Bucket List

The only item on my bucket list — indeed the only ambition I’ve had throughout my entire life — is to be one of the prizes they used to put in cereal boxes in the late 1970s, the kind that made kids tear open the box from the bottom and shake the bag of food coloring and carbs until they spotted the treasure hidden therein.

At first I dreamed of being a glow-in-the-dark toy, but quickly realized that learning to glow would distract me from the power walking and sentence diagramming needed for time travel. A surfeit of respect for intellectual property led me to opt against becoming a toy connected to one of the era’s finer cartoons.

After much consideration, I decided to become a bulbous-headed pirate. My enlarged cranium will throw off my center of gravity, causing parents to shake their heads at the cheapness of my design each time I clatter from a table, but my strange distorted features will endear me to children all the more.