illphated
The Great Cheez-It Deluge of ’25
Dusty Rhoades was a woman of simple tastes. She liked the sting of whiskey on her tongue, the feel of a well-worn saddle, and the satisfying crunch of a Cheez-It cracker. It was this last affection that would prove to be her undoing, or at least, a significant inconvenience.
It all started on a Tuesday. Dusty was out on the range, mending a fence line and lamenting the state of her snack bag, which contained nothing but a sad handful of trail mix. “Gosh darn it,” she muttered to the sky, a habit she’d picked up from her grandpappy. “I’d give anything for about 82 billion Cheez-Its right now.”
The sky, it seemed, was listening.
It began as a faint, orange-hued dust devil on the horizon. But as it drew closer, Dusty could see it wasn’t dust at all. It was a swirling, crackling vortex of cheesy, salty squares. The Great Cheez-It Deluge of ’25 had begun.
Within minutes, her ranch was buried. The barn, the house, the outhouse—all submerged beneath a tide of crunchy, baked goodness. Her cattle, initially confused, quickly adapted and began to graze on the cheesy bounty. Dusty, for her part, was in heaven. For about an hour.
Then the reality of the situation set in. The sheer, overwhelming volume of it all. The way the crackers got into everything. Her boots, her hat, her unmentionables. The relentless, one-note crunch that echoed across the plains.
Dusty, ever the resourceful cowgirl, adapted. She learned to surf the cheesy waves on an old barn door. She fashioned a filtration system from a pair of Levi’s and a canteen to separate the cracker dust from her drinking water. She even discovered that a river of molten cheese, a byproduct of the intense pressure at the bottom of the cracker dunes, flowed through the new, orange landscape.
Days turned into weeks. A passing satellite captured the anomaly, and soon, “Cheez-It Ranch” was a national phenomenon. Tourists flocked to see the cowgirl who had wished for a snack and received a geological feature. Dusty, ever the entrepreneur, started selling tickets.
She never did run out of snacks, that much was true. But as she sat atop a mountain of baked cheese, watching the sun set over a sea of orange, she couldn’t help but think that maybe, just maybe, she should have wished for a lifetime supply of beef jerky instead.
