What takes the cake

Sometimes, in the blurry dervishing darkness of too much noise and too many demands, I think about cake and how much I’d like a slice. One generous slice of moist devil’s food with a perfect crumb and just enough frosting –do you call it icing?- to make the confection sleek rather than shrugging.

A cake like this withstands the gentle pressure of a fork’s slender tines only just before succumbing. For a moment the shape rendered by cake and indent made by the utensil’s push resembles one of those simple down-and-up lines young children draw to resemble birds in flight. Then the bird is gone and I’m left with a bite of cake to savor and the time to do so.

Truth be told, this cake is most sublime when I can sit in silence with it, a cold glass of milk just beyond the upper right rim of my plate. In this setting, nothing vies for attention: the cake gets it all. More accurately, my enjoyment of it does. I needn’t rush my bites or my chewing. I won’t worry about choking when someone asks a question and wants the answer now. No greedy eyes will covet my cake, no one will ask me to share. I can close my eyes and experience the cake in my mouth, from first touch on my tongue to bittersweet farewell as my swallow whisks it south.

And then I can do the same thing again and again until my plate is but a crumb-dotted palate of what was.

*a freewrite from today's class

Inhumanity

"Tell me about the window." -a freewrite prompt from the wonderful Jena Schwartz  

Our driveway was a narrow one that led us to the garage through a tunnel of yews and a redwood-proportioned sassafras. I loved that sassafras tree what with its skyscraper stature and leaves large as the hands of a giant but soft as velvet. That’s where filé for gumbo comes from; did you know that? From the dried and ground leaves of the sassafras tree.

It was early evening the day we drove up and saw the garage door halted at an unusual angle. “I wonder what got caught in there,” Mom said. I peered through the windshield with eyes pressed into slits, hoping to better see the blockade.

Suddenly, Mom gasped and put the car in park. Tears streamed from her eyes as she tried to keep my sister and me from seeing what was holding the door ajar. 

We’d been hearing about “Satanic activities” in our neighborhood, urged to be careful as a wraithlike boy, who slunk about with malevolence in his deeply-set eyes, was suspected of inflicting harm on his neighbors pets.

When I saw my beloved cat, Atticus, a handsome gray tabby with a sweet, trusting soul, on his back under the garage door, all I knew was that I was witnessing evil for the first time. He’d been stabbed –“sacrificed” the cop said- and held to die as the garage door crushed his lungs.

Thirty years later, as I write of this for the first time, I am still rendered speechless and ill by the thought of such depraved behavior. I do not understand any better than I did then, which is to say not at all, what would possess someone to murder a helpless other. I cannot fathom what kind of void must reside in the place of one’s heart to enable that person to watch a defenseless being scared and in pain and hoping for life but having it slowly taken away. Purposefully. Patiently. Remorselessly. That kind of inhumanity terrifies me.

This week, as I looked through my computer screen window and saw the news that Samuel Dubose had been shot in the head at point-blank range by a Cincinnati cop who'd pulled him over on dubious (at best) reasons and about Cecil the lion being lured out and shot by the dentist, suffering a 40-hour death before being decapitated and skinned, carcass left to rot in the African sun, head the only thing that asshole killer wanted, I was whirled back to that evening when I was a child. When I saw firsthand how grotesque and baseless and truly ugly some people are. When my core was so deeply shaken that it still to this day trembles in the face of horrific inhumanity.

There is not a moral equivalency between killing a human and killing a lion, but I think the actions are rooted in the same heinous beginning which is one of inhumanity. And too often lately, when I look through windows, that’s what I see.

Fire escape

It is old. The black paint, once shiny and flawless like poreless skin, has chipped away after years in the blistering sun. Rust spots make the decay that much more obvious: measles on that clear expanse.

Was it ever used? Did it ever help someone reach the ground safely? Or did it serve only as a sneaky deck for smokers, a perch for birds and their shit, a rendezvous point for lusty, twenty-something lovers?

It almost looks quaint now: a lumbering iron relic of a bygone age. It's morphed into the architecture of the place, showing signs of life only in rainstorms when it catches droplets of water before quickly letting them go.

Even then it's just passively alive, bound as if fixed in a straitjacket. Things only happen to it, an irony in a way since it represents freedom.

And what of the similar escapes we forge in our minds and hearts? Do they rust when we become complacent? Do their joints cry out for oil and a good turn after years of waiting patiently for notice and use? 

And is use or abandonment best, keeping in mind what each really means?

*A freewrite from Jena Schwartz's prompt, "Tell me about the fire escape."