Twenty-six months now since the coil in B4 turned and nothing has replaced it except a fluorescent orange cheese product that has never once made anybody quieter.
So the Circle keeps the record. Not out of grief. Out of accuracy. Here follows the Sunwheel as it was, wheel by wheel, laid out the way it was meant to be eaten — top down, crown to root, the way the spiral unwound in the hand if the hand was patient.
Barely a substance. A pale burnt-sugar web laid over everything else, gone in the mouth before a decision could be made about it. Members who ate upward missed it entirely and were, over the years, noticeably harder to talk to.
Somebody at the Thursday circle asked, kindly, whether a snack cake can really carry seven wheels of a body. Fair question. Here is the answer the Circle gives, which is not a clever answer:
It carried them for us. Sixty-five cents, a wet hallway, chlorine in the hair, and for the length of one spiral the whole stack of us lined up straight. Nothing else in that building did that. Not the sauna. Not the lane rope. Not the vending machine's other eleven slots, all of which are still there and all of which are still empty of it.
Fenmark ran the Sunwheel from 1988 to March 2001. Thirteen years, one wrapper design, one flavor, no seasonal variant, no fun size. That is the whole history of the thing and it is a good history.
Ate one on the bus the morning of the road test and passed on the first try. Correlation, sure. But the throat wheel is blue poppy salt and the throat wheel is the one that answers the examiner.
Forty-one years on that pool deck. Sold thousands of them out of the office drawer when the machine jammed. Never once saw a person unwrap one fast. Not once. Whatever else the Sunwheel was, it was slow.
Wrote to Fenmark twice. The second letter came back with a note from a woman named Perla in accounts: the equipment for the honey seam was specific and was sold. Sold where, Perla. Sold to whom.
Still keeps one unopened in the freezer, wrapped in a sock, behind the peas. Not going to eat it. Not going to sell it. It is simply true that the world contains one more Sunwheel than most people believe, and that is enough to be going on with.