by Nino Cipri
You learned how miracles can hurt.
* * *
You align his bones on the metal tray that goes into the hungry oven. You hold his skull in your hands and rub the sides where his ears once were. You look deep into the sockets where once eyes of dark brown would stare back into you.
His clavicle passes your fingers. You remember the kisses you planted on his shoulder, when it used to be flesh. You position his ribcage, and you can still hear his heartbeat – a rumble in his chest the first time you lay together after barely surviving an onslaught of skinwalkers, a celebration of life. You remember that heart racing, as it did in your years as young men, when vitality kept you both up until dawn. You remember it beating quietly in his later years, when you were content and your bodies fit perfectly together – the alchemy of flesh you have now lost.
You deposit every shared memory in his bones, and then load the tray in the oven and slam shut the metal door.
Behind you, your daughter stands like a shadow, perfect in her apprentice robes. Not a single crease disfigures the contours of her pants and jacket. Not a single stain mars her apron.
She stares at you. She judges you.
She is perfection.
You wish you could leave her and crawl in the oven with your husband.
* * *
Flesh, blood and gristle do not make a cake easily, yet the Cake Maker has to wield these basic ingredients. Any misstep leads to failure, so you watch closely during your daughter’s examination, but she completes each task with effortless grace.
She crushes your husband’s bones to flour with conviction.
Your daughter mixes the dough of blood, fat, and bone flour, and you assist her. You hear your knuckles and fingers pop as you knead the hard dough, but hers move without a sound – fast and agile as they shape the round cakes.
Your daughter works over the flesh and organs until all you can see is a pale scarlet cream with the faint scent of iron, while you crush the honey crystals that will allow for the spirit to be digested by the gods. You wonder if she is doing this to prove how superior she is to you – to demonstrate how easy it is to lock yourself into a bakery with the dead. You wonder how to explain that you never burnt as brightly as your husband, that you don’t need to chase legends and charge into battle.
You wonder how to tell her that she is your greatest adventure, that you gave her most of the magic you had left.
* * *
Layer by layer, your husband is transformed into a cake. Not a single bit of him is lost. You pull away the skin on top and connect the pieces with threads from his hair. The sun turns the rich shade of lavender and calendula.
You cover the translucent skin with the dried blood drops you extracted before you placed the body in the purification vat and glazed it with the plasma. Now all that remains is to tell your husband’s story, in the language every Cake Maker knows – the language you’ve now taught your daughter.
You wonder whether she will blame you for the death of your husband in writing, the way she did when you told her of his death.
Your stillness killed him. You had to force him to stay, to give up his axe. Now he’s dead in his sleep. Is this what you wanted? Have him all to yourself? You couldn’t let him die out on the road.
Oh, how she screamed that day – her voice as unforgiving as thunder. Her screaming still reverberates through you. You’re afraid of what she’s going to tell the gods.
You both write. You cut and bend the dried strips of intestines into runes and you gently push them so they sink into the glazed skin and hold.
You write his early story. His childhood, his early feats, the mythology of your love. How you got your daughter. She tells the other half of your husband’s myth – how he trained her in every single weapon known to man, how they journeyed the world over to honor the gods.
Her work doesn’t mention you at all.
* * *
You rest your fingers, throbbing with pain from your manipulations. You have completed the last of your husband’s tale. You have written in the language of meat and bones and satisfied the gods’ hunger. You hope they will nod with approval as their tongues roll around the cooked flesh and swallow your sentences and your tether to life.
Your daughter swims into focus as she takes her position across the table, your husband between you, and joins you for the spell. He remains the barrier you can’t overcome even in death. As you begin to speak, you’re startled to hear her voice rise with yours. You mutter the incantation and her lips are your reflection, but while you caress the words, coaxing their magic into being, she cuts them into existence, so the veil you will around the cake spills like silk on your end and crusts on hers. The two halves shimmer in blue feylight, entwine into each other, and the deed is done.
You have said your farewell, better than you did when you first saw him dead. Some dam inside you breaks. Exhaustion wipes away your strength and you feel your age, first in the trembling in your hands, then in the creaking in your knees as you turn your back and measure your steps so you don’t disturb the air – a retreat as slow as young winter frost.
Outside the Bakery, your breath catches. Your scream is a living thing that squirms inside your throat and digs into the hidden recesses of your lungs. Your tears wash the dry mask from your cheeks.
Your daughter takes your hand, gently, with the unspoken understanding only shared loss births and you search for her gaze. You search for the flat, dull realization that weighs down the soul. You search for yourself in her eyes, but all you see is your husband – his flame now a wildfire that has swallowed every part of you. She looks at you as a person who has lost the only life she had ever known, pained and furious, and you pat her hand and kiss her forehead, her skin stinging against your lips. When confusion pulls her face together, her features lined with fissures in her protective mask, you shake your head.
“The gods praise your skill and technique. They praise your steady hand and precision, but they have no use of your hands in the Bakery.” The words roll out with difficulty – a thorn vine you lacerate your whole being with as you force yourself to reject your daughter. Yes, she can follow your path, but what good would that do?
“You honor me greatly.” Anger tinges her response, but fights in these holy places father only misfortune, so her voice is low and even. You are relieved to hear sincerity in her fury, desire in her voice to dedicate herself to your calling.
You want to keep her here, where she won’t leave. Your tongue itches with every lie you can bind her with, spells you’ve learned from gods that are not your own, hollow her out and hold onto her, even if such acts could end your life. You reconsider and instead hold on to her earnest reaction. You have grown to an age where even intent will suffice.
“It’s not an honor to answer your child’s yearning.” You maintain respectability, keep with the tradition, but still you lean in with all the weight of death tied to you like stones and you whisper. “I have told the story of your father in blood and gristle as I have with many others. As I will continue to tell every story as best as I can, until I myself end in the hands of a Cake Maker. But you can continue writing your father’s story outside the temple where your knife strokes have a meaning.
“Run. Run toward the mountains and rivers, sword in your hand and bow on your back. Run toward life. That is where you will find your father.”
Now it is she who is crying. You embrace her, the memory of doing so in her childhood alive inside your bones and she hugs you back as a babe, full of needing and vulnerable. But she is no longer a child – the muscles underneath her robes roll with the might of a river – so you usher her out to a life you have long since traded away.
Her steps still echo in the room outside the Baking Chamber as you reapply the coating to your face from the tiny, crystal jars. You see yourself: a grey, tired man who touched death more times than he ever touched his husband.
Your last task is to bring the cake to where the Mout
h awaits, its vines and branches shaking, aglow with iridescence. There, the gods will entwine their appendages around your offering, suck it in, close and digest. Relief overcomes you and you sigh.
Yes, it’s been a long day since you and your daughter cut your husband’s body open. You reenter the Baking Chamber and push the cake onto the cart.
About the Author
Haralambi Markov is a Bulgarian fiction writer, blogger and reviewer with a background in marketing. A Clarion 2014 graduate, Markov lives for the thrill of chasing down stories and you’ll always catch him typing. You can sign up for email updates here.
Copyright © 2015 by Haralambi Markov
Art copyright © 2015 by Sam Weber
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Carlos
“What song is that, man?”
I don’t move. The rumble of this ambulance’s diesel engine fills the air again, the smell of night, the park around us. If I hold still, if Victor shuts the fuck up, if nothing happens for another few seconds, maybe I can sink back in, grasp hold of that fragile thread of an echo fading into the darkness.
“Carlos?”
I rub my eyes and then retrieve the coffee cup from the dashboard. The thread is gone; my past is still a void. “It’s nothing, man. Just some song I heard.” The coffee is lukewarm but strong as hell. Reality settles in fully around me. “Stuck in my head is all. You get a job?”
Victor shakes his head, “Nah, man, go back to sleep.” The ambulance radio crackles to life, a routine announcement that seat belts save lives, and then all we hear is the diesel putt-putt-putt and occasional snores from the passenger compartment where Victor’s partner Del is laid out.
“Look,” I say, “if some shit don’t go down by four, I’m out, man.”
Victor nods. “I’m telling you, it’s been every night, C. Without fail.”
“Maybe accidents do take vacations, after all.”
“Carlos, I’ve been doing this job for twelve years and I ain’t never seen a pattern like this. You know I don’t go in for all that woo-woo shit, either. I don’t get involved in your whatever weirdo life. No offense.”
“Thanks, man.”
“And I ain’t never come to you ’bout some shit in all the time I known you.” He retrieves a cigarette and starts smoking it out the window.
Around us, the park glowers with late night shadows and a few scattered lights. The metal bars of a playground swing glint out of the gloom, a silhouetted pyramid against the cloudy sky. Darkened brownstones peer from behind the trees on either side. If I say anything right now, Victor will interpret it as encouragement to speak more, so I light a Malagueña and glower along with the park.
Victor lets out a menthol-laced cloud and shakes his head. “Last night, a hipster on a bike got completely destroyed by a passing garbage truck. I mean, we were picking up pieces of him blocks away. The night before it was a prisoner who broke out of the precinct over there, made it halfway across the street before the desk officer popped him, and then he got sideswiped by a motorcycle. The dude got dragged like four blocks and when we got to him his back was hamburger, Carlos. Hamburger.”
I just grunt.
“Wednesday it was the suicide, that was on the far corner of the park over there. Jumped from the roof of that brownstone and lived, man. We had to decompress him, though, he had full on tension pneumo—tubed that ass and hauled it to Bellevue. Died in surgery.”
“Damn.” I have no idea what Victor’s going on about, but all medical jargon aside, he’s right. And three apparently unrelated gory deaths in a four-block radius is the kinda thing that puts me to work. He rattles off a few more while I smoke and ponder patterns and, inevitably, the past …
“Carlos?”
“Yeah, man?”
“You’re humming again.”
“Huh?”
“Like, while I’m talking.” Victor narrows his eyes at me as I sit up and rub my face.
“Shit, man. Sorry.”
“It’s cool. I know you’re not used to the night life. Anyway, folks’ve started calling this place Red Square on the strength of all this. And I’m just saying, seems like the kinda thing … you might know something about.”
Vic’s never known how to talk about me being half-dead. It’s not his fault—I’ve never come out and said it to him. But gray pallor covers me like a layer of dust and my skin is cold to the touch. My heart rate never surpasses a melancholy stroll. Plus, I deal with ghosts. In fact, I’m employed by them: The New York Council of the Dead, a sprawling, incomprehensible bureaucracy, sends me in to clean up any messy irregularity in the rigid, porous borderlines between life and death. I mean, since I’m a walking messy irregularity of life and death, I guess it makes sense that the Council’d use me as their clean-up man, but the truth is, it gets lonely.
Especially recently.
A whiny bachata song explodes out of Victor’s belt. He curses and his belly shoves against the steering wheel as he squirms into what must be some kind of yoga pose to dig out his phone.
“Ay, shut the fuck up with that yadda-yadda horseshit,” Del hollers from the back. Del is like eight feet tall with locks down to his ass. He’s from Grenada but he got hit by a school bus in the nineties and has been speaking with a thick Russian accent ever since. When he gets worked up, his brain clicks fully over into Russian—some shit the neuroscientists of the world are still going nuts trying to figure out.
Mostly people try to be really nice to him.
“Sorry, man!” Victor yells, cradling the flip phone against his face. “Hello?… Hang on.” He hands me the phone. “It’s for you, man. Some chick.”
Sasha.
The thought wreaks havoc on my slow-ass heart for a half-second before I clobber it into submission. Of course it’s not Sasha. There are eighty million reasons for it not to be Sasha, least of which being how the fuck would she have Victor’s number and know I was with him? And why would she care? She walked out on me with no forwarding address, and now all I have is a Sasha-shaped hole in my chest.
Anyway, I killed her brother.
“Carlos?”
I have to stop disappearing from the world like this. I ignore Vic’s raised eyebrow, take the phone, and say hello into it.
“Tell your buddy if he refers to me as ‘some chick’ ever again he’ll be driving his own ass to the ER.”
“Hi, Kia.” Kia is sixteen and will probably rule the world one day. For now though, she runs my friend Baba Eddie’s botánica. Started on the register, selling Amor Sin Fin and Espanta Demonio herbal mixtures, statues of saints, and beaded necklaces. Then she started managing the books, which were a disaster, and—without bothering to ask Baba Eddie—she set up an online store and proceeded to build what appears to be a small spiritual goods empire, one she rules with an iron fist. And all as an after school job.
“Wassup, C?”
“Isn’t it a school night? What are you doing up at 4:00 a.m.?”
“Returning your phone call.”
“That was like eight hours ago!”
“Alright, man, I’ll talk to you later, then.”
“Wait—you know anything about the park over on Marcy?”
“Know anything about it? I know a buncha motherfuckas been gettin’ got there recently. Usedta be my stomping grounds for a while, then I moved on. Is that where you are right now, C? You might wanna not be there.”
“I’m alright. Anything else?”
“This girl Karina I know from the rec center babysits a whole boatload of little white kids at
that park. You want me to ask her about it?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“Imma see her tomorrow, maybe I’ll swing through with her.”
The radio crackles and Victor picks up the mic. “Five-seven x-ray … Send it over.”
“Be careful out there,” Kia says.
Victor put on his seat belt and cranes his head toward the back. “Del, we got a job.”
“Morgaly vikalu, padlo!”
“It’s been like three weeks now,” a little humpty-dumpty-looking middle-aged man in a bathrobe tells us. “I been coughing and hacking but this is different.”
Del towers over the guy, arms crossed over his chest, perpetual frown deeper than usual. “You’ve been coughing for three weeks, yes?” He says it like he’s about to launch into an eighty-thousand-page dissertation about vodka and agriculture reform. “And now you decide for to call 9-1-1, why?”
“Well, tonight I coughed up something different. You want to see?”
“I really do not want to see this thing,” Del says, but little oval-shaped dude is already rummaging through a layer of used tissues and medicine vials on his coffee table.
Victor scribbles the guy’s basic information down at the kitchen table. I’m sitting across from him trying not to gape like an asshole. “Is this normal?” I whisper. “People call you for this shit?”
He peers over his dollar store reading glasses at me for a hard second, then gets back to writing.
“Here it is!” the guy exclaims cheerfully. Then he erupts into a hacking fit. He passes a plastic Tupperware container to Del, who gingerly takes it in a gloved hand and peers in. He scowls and tips it toward us just enough for me to see a tennis-ball sized clump of tangled brown hair.