He patched up the dam with his hands and his heat vision, posed for photographs, signed some autographs, rose into the air, hovered long enough to salute the cheering, grateful crowds then returned to his kitchen in a blur of red and blue.

He opened the packet of bread and reached past the crust to select the third and fourth slices and heard the sound of a flare gun going off in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

After setting the oil tanker down in a Honolulu dry dock he hovered long enough to salute the cheering, grateful crowds then whoosh, and he placed the bread under a medium grill, started to grate the mature cheddar into a bowl and he felt the faint yet distinctive vibrations of an attack by a giant radioactive monster off the coast of Kamakura.

The creature safely shrunk and placed in an empty screw-top beer bottle, he paused briefly to give two thumbs up for the assembled news teams then up, up and away and turning the bread and chopping some olives and gunfire in downtown Metropolis and he tied the Octomaster and his henchmen up using tentacles torn from the large, and largely unnecessary, robot octopus they had been travelling in and gave a wave to the chief of the MCPD and leapt a tall building in a single bound and pulled the grill pan out and carefully spread the cheese and olives evenly over the bread.

The evil genius had barely opened his mouth to gloatingly exposit his plan to decimate the eastern seaboard using the giant atomic gorilla he had grown in a big vat under his volcano lair before he was slammed through a wall by what appeared to be an angry red and blue streak of impatient energy.

He knelt at the grill: not quite done. The timing was crucial.

He gently set the stricken Jumbo Jet down onto the runway, and, leaving the passengers and crew none the wiser as to how they had pulled out of the nosedive at the last minute, he checked the grill again. Brown. Bubbling. Perfect.

The perfect cheese on toast. He got a plate from the draining board and, with thumb and forefinger made heatproof by exposure to yellow sun radiation, delicately lifted the toast from the grill. He smiled. He heard the sound of tyres screeching, and a child crying and shouting for a lost cat. He looked at the toast. He wasn’t a cat person.

Johnny happily reunited with Tintin, and aware of the dangers of leaving the front door open when you own a cat and live on a main road, he flew through his kitchen window and tipped the cold toast into the pedalbin.

He opened the packet of bread, and reached past the crust.

******
The Perfect Cheese on Toast by Harris
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