old wedding cake stored in plastic bags in the ice box

old wedding cake stored in plastic bags in the ice box

fiction
Edward w Pritchard


I found some old wedding cake stored in plastic bags in the ice box.

You had tied the plastic bags meticulously with care and it took me a moment to unravel the bag to get to the Cake. You must have twisted the knotted red tie twenty times to keep the cake always fresh I guess.

The white icing was crumbly like duned drifted sands in the Moroccan dessert and the icing fell apart in my hands and heaped onto the kitchen floor.

The blue and red lettering on icing was faded unreadable and I had forgotten what we had wrote with blue icing on our wedding cake. Try as I might I can't remember.

The cake itself is frozen solid but it is crispy and comes apart in cubic marbled sheets like quartz or diamond being cleaved by a bent bespectacled Jewish jeweler in a dark workshop in Amsterdam.

The cake sticks to my lips and tongue when I try to taste it and it is bitter and my immune system jolts with alarm that it might be toxic or poison.

The cake is so light now, it nearly floats in my hands when I hold it.

The wedding cake stored in the icebox is nearly all gone; soon there will be plenty of space for others things or for cold air to circulate freely about the compartment of the icebox.