by Sally DeWind
Flash Fiction
Have you seen it? It’s unbelievably dumb. One of those baking-competition-reality-game-show kind of things. Contestants must bake cakes that look convincingly like other things. You might see a sneaker or a teapot, but when the knife slices through, the world shifts, all perception is altered: it was never a ukulele; it was always cake. My boyfriend and I laugh. My boyfriend and I have been laughing at dumb TV for the past nine years. My boyfriend is not my husband because we share an ambivalence about marriage rooted in feminist principles, not doubts about each other. Anyway, we might do it after my boyfriend finishes his PhD program.
Lying on our couch, my legs across my boyfriend’s lap, I barely notice the doorbell ring. My boyfriend and I are both mystified and slightly delighted when we open the door and there’s no one, just a tall pink box tied with string. I pull the string and the box fans out, revealing a pristine, pure white, four-tiered wedding cake. Each tier is decorated with its own complex piping pattern of frosting frills and rosettes. Iridescent pearls of sugar pin the ribbons of icing in place. No cake has ever looked so much like a cake.
“Is it cake?!” we yell gleefully, the dumb show’s dumb catchphrase, and bring the cake inside. Tenderly, we place the cake on our kitchen counter. My boyfriend gets out a long knife. I’m suddenly starving.
“Is it cake?” I ask again as he slices, giggling.
“No,” he says, suddenly serious. He takes a step back. “It’s my parents’ divorce.”
“Really?” I say, putting my hand on his back. “The custody battle too?”
“Yeah. The suit I had to wear to court that was too big for me. The child therapist I refused to talk to.” He looks like he’s about to cry.
Neither of us says anything for a moment.
My boyfriend extends the handle of the knife toward me.
“Is it cake?” he asks, meekly.
“No,” my throat constricts. “It’s my mom’s narcissism. When she banned me from eating bread at eleven. The time she didn’t talk to me for a week after I got a 2 on my Physics AP.” I pass the knife back to my boyfriend.
“Is it cake?”
“No. It’s our wildly different relationships to money.”
“You just need to make a budget!” I say too quickly. We’re instantly a little mad at each other. The cake is the PlayStation 5 he bought without telling me. The cake is my searing disapproval.
For some reason, we keep going. It’s all there: conflicting ambitions, inventories of injustices, the dishes, an early infidelity, disagreements we’d claimed were misunderstandings, slights we promised to have forgotten but have actually held tight for years in clenched, clammy fists. Inside the final tier: the baby that my boyfriend is certain, despite everything, he wants, and I think, more and more, I might never want.
We’re not looking at each other now, our faces flushed with a combination of exertion, anger, and shame. I feel the knife, still in my hand.
“What are you doing?” My boyfriend asks warily. But I’m already out of the room. The dumb show is still paused on the TV, the host’s face frozen in a condescending pout. I stab the center of the screen. There’s barely any resistance. I pull the blade back and it’s coated in chocolate ganache. I try the coffee table: carrot. A printed chapter from my boyfriend’s thesis: sponge. A stack of folded laundry: angel food. Soon it’s everywhere, a blizzard of cake. We’re so covered in it, I panic for a second, worried that my boyfriend might be turning into cake too. But when I reach out, I can feel the firm flesh of his arm and pull him toward me. My boyfriend and I sit on the floor, panting, curling into each other. My boyfriend and I eat the cake with our hands, licking it out of each other’s hair, laughing again.
Sally DeWind is a writer and teacher from Brooklyn, New York. She is a graduate of the Brooklyn College MFA in fiction where she was the recipient of the Lainoff Prize. Her work has been published in the Bennington Review and The Other Almanac.