The Cake

“I’m going to make you a cake that looks like a Band-Aid, but it might end up looking more like a penis, so even better!” Elisa let out a laugh as she said it, causing Anna to shake her head.

“Yeah, okay, Elisa,” Anna said, heading out the door in her striped work uniform shirt and matching skort.

Little did she know that when she arrived home in the darker hours of the evening after sunset, she would be greeted by said cake on the dining room table.  It was exactly what Elisa had said, a Band-Aid cake, but with the shape and the color, it ended up looking a lot more like a penis than a Band-Aid.  Then there was the contributing factor that that was something Anna had on her mind anyway.  The cake was surrounded by candles artfully arranged on top of stacks of books and circling the Band-Aid/penis cake.  On the table in front of it was a brightly colored Post-It note that read “Eat your heart out.  Don’t forget to swallow.”

“Elisa, what did you do…” Anna mumbled, shaking her head at her roommate’s idea of a cathartic binge eating of oddly shaped baked goods.

There was no point in inviting Elisa to help her eat the cake since she was probably out with her current boyfriend, so Anna was left with a paper plate, a napkin, a fork, and the cake.  Nothing but her feelings and sugar to keep her company.

She supposed she should be thanking Elisa for thinking of her, but there was some small part of her that wondered if it was an act of mercy because if Anna went into a diabetic coma, then not only would it put her out of her misery but Elisa also wouldn’t have to deal with the moping of a recently single roommate.  She supposed that there were worse ways to go than by sugar overload and since “she had nothing left to live for,” it was probably the least cliché way of going short of tying a silly straw around her throat and seeing if that worked.  Besides, tying a silly straw around anything would probably take more effort than was worth expending on a potentially failing pursuit.

Part of what angered her about the whole situation was how cliché her feelings were.  Two things couldn’t possibly be more cliché and those were being in love, and being heartbroken.  The fact that she could be upset about feeling a cliché just went to show her that she was more worried about how her emotions measured up in the “universal condition” than she was about dealing with whatever those feelings meant.  That probably had to do with the fact that she was a writer, and as a writer you write things (go figure).  But since heartbreak is a universal thing, everyone feels it at some point, is there really something new to say about it?  How was she supposed to explain how she felt without using tired phrases that didn’t mean anything anymore?  Then again, she ran into the same problem when she was happy and in love too.  So there really was no winning.

Anna grabbed the plate with the cake on it and re-located it to the coffee table, settling down into a pretzel position on the floor next to it.  She looked at the cake accusingly for about a minute before stabbing it with a fork.

“Well, might as well put something in my mouth.”