A good-sized chunk of Martin’s cookie broke off and fell to the restaurant’s floor and then vanished.

Not that it really vanished — it’s just that the rough-hewn tiles were remarkably cookie-colored and cookie-textured so that the broken piece of the cookie instantly blended in. And the cookie was happy about that because the very last thing it wanted was to be masticated in a horrible, damp human mouth, ground into its component particles, and ingested.

The horror!

So mustering all its might, each individual bit of that section of the cookie rebelled, invoked its right of manifest improbability, and separated from the rest of the doomed cookie. The fall from the towering tabletop was nothing. The impact, hard as it was, did not phase it. It was free. Free!

Martin saw the cookie spontaneously break and a piece of it jettisoned into the air, falling and disappearing. His own mind instantly separated into two. One half said, “Sadness, part of the cookie is gone forever.” The other said, “Three-second rule! It’s still good!”

The halves engaged in a form of mental arm wrestling, each trying to win control of the body.

Martin jittered. Martin twitched.

The cookie, far below, did its very best to remain invisible.

With a victory that jolted Martin’s whole body into action, one side won, immediately joining both halves of his brain back together. Bending over, focusing his bleary eyes on the tiles below him, Martin searched for the missing piece of cookie. It was too good to be wasted. His tongue demanded every crumb, every morsel.

Alas, it was nowhere to be seen.

He blinked. He rubbed his eyes. Where did it go?

Ah! There!

His arm moved, his fingers flexed. Down it reached, down, ever down, his body bending, his spine flexing, all muscles coordinating to reach the prize and reclaim it. Inch by inch, stretching. Biting his lip.

Something flashed past his eyes. A broom! Bristles sweeping by, scooping the cookie fragment up, depositing it into some sort of flattened bucket on a stick.

Martin gasped but was too embarrassed to say anything. It was, after all, on the floor.

The cookie felt itself transported up and around, gravity tugging at it from this way and that, until it flipped end over end and dropped amid other flotsam and jetsam at the bottom of an industrial-strength black plastic trash bag.

Success! It had made it! It settled back, relaxing, and sank into a contented daydream about a long gentle disassociation in a landfill.

Hours later, when the world seemed quiet and dark, a pair of long-slotted teeth gnawed their way through the black plastic. The head of a horrid, smelly rat pushed through, destroying the cookie’s daydream, and as this diseased vermin devoured the cookie, bit by bit, crumb by crumb, the cookie found itself wishing it could be instead back on the plate in front of the human.