Introducing...

Welcome to Dirt’s inaugural Fiction Week. We are excited to bring you three short stories from established and emerging authors. (August itself feels like a short story, doesn’t it?) The characters in these stories nurse addictions, take nude portraits in the mirror, strive to describe the art of others.

Their narrators are like anthropologists–“contained, reflected, distracted,” as Wye Coday writes. In her story Cake, Laurie Stone gives us a poignant framework for self-knowledge. “There are people who are envelopes and people who are letters, and if you are an envelope, you go looking for a letter, and you can’t mind what you are, and you can’t mind what other people are, can you?”

To the letters, to the envelopes, to you–our subscribers. Enjoy! – Daisy Alioto

Cake by Laurie Stone

Laurie Stone is author of six books, most recently “Streaming Now, Postcards from the Thing that is Happening.” She writes the substack "Everything is Personal.”

April’s dress was the color of cream. Her cake was chocolate. What a great cake.

Outside the barn, she said, “Keep my cake for me.” I said, “Okay.” I said okay to whatever she asked.

Moonlight was bouncing off her dress. I’d paid for it. I’d paid for the cake. You could say it was my cake. I wouldn’t say that, but you could, if you wanted to help me out, here.

She said, “Next year, on our first anniversary, we’ll come back, and we’ll eat the cake.” She had placed the top layer of her wedding cake in a box, and she was putting it in my freezer. I didn’t know it was a thing to freeze the top layer of a wedding cake and eat it the next year. Did you?

April was young enough to be my daughter, and I loved her. I had hosted her reception. I had hired the caterer and the florist. I had decked out the barn with a thousand votive candles and billowy white curtains. When, a year later, April stood in my kitchen with her hands on her hips and shouted, “You ate my cake!” I said, “To be accurate, mostly I ate the frosting.”

She didn’t laugh. She should have laughed, right? It was just a cake, not even a whole cake. I think it was just a cake.

She was tall with mountains of chestnut hair. We looked alike. Aunt and niece? I like to flatter myself. I’ve always done it. Men wanted to have sex with April. Stunning men wanted to marry her, but April chose Jay with his thick middle and abrupt little arms and legs. He had the shape of a bumblebee. Who knows why anyone picks anyone.

Before April met Jay, she would call me every night and talk about this man who had led her on, or that man she had stood up at an expensive restaurant. I could never understand that. Why not eat the fancy food, and then call it quits? She was a lawyer. Her clients were battered women, and after a cruel week of work—her weeks were always cruel—she’d take the train to my house in Kilburn, and I’d tuck her into the guest room. We’d hike in the woods. We’d sit reading on opposite sides of the couch, our feet touching. I was doing my bit for battered women.

For eight months, I’d open the freezer, see the cake, and let it mind it’s own business. Then one moonless night I opened the freezer with a different intent. I live on a hill, far from shops, and there was nothing else to eat. I tell myself. I lifted out the box. The box was the color of chocolate, too, a cake from Shenkmann’s, the famous bakery in Brooklyn. I’d ordered the cake with its thick layer of chocolate ganache over slabs of yellow sponge and hazelnut cream.

The door on a kitchen cabinet was off its hinge. Money was tight. I’d dug into savings for April without giving it a thought. Before moving up to Kilburn, I’d worked as an actress in New York. Maybe you saw me on the soap One Lie too Many? I played twins Ellie and Nelly. Ellie had a mean streak. Nelly quietly seethed. Everyone was surprised when Nelly murdered Ellie, and when Nelly went to jail, I was off the show. After that I toured the club circuit with a cabaret act. Does it ring a bell? When bookings grew thin, I didn’t miss them.

If you’re wondering how Nelly killed Ellie, she stabbed her in the neck with a humungous icicle, and then the murder weapon melted. I thought this was clever and didn’t know why Nelly had to confess to the crime. Honestly, she didn’t.

I slipped the ribbon off the box carefully, in order to slide it back the same way. I opened it. A small cake with a glossy disc of frozen icing sat atop a circle of gold cardboard. The thing was too frozen to give off a scent. I swirled a finger around the sides and tasted a thin coating of fudge. I swirled a finger around again, and the cake began to wake up. Tiny beads of moisture formed on the surface.

After the wedding, April and Jay had visited a few times, and I’d felt like the innkeeper, preparing meals and changing linens, wearing one of those smiles actors can paste on in a minute. I’d met April five years earlier at a bar on Allen Street. We’d confided things fast, assuming we’d never see each other again. Her aria was having been a runaway child with hippy parents, who lived outside the law. We got to talking in the bathroom. She’d asked if I had an aspirin, and I had some in my purse. We starting laughing, looking in the mirror side by side, noticing our resemblance. We sat at the bar, doing tequila shots until we scooped ourselves into a cab.

At that time, I had an apartment on Central Park West. After work, April would swing by, and we’d sit in front of the fireplace, watching rain sweep across the park. Should her future be a steady thing? A crazy thing? A steady thing threaded with crazy? She said she thought she might like to end up in the country, with a house like mine. It was strange to see my life as any kind of map.

She’d met Jay at the courts. He practiced corporate law, and she’d sized him up as a person who’d pay the bills and show up for her life. She’d recently decided to change careers and become a shrink. She’d begun taking classes at an institute.

I don’t remember scraping the sides of the cake with a knife. But there I was, tossing a knife in the sink and assessing the damage. The cake didn’t look too bad. Maybe the top edge wasn’t as sharp as before. Maybe the frosting on the sides was a little thin in places, but not so anyone would notice.

During the next month, I left the cake alone, but it was always there, in the back of my thoughts. How could April have entrusted me with her cake? In New York, she’d come with me to art galleries and plays. She’d ask what I thought the art was saying, and I’d turn the question back to her. One day, we saw a play about a May/December romance, and she told me about a married professor she’d slept with in college. He’d told her she had a mind for argument and that she could have any job she wanted. She told me about other people who had helped her. She said, “I have been calculating for so long, I’m not sure I know how to be genuine.” I said, “That’s what art is for.” I’m not sure I know what I meant.

In late winter, April wrote to say she was pregnant and that the baby was due in the fall. She hoped she and Jay could spend some weekends with me before the baby came. I wrote that I was thrilled about the baby and that of course they were welcome to stay here any time. I was the opposite of thrilled.

I went to the freezer and brought the cake to my bed. It looked dark and mysterious against the pale sheets. I stripped off my clothes. Now seems a good time to tell you about a thing I do that may or may not be an art project. Let’s say it is. I take pictures of myself nude in front of mirrors. I wait to be alone in a dressing room or a public toilet. Once, in a hotel room I stripped after a waiter delivered room service. He had curly brown hair. You can see his shadow in a shot as he moves out of the frame. Sometimes, I pose with my legs apart. Sometimes with my legs closed. In all the images, you see a figure with small breasts, looking intently at something.

I took a picture of the cake, balanced on my stomach, a house on a prairie. Little hairs stood up on my skin. I’d told April about the photographs, and she’d never asked to see them. I was a bit hurt. I think they’re interesting. I think they are maybe the most interesting thing I’ve ever done, although I feel too shy to publish them. I carried the cake to the kitchen and cut thin slivers from the sides, working my way around, creating a ring of tiny facets that looked circular if you squinted. Absently, I scratched the top of the cake as if the knife were a stick, slashing doodles into the ground.

The next day, I thought of driving to Brooklyn to buy April a new cake. She’d never know. Of course she’d know, even if the ingredients were the same. April was a bloodhound. Anyway, buying a new cake was going too far. Right? April would find it funny when she found out. How cold she not find it funny? It would be a story to tell her children. Remember the time nutty Aunt Eliza ate the wedding cake? To hell with a new cake, there was plenty left of this cake to share with Jay and remember their happy union.

Before their anniversary, I made two more visits to the cake, shaving off slivers that tasted better and better each time. To be honest, the box I presented to April was stamped with chocolate fingerprints, but I still thought it looked okay. I hadn’t carved into the cake. It was still round and smooth, or nearly so. A cake that has been frozen for a year—well, frozen and unfrozen a number of times—couldn’t look untouched. Could it?

She was three months pregnant when she arrived, just beginning to show beneath the silk harem pants she wore. They were sapphire blue. Jay looked taller, somehow, and his limbs looked more elongated. Can happiness stretch you? Surely, it could stretch their sense of forgiveness.

I set out a porcelain plate for their portion of cake and two silver forks. I uncorked a bottle of champagne.

When I was April’s age—we’re talking thirty years ago—I’d looked like her physically, but I’d bumped along without a plan. I’d thought you found strangers who could become friends, and if you were lucky sometimes they could become more than friends. When I’d told April about the nude photos, she’d looked as if she’d suddenly turned down onto a lonely road.

She screamed when she opened the box. I mean, loud. I mean the loud of finding a severed finger or an ear. She said, “Oh my God, Eliza, how could you have tampered with this?” She said tamper, like with evidence. I laughed the way I sometimes laugh when someone slips on a patch of ice. I laugh even if blood is trickling from their forehead or if I’m the one who’s gone down.

I said, “I’m sorry.” I wasn’t sorry. She could no doubt tell. I’m not that good at acting, I probably don’t need to mention. Jay looked from April to me, wondering what to say, and deciding to say nothing. My hands felt sticky. My fingers looked like the fingers of a child with the nails cut short. I said, “Let me buy you a new cake. I’ll drive to Shenkmann’s right now.” I would have been happy to get out of the house.

She said, “This was our wedding cake. This one, not another one you could buy. Don’t you understand?” She looked at the cake again, as if this time it would look less eaten. She was at the kitchen counter. I was a few feet away. She poked the air and said, “You ate my wedding. You wanted it to go away.” I said, “No.” She kept looking at me. I shrugged and said, “Okay, maybe, but I’m sorry, really, April.” Then, I laughed. It was bad. We were breaking up, and it felt weird to be breaking up with her, and I couldn’t tell if she had changed or we had always been an unlikely fit. It felt weird not to know, but I never understood how relationships keep going.

Jay touched her shoulder and said, “Easy, April. Don’t say things you can’t take back.” He spoke slowly, looking weary. I wondered how long this marriage would last. She jerked away and left the room. A door slammed. He went to her and knocked softly, saying, “Honey, it’s okay. It’s only a cake. Eliza is sorry. We can eat it, anyway. It doesn’t matter that much. It’s only a cake.” Was it? After a while, she let him in.

An hour later they were at the door with their bags. April didn’t look at me. Jay hugged me and said, “Give it time. Thank you for everything. You know April. Give it time.” I said, “Of course.”

And then, as soon as I heard their tires crunch on the gravel, I stripped off my clothes. The light was flat between the trees. I set my camera on a tripod and shot myself eating the cake in front of the mirror. I ate the fudge shell, the yellow layers and the hazelnut filling. I looked serene. I looked like myself. Cake calms you. That’s why they call it cake.

Later, looking at the images, I saw something different about them. There was puffiness around my eyes. The corners of my mouth turned down. I looked old. I looked my age.

I remembered April and me on the couch with our feet on a stool and no space between us. She’s a selfish girl is our April, no news there. There are people who are envelopes and people who are letters, and if you are an envelope, you go looking for a letter, and you can’t mind what you are, and you can’t mind what other people are, can you? I ate the cake to get on with things. Of course I ate the cake to get on with things. Things had taken a turn. Things always take a turn, and, honestly, it’s hard to know why anyone does anything. I saw a car stop and a person open the door, and the car sped off. I couldn’t tell if the driver was April or if the driver was me. I couldn’t tell which of us had been left on the road. I already missed her. A good picture comes together barely.