keyword: hemorrhagic, title: frankenberry or the post-modern prometheus in misc. flash fiction

I often wonder about the people who ended up becoming the various parts of Frankenberry. You know, Frankenberry the breakfast mascot, along with Count Chocula and Boo Berry, part of the Holy Trinity of the Monster Cereals, not forgetting the lessers Fruit Brute and Yummy Mummy.

Cereal pitch-man or not, though, Frankenberry is nevertheless clearly a Frankenstein’s monster in form and in substance. Stitches and bolts and all, he is clearly a reanimated flesh golem of a kind, mostly comprised of pieces of dead human bodies with the occasional mechanical steam valve or strawberry thrown in verisimilitudic flavor, to excuse the punning, here and there. Cute pink face on a box in an October Hannaford’s supermarket aisle or not, if you follow the concept through to the end, he has got to be mainly a patchwork of corpses. What sort of people would you say add up to become Frankenberry?

Were his constituent components killed off purpose-built to purpose build him? Was he just put together by whatever freshly-dead corpses his creator could abscond with in the days before his dire nativity? Did they love strawberries? Were they all appreciators of Saturday-morning sugar bomb plastic-soul vitamin-enriched prize-inside cuisine? Were they volunteers for this, to meld in death to later play a role in the raising of a new high-fructose life form? Did they see their souls as Christ’s mustard seeds to bring back forth a mighty yield, except in this case became macabre spent grain and corn-syrup hemorrhagic confection instead of bread-body, blood-wine?

How many of them hale and how many were infirm? How many children and how many of them elderly? We can assume from the pervasive use of “he” in all the animated ads that there are boy parts in his boxer-shorts, but I wonder how many of his other parts were women once? How does one make that smiling face, hawking tooth decay to the children of ten million nostalgic morning yesterdays, I wonder how many it took, wonder sometimes on waking how each of them looked?

Friends of mine who play Dungeons and Dragons-type games often use this analogy to explain the differences between character traits in role-playing: Intelligence is knowing that the doctor was the one named Frankenstein not the monster, Wisdom is knowing that the real monster was Doctor Frankenstein himself but that, in the end, Charisma is knowing that the people who are pedantic about such meaningless distinctions, they’re the real monsters in the truest of senses.

But whatever you think of Frankensteinian nomenclature or whatever you believe Frankenberry is made of part-by-part and bit-by-bit and piece-by-piece, I’m sure we can all at least agree that Frankenberry is the Frankenberry monster’s real name. He couldn’t have been built by someone named Doctor Frankenberry. A doctor named Frankenberry would just be too silly, though we of course agree that he would be the monster too, of course, wading through death all the way to the General Mills of eternity.