“Jack, are you ready?”
“I think so,” replied the thirty-something year old, eyes focused on the road ahead.
“Be cool. You’ve got this. Everything’s gonna go as planned.”
“Mhmm.”
“Jack? Are you listening? Are you nervous, buddy?”
“No, no, I’m fine.”
“You’re not doubting yourself, right? You remember why you’re doing this?”
“Yes, of course, I’ll get it done, don’t worry.” The truth was, Jack had forgotten why he did any of what he did anymore, but he trusted that his orders came from a good place.
He heard the crunch of gravel beneath his car tires and slowed to a halt. He grabbed the cake from the backseat, took his key out of the ignition, and stepped out onto the unfinished driveway. “I’ll be back soon.” He shut the car door behind him.
With every step he took towards the door, he grew nervous, agitated; his neck twitched, and his forehead sweat, but his hands, his hands were very steady, gripping the cake firmly.
Knock. Knock.
The door flung open haphazardly. Before him stood a woman roughly his age, with defined crow’s feet, stains covering her top, and a dishcloth slung over her shoulder. She smelled of feces and cheap perfume but had the audacity to smile at him. He welcomed himself in, ignoring the gibberish she spoke at him. Jack spotted a slender woman seated at the dining table, glaring at him while licking her teeth in his direction. She was a canopy of black clothing, with a thick matching coat of eye shadow covering her lids. Her arms were crossed; signalling that was unapproachable, perhaps dangerous.
He had been warned against paying too much attention to anyone, as it might throw him off. He was to simply walk in and serve the cake. He focused his attention elsewhere, as he sluggishly dragged himself over to the dining table. The home was hardly one at all; vile, filthy, a mountain of unwashed dishes, with mismatched decorations hanging from the walls. Jack reached the dining table, with little notice toward the woman charging at him from the hallway to his left. She was screaming loudly, high-pitched and uncontrolled. He looked forward again but saw from his side eye that she had stopped, and was now engaged in a conversation with the woman who opened the door. They both looked concernedly at Jack.
All the plates were laid out with forks to the right of each. He placed the cake down and uncovered it. All three women sat down, joined by a younger man than Jack. He was small, incredibly small for a man, and sat in a thinner, higher chair than the rest. The small man sat at the head of the table. Jack assumed he was important, and looked ahead again at the cake, refusing to initiate eye contact.
The woman with the crow’s feet penetrated the icing of the cake with a large steel knife and served the small man first, whose eyes Jack felt piercing into his side. Jack sat across from the woman in black who took small bites of the slice she was served, and next to the shorter woman who stuffed large chunks into her mouth.
He turned his attention away from her when he heard a slab of cake land on the plate before him. He picked up his fork and began to play with the icing, piercing in and out of it. He watched the women and the small man devour their cake. And he waited.
---
“Alright Walken what do we have here?” Stanford asked.
“Well, homicide, from the looks of it. Four victims,” his partner responded.
Both officers walked toward three of the victims, each slouched over a dining table. There was a flurry of activity from the forensics team around them, gathering evidence and sweeping the crime scene for any clues. Their assistant director was busy interviewing the neighbour who found them.
“Isn’t there someone missing from this picture?”
“Hell yeah, our main suspect, this, er, what’s his name again…?” Walken flipped through the file he held. “Ahh, Jack Diemer, thirty-eight, father of three, married to none other than Laura Diemer,” he said, pointing to the woman whose face was side planted in some cake.
“No, no, I mean, you said four victims, I see three,”
“Oh yeah, uh there was a small infant boy too, they already covered his body. It was gruesome, let me tell ya that much.”
“Jesus Christ, what kind of sick fuck kills his family like this? His children? His wife?” Stanford replied, in awe.
“I couldn’t tell ya.”
The assistant director walked toward the two officers and wiped his brow.
“This sure is something, boys.”
“What did you get from the neighbour?” asked Walken.
“Well, she said her and Mrs. Diemer were close, and that she’d been worried about her husband these past few months. Said he’d been hearing voices.”
“Voices, huh?” Stanford repeated.
“Yeah, voices.”
The three men stared at the gruesome scene before them. In all their years of facing blood and gore, the aftermath of rage and fear, and the multiple downfalls of seemingly normal individuals, there was something far more chilling about this scene than any of their previous cases.
“Well,” Stanford spoke, breaking the silence, “I suppose when you’re that far gone, something like this has got to be a piece of cake.”
You have two options, Arni.
You are level-headed, yes, but there is this fervour that runs through your veins and kick starts your heart every morning. I’ve seen you hold back, strategically maintaining the balanced rhythm to your voice, but then, there are these raw glimpses of something more. I’ve seen it when you ask for the potatoes on the dinner table—the rough exchange from my hands to yours. I’ve seen it when the green light abruptly shifts to yellow and you speed up a little too much to avoid the red.
But the red is a part of you, Arni.
When we were younger—so young that our hair twisted into perfect pig tails and our realities existed within the confines of a sandbox—we would share stories with each other. These stories were fantastical. They were roaring with imagination and life and daring prose. I would tell you about the “Adventure of Rabbit and her Friend” and you would tell me about the rainbow dragon that would escape its cage every night to fly in the cloud-speckled sky. And we would laugh at these stories and cry at these stories and ponder the futures of our beloved friends, Rabbit and Dragon. When the sun would go down, we’d run inside and greet your mother who awaited us with chocolate cake. And when she’d ask if you wanted an extra slice, you would reply, “More. I want more.”
Young Arni was never one to mince her words.
But as you grew up, you began to hold back and grit your teeth into white, fine powder. Your soft hums would melt in the white noise, but I could still hear the salt in your music and the ridges in your harmonies. I soon realized that your level-headedness was much less leveled and much more varied: there were peaks and mountains and valleys and fjords. But it’s beautiful. In this landscape, life grows: fields, flowers, and trees; your voice is loud and your words are cosmic, overshadowing the sun and the moon and the stars that all share the same sky.
But in this life they would tell you, “your voice is too loud, Arni.”
“Another piece of cake? That’s a bit much.”
“Can you wait here for a second? Oh, and can you hold my coat?”
Arni is a storyteller, not a coat hanger.
Arni is friends with dragons.
Arni is Red.
Remember that time you and I went to that party behind the carpet factory? It was the weekend before you went away to university in Vancouver, so we decided to celebrate your last days with a bit of adventure. We caught the last train out of the city and then flagged down a strange car and hopped into the backseat. You were nervous at first, but I reassured you that “hitchhikers are the last people to die in movies, anyway.”
The man who drove us was actually heading to a party and extended a rather warm invitation. “It’s going to be wild,” he insisted. Before I could reject his offer, you screamed, “YES.” I turned to scold you, but then quieted down when I saw that look in your eyes, and recognized that you, Arni, are fire.
“Remember, hitchhikers never die,” you said to me before we entered a dimly lit row house. That night, we ended up dancing and laughing and becoming temporary friends with a lot of people we would never see again. There was a woman who sang opera for a living. There was a guy who saw spirits when he ate too much ice cream. And then there was the man who drove us there, who really liked the way you danced and wanted to get to know you more upstairs and was a “good guy, I promise.” You disappeared with him and I waited for you on the dance floor. You reappeared soon after and grabbed my hand and ushered me to the kitchen. You confessed that you were scared of leaving home, but even more scared to stay.
We fell asleep on the kitchen floor, and then caught the first train back into the city.
You called your mother and she picked us up from the train station. The car ride was long and silent—apparently, your mother wasn’t expecting you to smell like smoke and beer and strange men. “Arni, you need to quiet down and be smart,” your mother whispered to you when we were at a red light. She thought that I wouldn’t hear, but I was accustomed to deciphering whispers—the language that we soon learned to adopt as our own.
The next Monday you went to Vancouver. I didn’t see you for a year. But you came back in the summer, and the summer after that. At one point though, and I’m not too sure when, you stopped visiting all together.
Sometimes, when I think about you, I feel a kind of sadness. At times, I forget the way you look and start drawing conclusions about whether you’re a redhead now or a daring blonde. I pretend that you’re still sitting in the back of cars with me and spend my day crafting the stories of adventures we’ll never have together.
Arni, you have two options.
I don’t necessarily know what these options are, or if they even exist—perhaps they are a culmination of my twisted imagination, the same imagination that paints you in all of my pictures and saves a seat for you at the dinner table. But, regardless, you have a choice. You have a choice to be who you want to be. You have a choice to scream or whisper or say nothing at all. You have a choice to be red—not pink, or purple or grey or blue. Red.
I just hope that wherever you are, and whatever you decide, you never stop asking for another slice of cake.
She burst through the door and threw her scarf and coat to the floor, but meticulously draped her blazer over the chair. Her heels hit the wooden panels as she kicked them off. The sharp sound cut through the music and noises that screamed from behind the closed bedroom door. He appeared from the room. A smile cracked his face at the sight of her as she, in all her beauty and confidence, continued to drop clothes. Sweat dripped down from his brow as the efforts of his work took their toll and mixed with the fresh paint on his previously white t-shirt. The violent expression of abstract art on the paper that covered his bedroom floor had more work to do, but both knew that a break was in order. A devilish snicker escaped her lips. Without a word, she grabbed his hand and tugged him into the bedroom as he pulled the door shut.
She never smiled in her day to day life except for thrills like these. They met, by coincidence, in his corner-shop bakery late one night. She ordered a children’s cake, but he did not care. He enjoyed her fiery attitude, and she loved his passion.
One evening while they interrupted another painting session, the two performed another ‘once-around-the-apartment’, which was not too difficult considered its tiny size. He always had a cake from his bakery for the small talk afterwards; her sweet-tooth always satisfied after her libido. The craft and care he put into his baking work shown each and every time in his unique style and recognizable tendencies as his hands formed more than just art on a canvas.
She went home. Splashed paint from the dirty acts before exposed itself in odd places. Her husband called her out on it. Everything snapped into place and the husband connected the dots mid-sentence. The man’s confusion shifted to complete and utter hatred. She attempted to defend herself with a strong front of screams and shouts as both brought up events from the past with hyperbole and bottled up frustrations. They moved through the house as separate entities but always chased one another to exclaim more anger. She never stated any personal information about her lover to protect him, despite the man’s persistence and threats. She slammed the door behind her as she left.
Three knocks on the apartment door. He immediately knew something was wrong as the only knocks that happened between them were the headboard that rhythmically beat against the wall. He appeared from his apartment. The woman who normally ran through his door with raw sexual energy had been broken down to a tearful girl. Her soft side exposed to him for the first time, he had no idea what do to besides hug her tightly and give a shoulder to cry on. She collapsed in an emotional wreck onto him as he pulled the door shut. He paced back and forth as she took to the couch. Worry struck his face as sadness shaped hers.
How could she forgive herself after doing something like this for so long? She did not expect him to forgive her, but she knew that she was no longer the person her husband courted on their first date. Was this really for the worst? She considered that they may just have different priorities now and had just grown incompatible.
The man took the night to think about what had just happened. Head in hands, he played out the events in his mind over and over again. Not just of the fight itself, but of their entire marriage up to this point. Questions raced through his mind without answers. The only real conclusion that provided any sense of purpose or relief was to try and make his marriage work despite this catastrophe. The man became committed to show her that they can work through this together.
The man rehearsed what he was to say to her over and over again. Calm, cool, and relatively collected were the delivery of the lines, accompanied by some cute gifts to ease the tension a bit. Flowers, while stereotypical, might help. The man also knew of his wife’s sweet-tooth, of course, and took to a bakery she recommended in the final stop of a desperate move to try and save what once was.
Bells jingled as the man walked through his door. Fake smiles from the both of them hid the events from last night. The baker behind the counter attempted to forget the turmoil from last night as the man in front wanted to move on from it. He asked the baker for the finest, richest slice of cake he had. Flowers and cake in hand, he went back to his house before an attempt to try and track her down.
She was already there. As he came up the steps, she opened the door. She considered for a split-second that maybe they could make this work until she saw the piece of cake. Her smile turned into a look of complete and utter sadness after sight of that unique style and recognizable tendencies that went into each and every slice. His smile turned into a frown after sight of hers. They had both changed too much and grown too far apart, she concluded. The man knew this in the back of his mind, but wanted to believe it was not the case. She looked at him once more as she closed the door slowly.
He walked with shoulders slumped and head down to the end of the walkway. He placed the flowers and piece of cake into the trash in defeat.
Read more:
Second place short story: Rabbit and Dragon
Third place short story: Piece of cake
Our take on cake: Short stories from the editors
Bahar Orang
Senior ANDY Editor
Should I bake a cake? I have all the ingredients eggs and flour and baking power and vanilla extract and cocoa but maybe I should make it healthy then I’ll need some avocado but who puts avocado inside a cake that makes no sense but then I can eat some except it won’t taste as good so maybe I’ll make it pretty and take a photo and share the picture somewhere then I won’t eat any except for just one lick off my finger oh who am I kidding I’ll eat the whole damn thing and even lick the crumbs off the platter then feel sick and stupid and silly except you know maybe cake isn’t the way to go maybe I should cook something like salmon or asparagus and oysters ew oysters that’s more impressive like all the yelling manly cooks I could be tough like them instead of this frilly apron thing but baking is harder than it looks you have to measure things there’s more math involved and some chemistry you can’t just toss a bunch of randoms in a pan and call it a day except I’m still not sure maybe I should just leave the kitchen and parade a sign outside that says something cool and smart but all I want right now is something sweet and lovely like a cake and how nice that I want to make it and not buy it I’ll spend more time but spend less money or would it make a difference if there was something clever written on the cake or what if I made cupcakes that looked like little cu- also who makes just one cake only for themselves that can’t be good should I make it for my mom or dad or boyfriend but there’s no birthdays coming up so can’t I make one just for fun is that so wrong it’s pleasurable and personal and yes I’ll be the one to decide just for one evening I want to wear this thing with the pink polka dot print and bake a cake and make it baby blue with a few drops of food colouring the batter gosh who knew this question was so hard.
Cooper Long
Assistant ANDY Editor
She looked at him across the crowded bakery kitchen. Through a tangle of pots hanging from the ceiling and several racks of cooling cakes, she could see him standing next to the refrigerator. He was illuminated by the reflections from its stainless steel doors, and seemingly oblivious to her persistent stare.
She thought back to the first time they had met. It had been a frantic day one month ago. A rush order for a six-tiered wedding cake with fondant butterflies had come in, and so white-aproned figures were scrambling all around. Amid this commotion, they two had accidentally collided. They had both worked in the kitchen for a while, but for some reason they had never come into contact until then.
It wasn’t just a superficial bond that they shared in that moment. She could feel that they had a powerful, almost elemental compatibility. They had both bubbled with the giddy excitement of meeting someone you truly connect with.
They eventually returned to their respective stations, and since then they had not interacted once. Somehow they tended to stay on their own sides of the room. During the day, she rarely left her post next to the Hobart industrial dough mixer.
Sometimes she suspected that people in the kitchen were deliberately trying to keep the two separated. She sensed that others thought they were wrong for each other. But no one who had seen them together could deny that they had chemistry.
Suddenly, the little box of baking soda’s reverie was interrupted. A pastry chef removed her from the high shelf next to the Hobart industrial dough mixer, raised her above a bowl of dry ingredients, and shook twice.
As soon as she was returned to her proper place, her gaze immediately returned to the jug of vinegar across the kitchen. Yes, the little box thought, the next time they got together it was going to be explosive. And messy.
