Jay McKenzie
08/11/2023
Content warning: themes of suicide
Image description: a three-layered chocolate cake is covered in white icing and the layers are stacked together by red icing that looks like blood.
The man who comes to fix the oven signs off with a cheery ‘happy cooking!’
I only noticed it was broken when I stuck my head in it and switched it on. Couldn’t remember when I’d last used it before then. For food I mean.
I’d used it to bake the letters he’d written her: loaded them into a casserole dish and doused them with oil. It only took a few hours for the house to fill with smoke, carrying his painfully sentimental ramblings with it.
I yearn for you crackled in the ceramic crematorium. The words honey and baby incinerated in a crisp black smoke.
The cat never came back after that night. He also left the next day, tight roping between I’m sorry and psychobitch.
I stare into the chasm of the fridge, bare, sad bulb illuminating the lone resident: a square box from Tesco. Why do they put round cakes into square boxes?
The letter, a knife and a sheet of ready-roll icing wait expectantly on the chopping board he bought at the craft market that time, back in the days when he still stroked my hair, touched a finger to my lips to brush away a stray curl.
What my fingers do is work with the precision of a surgeon. A sliver removed from the side of the cake to make space for the letter, the paper eased in with the care of a new heart or liver or lung. Then a gate of spongy cake pressed back in to mask the entrance, icing draped like a bridal gown over the cake, tucked down.
On the snow-white surface, I pipe his name in red. His favourite colour.
I’ll have it delivered this afternoon. An anonymous courier who has agreed to an extra ten dollars not to say where it came from.
He never could resist a cake. Even ate that celebratory one his brother sent for the baby, before he knew that it died inside me.
Not sure what she thinks about cake. His mistress. She looks too vegan, too lentilly.
He’s on time, the courier. Taking the box, he nods curtly at the fresh note I press into his hand, turns, and the motorbike is out of sight before the curtain over the door has stopped fluttering.
I count to a hundred, then count a hundred more.
He will come, I tell myself. He will come in time.
As I’m picturing the delight, the confusion on his face taking the box from the courier, what my fingers do is place the rolled-up towel across the gap under the kitchen door. I see him taking the cake to the kitchen, scratching his head, shirt riding above the waistband of his always-sagging jeans. I close my kitchen window, pause, then close the curtains too. I hear him say out loud just a slice, and what my fingers do is turn the knobs on my newly fixed oven, marvelling at how quickly the gas catches.
He’ll cut it with one of those knives he spent too much money on, too sharp for the soft flesh of a sponge cake.
I kneel, thinking how blue and hot that flame licking the back of the oven is, what a pity it is that I have to blow it out.
He’ll cut it on a sloppy angle with no care for how neatly I swirled his name, and the knife might even slit the paper. There, he’ll pluck it from the cake, frown, lick off the pale crumbs. He will unfold the sheet, and there he will read my neatly printed words:
‘What did my fingers do before they held him?’
Sylvia Plath
And he’ll know, because how could he not? The cake will fall from his hand onto the tiles with a plop, maybe he’ll slip on the icing as he races into the street without his jacket or shoes, then he’ll run, run, run to me.
I count a hundred, then count a hundred more, then I lay my tired head on the oven floor and what my fingers do is tap out the hundred that my brain is too tired to think of anymore and I breathe, breathe, breathe and wait.
***
British writer Jay lives on Australia’s Gold Coast with her fiancé, daughter and a dog called Duck. She is a prize winning short story writer whose micro, flash and short stories have been published in numerous publications and anthologies, including Unleash Lit Magazine, Cerasus Magazine, Leicester Writes and Fabula Nivalis. She won the 2022 Exeter Short Story Prize, Fabula Aestas 2023, the fifth Writers Playground challenge and is a two time winner of AWC’s Furious Fiction. She was shortlisted for the 2022 Exeter Novel Prize and the 2023 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her debut novel Mim and Wiggy’s Grand Adventure was released in July 2023 with Serenade Publishing.
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