.
“Great,” she says, taking a bite. “Too bad this isn’t a real holiday.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that like, obviously I love the idea of Donut Day, I just wish it were an actual holiday.”
Nick purses his lips and scrunches his eyes shut. “Easy, Sophe.”
“But like…this isn’t a real holiday, right? Like, this is one of those Tracy holidays that you make up and then force everyone to celebrate. Like Hug a Fish Day.”
“Hug a Fish Day suuucks,” Nick groans.
“Or like last year,” Alfie says, “when you made us hang tissues from your bedroom ceiling because you wanted Flu Season to be a little more festive.”
“Actually it is a real holiday.”
Sophia tilts her head skeptically.
“It is! I promise.” I start in on a second sprinkled donut.
They peer at each other silently for a moment.
Finally Alfie sighs. “Okay, fine. Tell us the history of Donut Day then, Tracy.”
I straighten up in my seat. “I thought you’d never ask!”
Nick shakes his head quietly and crosses his arms. “I donut think you want to hear it.”
I shush him and begin my story. “Once upon a time there lived a woman named Marchu.”
“Marchu?”
“Gesundheit. This was a poor woman, you see, and she had little to feed her twenty-six children.”
“Twenty-six?!”
“One for every letter of the alphabet. But after years of drought and famine and locusts and the inevitable blood rain, she decided to set out for the king’s castle to plead for help.”
“What country is this?”
“So Marchu set out toward the castle, and the journey took weeks and was fraught with terrors: the ice fields and the fearsome giant hopping toads and the wide chasms she must cross with only the aid of a rickety rope bridge. Finally, though, she made it to the castle. But when the guards saw her bedraggled state, they refused to let her enter, much less have an audience with the king. ‘Servants’ entrance is in the back,’ they told her.”
“Rude.”
“I know. But Marchu was used to this type of treatment, and she went around to the servants’ entrance, which happened to open into the kitchen. The door was open, and as she stood in the doorway, she filled her lungs with the most wonderful scent. Rich, yeasty, wholesome…her mouth watered and her stomach growled so loudly that the head chef looked up in surprise. ‘You zere!’ he said. He was French, this chef. He said, ‘Beggar woman! Get ahway from mah keetchen!’ But Marchu was clever. Not to mention desperate. She told the French head chef that she was a new cook just hired by the king.”
“That seems like it would be pretty easy to fact-check.”
“The head chef of the castle didn’t have time to fact-check, Alfie! He just told her to come inside and get started kneading. But of course, Marchu didn’t know what that meant. She’d never seen anything like this before.”
“Wait. You’re saying she didn’t know what bread is? Nobody in her entire village had ever heard of yeast?”
“Not everyone has heard of things, Sophe. Now, Marchu knew if she could only get her hands on a small morsel of this remarkable substance, it would keep growing and growing, and she’d be able to feed all her twenty-six children for eternity. So she quickly learned the ins and outs kneading and cutting out the circle buns the king liked and frying them up all golden-brown, and every night when the work was done, she secreted away the extra dough that got caught under her fingernails.”
“Gross. Call the health inspector.”
“Finally she had enough and returned to her village. She fried up the dough as her twenty-six children looked on in amazement, and that night they all ate until their bellies were stuffed. And that would have been that, except that the youngest, Zachariah, accidentally dropped his in the sugar pond. At first Marchu scolded him, but when she tasted it, she realized what an opportunity this was! She started selling her buns, dipped in the sugar pond, far and wide, and that’s how we got donuts.”
Alfie spews crumbs all over the table. “Wait, what! They had a sugar pond this whole time?”
“But no dentist in town, so it wasn’t like they could just eat that all day.”
“Well, what did they use to fry the donuts?”
“Oh, they just fried them in the hot oil springs in the caves near the village.”
“Oh, of course. Wasn’t that obvious, Alfie?”
“So anyway,” I say, “that’s the story of Marchu and the donuts. Every year on Donut Day we stuff ourselves with donuts of all sorts to commemorate her daring heist and ingenuity. You know, I kind of hope that eventually, every day will be Donut Day, all across the globe. That is my dream for this troubled world. I mean, yes, diabetes and obesity rates would soar, but it will be worth it.”
When I finish, Sophia and Alfie gape silently at me. They look mad. Grinning, Nick reaches across me for a bear claw.
“A very merry Donut Day to us all,” he says.
