Kevin Spaide: LEMON CAKE • Cleaver Magazine

Flash by Kevin Spaide
LEMON CAKE

The cat watches as you eat a piece of the lemon cake you bought this morning even though you know how to make lemon cake and have, in fact, made hundreds of them. At one time in your life, as unbelievable as it now sounds, you were known for making lemon cakes. People would ask you to make them and you would make them. This is no longer the case. There was the pandemic, of course, one consequence of which–perhaps the smallest out of an almost infinite number–was that you stopped making lemon cakes. You do not make them for yourself, and you do not make them for others. You have returned to a state of life before all that started. But you are different now. You are someone who once made lemon cakes but no longer does. Sometimes, even now, all these years later, someone will attempt to persuade you to make them one. You will not do it, though. Perhaps you never will again. So much has happened.

And then, of course, there is the cat. The cat simply wants a share of what you are eating whether you made it yourself or not. When you pop the last corner of it in your mouth and then set the plate on the table, she looks first at the plate and then at your hand and then at your face. When she looks at your face, she looks as though she feels distinctly betrayed. So you have managed to betray the cat. She looks at your hand again, confirming that you’ve eaten all the cake and that none remains for her. She licks the plate, which you’ve at least set beside her on the table. When she finishes with this, you carry the plate out of the room. She hops off the table and follows you, like you might have had a change of heart and are on your way to get another piece for her. But you have not had a change of heart. Cats should not eat lemon cake. You set the plate in the sink in the kitchen. It is the same kitchen where you used to make lemon cakes but no longer do and probably never will again.

Kevin Spaide has published stories in Wigleaf, Witness, Frigg, New World Writing and many other places. He writes, runs, paints houses, and he lives in Madrid.