Do Toasters Have Capacitors?

An important story

Barnaby Royce was a short man. So short, in fact, that his wife used to have to lift him out of bed in the morning. So short, in fact, that they had a special shower put in that was the size of a dishwasher.

One day Barnaby was walking back from the newsagent eating a Snickers bar which, to passers-by, looked so big that it may have seemed like Barnaby was eating his iPhone 14 Pro Max with the synthetic brown horse-leather case.

“Excuse me, young man,” said a street vendor, an unusual-looking man with yellowing eyes and biltong lips. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Barnaby Royce made a face similar to the face he made whenever his wife spent too long on the phone to her ex-boyfriend Chad, who was an enormous five foot nine with a schlong to match (Barnaby was sure). In fact, Barnaby spent many an evening thinking about Chad’s schlong, and not in a fun way, but in a way that made Barnaby want to commit murder.

Regardless, Barnaby was aware that he could never commit murder. And it wasn’t a moral thing, more that he believed one would need a degree in mathematics to get away with it in these times of technology, social media and surveillance. This mathematical complexity was also the reason he didn’t cheat on his wife, or perhaps the second reason. The first reason was that he could never find anyone to cheat on her with. For any woman he met might assume that his own schlong was also in direct proportion to his height, and there was most certainly an element of untruth to the fact that this was just a myth.

And at this stage you might think Barnaby a man of little moral fibre, and that he should instead have a rationale for not cheating on his wife based on his love and respect for her.

But Barnaby was deeply sure that his wife was cheating on him with Chad. And Barnaby was certainly, if anything, a jealous type, with the exact short-man anger that is usually attributed to jockeys and Hitler. And Barnaby himself had in fact considered a career as a jockey, although he had a mild phobia of four-legged animals and a recurring allergy to grass. So he had, instead, taken on a career as an auditor, which he was very good at.

“Young man?” said Barnaby. “Young man? I’m probably twenty years older than you, at least.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said the street vendor. “I assumed from your limited stature that you were a pre-pubescent child. And that’s a compliment, believe me. When you grow up you’ll appreciate the fact that people think you are younger. Anyway, have you heard of the Pinhole Foundation before?”

Barnaby noticed a signboard back on the pavement. On it was a giant logo for the Pinhole Foundation and several pictures of rather tiny holes in things. There was a hole in what looked like a slice of chocolate cake. There was a tiny hole in the right-hand door of a blue Porsche 911.

Most strangely, there was a hole in a man’s left butt cheek. Barnaby assumed it was a man, since the cheek was covered in a thick layer of black hair. And Barnaby was from a societal group of men who believed that women should never covet any kind of body hair except on their heads, and if it was part of a very well-trimmed bush, with hairs no longer than 4mm in length, so as not to get stuck in one’s teeth during the act of cunnilingus. Particularly for Barnaby, being incredibly short, even a 4mm hair in his teeth would be like trying to remove a Cat6e ethernet cord from between his molars. And cunnilingus was something that Barnaby Royce performed at least once a fortnight, usually when his wife came back from her book club smelling of sauvignon blanc and frittata. She would never ask for Barnaby’s consent, but only stuff his head between her legs without words. And Barnaby would often feel like he was in the war, captured by an enemy whose favourite torture method was waterboarding. Often he felt like he was drowning and couldn’t breathe for almost a minute, and her legs would clamp so tightly that he felt like Houdini in his Chinese water torture cell. Sometimes Barnaby considered that he might die right there in that wet, dark chamber surrounded by slippery walls and the internal boom of his wife’s ecstatic moans amplified from the inside. Sometimes his head slipped upwards, locking into her canal and creating a vacuum that gripped his head inescapably like he was heading back up the womb. Eventually the booms would peak, sounding like a CD of traditional bagpipes played at 0.25 speed, and her legs would open and Barnaby would slip right out in a gush of water, like he was back in his youth exiting a waterslide at Flamingo Land waterpark back in his local town.

“So what do you do exactly?” said Barnaby to the street vendor.

“We put holes in things. But not just any holes — pinholes. Sometimes holes so tiny that you can’t see them.”

Barnaby nodded like it made sense, but it didn’t.

“I have a two-part question,” he said. “Firstly, why on earth would you do that? And secondly, what do you want from me?”

“Great questions,” said the street vendor, licking his desiccated lips, which turned a shade of neon cherry.

“First, things need holes. All kinds of things need holes. Think about it: Swiss cheese. Those holes. Who do you think makes them holes? The holes you put headphones in? And those tiny ones you stick pins in to reset things? You ever seen people with earrings? Those earrings need holes. And teabags. How would the tea stain the water without tiny holes? Those are just a few examples. But here’s the thing: those holes, they aren’t cheap. Every hole costs money to make. And honestly, for the price of a cup of coffee every month, you can help us keep making these critical holes.”

Barnaby Royce stood there for a moment. He wondered quite seriously if he had suffered some kind of stroke and was now in a coma, hallucinating this situation. He considered what was the last thing he remembered before leaving the house. He remembered ironing his trousers, listening to Radio 4. Then it dawned on him. The toaster.

The last thing he remembered was standing on a chair in the kitchen trying to dig a small piece of crumpet out that had become dislodged and stuck to one of the elements. And of course the toaster had been off, but he wondered if some kind of residual current had been in the elements. Something to do with a faulty capacitor. Were there even capacitors in toasters?

He asked the street vendor.

“Are there even capacitors in toasters?”

The street vendor nodded.

“The answer to that is complex,” he said. “But I’ll try. You see, humans seem to think that infinity is illogical and that relativity is logical, but it’s not true. The absolute and relative are two sides of the very same coin. An ending, by its very nature, requires the beginning of something else. If something else does not begin, then there cannot be that ending. Hence, the thing cannot end without the beginning, and if there is a beginning, then there cannot be a true end. You are a very short man, Barnaby, and you fear death, but what you should fear more is no death, and what that entails, based on the habitual tailwind that you nurture like your own child. So, to answer your rather childish question, do toasters have capacitors? The answer is a Tuesday afternoon in August consuming pastiche with your wife at that cute French bakery on Nicholson St, or sitting in traffic on a Friday afternoon listening to a podcast about Friedrich Terrance, that grim bastard who murdered his wife by stabbing her a hundred and forty-two times with a potato masher. Or it’s getting pinned down and fucked at midnight on the floor of a prison cell by the Weasley twins in the ‘Man in the High Tower’ version of the Harry Potter timeline. To sum up, let me perform an interpretive dance.”

From nowhere, Barnaby heard the sound of psychedelic bagpipes, and the street vendor began doing the robot.

Barnaby’s head emerged, soaked, from his wife’s vagina. He sat up on the edge of the bed, towelled off his head, caught his breath again, took a sip of water and flicked on the television. It was Rick Stein cooking fish in Portugal. Barnaby had always liked Rick Stein.

He watched for a minute, considering his near-death experience before picking up his phone and opening the eBay app.

He clicked on the search bar and began to type:

…Slimline emergency oxygen tank solutions for couples…

---