Awful, Ohio

The individual that was going to help Troy complete the script was Baltazar Garcia. Troy knew Baltazar Garcia through the hot sauce warehouse, as he had once worked for Mad Ted. Troy and Baltazar would walk past one another every morning and evening. However, they never exchanged in conversation because neither one of them had ever made eye contact, which allowed them to avoid acknowledgment. Neither one of them would ever know if the other one had ever made the effort.

  Baltazar had always carried himself silently and softly through the hot sauce warehouse, strolling without landing any heavy footprints loud enough to imprint his existence into the memory of anyone that he had worked with.

  It was Baltazar’s duty to enter the changing chute, dressing him in the mandatory galoshes, jump suit, and snorkel. He was then ordered to tend a conveyor belt where he was to examine the firmness of all the bottles that the hot sauce was going to be dispensed into. If the bottle was too firm, Baltazar was to discard the bottle, permanently banishing it from ever holding a smidgen of Mad Ted’s Uckin Hot Auce. Mad Ted’s objective was to serve all of his hot sauce in easy to squeeze bottles, intentionally causing more hot sauce to eject from the bottle, causing the consumer to use more hot sauce, forcing the household hot sauce supply to quickly deteriorate, forcing the household to purchase more hot sauce to fulfill the household hot sauce demands.

  The plan worked well for the purpose of profit, but after a few weeks of squeezing, Baltazar Garcia began to recede in mental stability. The repetition had attempted to solidify Baltazar’s cognitive ability, permanently cementing it into an indestructible, concreted brain mass. But Baltazar was conscious of the staleness, as he jumped course, rebelling from the permanence of repetition with no fear. He abandoned his conveyor belt in search of one of the hot sauce kettles, and dove in head first with a ladle in hand each. Mad Ted watched from above, concealed in the eagle’s nest as Baltazar was practicing his back-stroke, squirting the hot sauce from his mouth like a marbled fountainhead. Mad Ted unleashed a verbal assault to Baltazar Garcia that was heard throughout the entire warehouse.

  “Baltazar Garcia,” omnisciently spoke Mad Ted from the eagle’s nest. “I have called you here to reveal to you the unsatisfactory work that you have been providing here to the warehouse. Countless times you have been discovered objectifying corporate hours towards solipstic gratification. You are required to surrender your life and time to the hot sauce for maximizing and elevating the prestige of this product. Your lack of productivity qualifies you as incompetent, and a valueless entity within the community of the warehouse. We do not tolerate moments of enjoyment, hedonism, and personal pleasure within this hot sauce facility. We, as a community, have gathered together without your input, and declared you as a valueless resource within our facility. As of this moment, we here in the hot sauce warehouse will expect you to remove your qualifications to another facility. We no longer wish for you to continue exhausting what it is that you do with your time within these walls. We do encourage you to engage in what it is that you wish to surrender your time to. But if you are unwilling to surrender your time to the benefits of the hot sauce community, then we will no longer provide to you the benefits and compensation of working within these walls of the hot sauce community! Remove yourself immediately!”

  Baltazar did as told, dejected and humiliated, permanently leaving the hot sauce warehouse. He entered into the coniferous surroundings of Awful, Ohio, and built himself a home made from his surroundings.

  This verbal lashing upon Baltazar Garcia was witnessed by everyone that was working in the hot sauce warehouse, leaving a permanent imprint of his existence in everyone’s mind. No one knew Baltazar before the lashing because of his quiet nature, including Troy Slushy, regardless of walking past him twice a day. But after the lashing, he had become a hot sauce iconoclast because of the severity of the lashing.

  Baltazar Garcia became a common name throughout the hot sauce warehouse, earning recognition from all of his coworkers. However, no one knew Baltazar Garcia personally or his reserved nature, so hot sauce folklore quickly developed, offering a variety of stories, depicting Baltazar as a variety of polar opposing characters. Some suggested that he was a martyr for the overworked, and that those working there should join together to form a union. Others suggested that he was nothing more than a looney, who found his way in a place that he never belonged. And the other working shifts who had never seen him had depicted him as nothing but a pagan idea that lived only in metaphors.

  Regardless of varying personalities he was mentally developed as, one common feature that all the created folklore did regain was that Baltazar was an outspoken extrovert for the overworked. Troy conjured up his own story, detailing Baltazar Garcia as a gifted artist that was endowed with high levels of creation. This endowment, Troy thought, fueled Baltazar’s rebellion, causing him to search for his own identity, releasing Baltazar into an existential world where his own virtues and values bled truth for anything and everything that surrounded him. This assumed declaration of Baltazar’s search for independence resurrected Troy’s soul that had been buried beneath the devotion of hot sauce, as it served as Troy’s influence for wanting to break free from the constraints of his job.

  “These are the actions of a man who can help me write this script,” thought Troy, convinced that Baltazar’s rebellion was a cause of deeply manifested emotions that were waiting to be released through creative expression.