Lights On, Rats Out by Cree LeFavour

Author:Cree LeFavour [LeFavour, Cree]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802189158
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2017-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

The birthday. Some party venue this is. The only cake they had was white, so they delivered their oversize sheet of sugar. I imagine it passing through a metal detector or sliding beneath an X-ray so the orderlies can check for razors. Or was it one of many in a dedicated basement birthday cake freezer stacked with white cakes identical to mine? I imagine the slabs thawed overnight in the dark kitchen so that at 11 A.M. the following day the cooks in their whites could send the cakes up. Wherever it came from it looks like all the other grocery store cakes I’ve ever seen, except the French groove tip used to pipe along the base has so many finger dents the frosting looks unintentional. Two pink sugar paste flowers hard as dry mud form a cluster—if you can call it that—in the upper right corner. Settling in to a dirge played as a birthday song, the colored wax melts, fiery stubs closing in on roses and icing. Covered in wax. A wish? Quick, blow the fire out. Parceled and sliced … Pink rose frosting flower for me, please. It’s my birthday. The cake is all sweetness suspended in slippery shortening. I chew in faith, swallowing. A wish? Did I blow out candles? Or is it a dream, this birthday cake and the gathered ghouls chasing bites of cake around paper plates with useless plastic forks? Garbage heaped: clear plastic bell, cards, gifts, crumbs, pink roses, uneaten lettering, smudged frosting. Fill it up. Overflowing with kind thoughts and good wishes, food dye, and flour. Dump it. This party’s over. Rather than cake I eat confusion for afternoon tea. As Alice says, “I’ll never go THERE again! It’s the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!” Party? Birthday party? Tea party? But of course: “‘You don’t know how to manage Looking-glass cakes … Hand it round first, and cut it afterwards.’” I didn’t know.

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