2nd Place Winner – Flash 405, February 2025: “Anchor”
Experimental
I never told anyone this, but the day after my mother died, I ate her unfinished red velvet birthday cake. Still moist and chilled from the fridge. The whole of it. Minus the razor-thin slice she had pretended to eat. The buttery frosting left a waxy film on the roof of my mouth. My lips tinged red. I did not purge. Managed to leave my mother’s final celebration inside me, felt its sweetness inching down my intestines. Satisfying. I did not purge! How many eggs in this cake? I wondered. Eggs have protein. I thought of the creamy scrambled ones my mother years ago made for breakfast that tasted like love so much I couldn’t resist. Then one day a tiny eggshell surprised my tongue. My body shivered with disgust. Mom said, What’s the big deal? This happened more than once. So, before eating, I’d fork the soft eggs around my plate trying to detect any white hard bits. She’d laugh when I held up another speck on my fingertip. Eggshells have calcium. Several days might go by before I felt another crunch. Gag. I began to suspect she did this on purpose. After a while, I stopped showing Mom the found shells as she danced around our bright kitchen singing, What a wonderful day!, her blonde hair swept in a French twist, cheekbones like polished marble. I craved her delicious beauty, too.
One night, lying in my princess bed, I noticed that the plastic stars twinkling on the ceiling were the color of eggshells. This caused a fear that a pointy shell might be stuck to my stomach wall, slowly scraping away. My brain told me what to do. I rose, padded lightly down the hallway to the bathroom, the cool tile welcoming my bare feet.
Back in bed, I vowed to stop eating my mother’s eggs. Yet, in the newness of the morning, my purged stomach could not resist the warm buttery smell of her love.
Judge’s Comments:
I was struck by the visceral and vivid descriptions of the narrator eating food. I love the association of food with mourning and memory, particularly the way the narrator links together eggs and eggshells with her mother.
Evelyn Krieger is a writer and educational consultant in Sharon, Massachusetts. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, Hunger Mountain Review, Gemini Magazine, Tablet Magazine, The Sunlight Press, WOW! Women on Writing, Chicken Soup for the Soul, eMerge Magazine, Teachers & Writers Magazine, and other publications. She has been awarded residencies and fellowships from Key West Literary Seminar, Vermont Studio Center, PJ Library, Essere, Ragdale, and Writers in Paradise. She was a finalist for the 2022 Craft Literary First Chapters Contest, the New Millennium Fiction Award, and the 2024 Tuscan Literary Festival Prize. She is the author of the award-winning middle grade novel, One Is Not A Lonely Number. She serves on the board of the Writers’ Room of Boston. www.Evelynkrieger.net
Photo by amirali mirhashemian