Cake!
Or a Fable on the Body
Candace was hungry, but not starving. Her mother had always taught her if she was hungry for something in particular, a craving you might call it, it wasn’t really hunger at all but the gut wandering devilishly astray. It was, after all, the second brain, as so many scientists now believed and had repeated over television chat show programmes and special segments on the radio.
Nevertheless, Candace had been craving chocolate cake for three weeks, and by her mother’s advice had:
pinched her skin;
splashed her face with ice-water;
drank a gallon of milk and raw eggs for the all-filling protein;
cut the fruit from her diet and replaced it with almonds,
and (unbeknownst to her mother) slipped just a smidgeon of baking chocolate from the cookie mix before her eldest son’s bake sale.
Yet the fever persisted, and right at the crux of high-summer. No, she would not eat potato salads, and she would not eat meatloaf in this heat – but Candace wanted chocolate cake.
Her husband just could not begin to digest it. Well honey, he said, flat-reed nasal, idly kissing her cheek as he swept away to work, if you really want some cake that bad, why don’t you just get some and eat it?Always the pragmatist. Always so simple.
Smoothing out her dress, fingers firm down her loose, patchwork stomach, crinkled from where she’d cooked her twins up thirteen years prior, Candace simply laughed and turned on the TV. A strange little man in black and white danced across the screen, knocking up the letters to spell BUTTER! Beautiful and big, and what a sight!
One-hundred-percent cream is what it said real butter was churned from, and the strange little cream-man and his strange little cream-wife danced towards the table to dig into dinner. Candace grabbed onto the rolls of flesh at her side, really squeezed them between her fingers, played with them, rearranged them and decided that
to Hell with it, she’d have her cake and eat it too.
So, Candace wore her prettiest pink dress, her prettiest pink pumps and a sweet little hat which framed her pretty pink face. At precisely 11:32 in the morning, right after dropping off the dry-cleaning and at least a few hours before she’d have to head home to cook her family a delicious/nutritious meal, she tottered down the road, salacious and salivary in her dreaming, taking a careful gander over a plethora of twee cake shops along the promenade. Here the slices were too thin, there the icing not generous enough – in some places they didn’t even have cake, just pie, or cupcakes, or tartlets, or, in that chic little French place with the rakish waiter she spied only (God forbid) petit-fours.
All the colours in the world, the cherry reds and blueberry blues, the mint shakes, the yellow of pie-crust or banana-cream, the pastel pink and periwinkle walls beckoned out to her – but where was that treacly black ganache? The dense chocolate crumb? Where was the smell of cocoa amongst the coffee, against the cream? They just would not cut it. No, she needed fat, chunky, toothsome chocolate cake. Her paper-bag belly specifically requested it.
It was the most beautiful place she settled for in the end, painted lavender with bright blue tables, hydrangeas hanging from baskets out front. But none of that mattered. Under one of a series of glass cloches gleamed the most delectable mirror-glazed triple-chocolate fudge cake she had ever laid her little blue peepers on. It was love at first sight.
Candace had worn her finest for her new beau, for this secret rendezvous, and she would be damned if she was not going to revel in her own decadence. She was going to sit outside by the lake, have a long cigarette, and eat her chocolate cake. Once tucked into the white trellis-table, prim and proper, she tucked her napkin into her collar, lifted her fork and carved a neat little piece into a triangle that could reanimate Pythagoras’ cold, dead heart. Dense, fudgy, begging for her to take it. It left a smudge on the china like a kiss of lipstick on a paper napkin.
Her nostrils twitched, and she closed her eyes as the cake glided in. The texture was moist, the icing was right, the bite was perfect, the crumb delicate, the aroma unassumingly chocolatey, she could feel the cream and butter even, but as soon as she swallowed it, as soon as she could realise what she had done to her poor tongue she was left with nothing.
Nothing but the acrid taste of sweetener! The gritty texture of buckwheat flour! The deceptive flavours of carob, aniseed and – by golly, what on Earth? – clove? What a damned disgrace, what a crying shame! Oh, how looks deceive! Oh, how foolish she was! Candace’s mouth pulled tight from side to side in revulsion at the taste. It was singularly the most awful experience of her life. There was nothing worse that could happen now. Everything she had known was a lie.
Well, to hell with it!
Overjoyed, she put down her fork and grabbed the cake with two hands, stuffing it angrily in her mouth, chocolate smeared down her cheeks, pudgy and bloated from weeks of no sleep, her blonde curls turning brown with the ravaging dusts of cocoa. She crumbled and crushed it in her hands, squished it into her fist where icing squeezed out the gaps between her digits, chucked it on the floor and stamped it into her heels. Feeling it roll into balls beneath her nails, feeling it soak into her skin, wiping the handprints into her pretty pink dress, she smiled, because
Why not? To hell with it!
Candace leapt up in her pretty pink pumps, tore open her handbag, grabbed her little leather wallet and slid a greased-up, buttery twenty-dollar note across the counter to the owner before grabbing him for a quick waltz, running out of the store into the street, flesh jiggling gloriously in every direction down the promenade, screaming, singing, smiling, rasping, serenading every baffled stranger, finally herself, hungry for everything she could lay eyes on, consuming and absorbing it all, chips, dips, broccoli, blue cheese, steak tartare, fine beans, tearing off her pretty pink dress and stumbling out of her pretty pink pumps, and, whilst adoring her crumpled and beaten-up and beautiful body, climbed on the dining room table in her own home and danced the foxtrot on it like a grave, laughing like a hyena before lying down on the couch to fall asleep, her body soft and spreadable, Candace was forever more dreaming of butter, melting into butter thinking
Why not? Why not? To hell with it, why not? Why not?
Written in the forty minutes following a deeply disappointing muffin.