[Fiction | Issue 11]
Ryan Bender-Murphy
the sweetness remained the same
I had a friend named Tanner who would come over to my house once a week to deliver a homemade cake. I never asked for this cake, but nonetheless, I would accept it and invite him inside to eat it with me.
Tanner never explained himself, and I never asked him why. I guess that meant we were close. We said very little to each other, in fact, and mostly ate outside on my deck, from which you could see a river crowded with paddleboarders in the distance. I had recently bought the house, so, the first time, I thought that the cake was a housewarming present. The following week, however, I knew it was something different. A form of gratitude, I supposed. Or some kind of brotherly love. Whatever the case, I was happy to eat a free meal, having blown most of my savings on the down payment. And since the cake wasn’t too big – Tanner was an amateur baker, to be clear – we’d eat the whole thing and wash it down with tap water.
Really, the only thing that was slightly off-putting about this whole arrangement, if we could call it that, was the cake itself. It was so sweet that my teeth would ache while eating it. Not only that, I could tell that my waistline was expanding, even though I ate very little else. I was hopeful that Tanner would naturally adjust his recipe (interestingly, he himself never changed in appearance or winced in pain while eating), and, to some extent, he did. The cake evolved in this fashion: yellow with chocolate buttercream, white with vanilla buttercream, chocolate peanut butter, coffee, carrot, blueberry, lemon bundt, and creamy coconut. It also grew from a single layer to a double layer. The sweetness, however, remained the same.
I didn’t mention anything to Tanner because I was afraid that he wouldn’t come back, feeling insulted. But after several months of replenishing my savings, and going to routine check-ups with my doctor and dentist, I felt more comfortable talking to him explicitly about the cake. The fact of the matter was, I had four new cavities – in two molars on each side of my mouth – and gained upwards of thirty pounds. Perhaps Tanner was slowly killing me, I joked with myself. Which then worried me enough to work out what exactly I’d say to him on his next visit.
As soon as we sat back in my Adirondack chairs, I launched right into it, asking: “Why do you make these cakes, Tanner?” This time he had brought a black forest chocolate cake, which had three layers.
As he served me a slice, he pursed his lips and said, “Are you joking?”
He was obviously upset, as if I had forgotten an agreement that we had made, but I was certain that that wasn’t the case. Still, I treaded lightly, saying: “Refresh my memory.”
To my surprise, Tanner’s face immediately lit up, erasing all signs of annoyance. “That’s exactly right,” he said. “Each of the cakes memorializes a moment we’ve shared together.”
“Right,” I said, glancing at my slice. “Last week we hiked through the park after work, when the sun had already set – hence, black forest.”
“Yes!” Tanner replied excitedly. He then spoke like I had finally broken the fourth wall, or like our game of silent chicken was over, and since he was the winner, he could say whatever he wanted now: “Think – we eat cakes on birthdays, at weddings, during holidays, and for so many other special occasions. Memory becomes linked to the cake, and it’s a good feeling. So, why not do the same with the minor stuff, the everyday events? We can then appreciate them more fully. Don’t you agree?”
I liked the idea that I had gained thirty pounds of memories, and that the memories were so strong that they had made holes in my teeth, so I nodded and said, “Yes; I can remember every cake you’ve brought over.”
Tanner smiled and ate his slice. He then started on another. It was at this moment that I decided to bring up my second point, which was the main purpose of our conversation: “And while I do appreciate the cakes – and all the memories attached to them – my doctors feel a bit differently. Put simply, they recommend that I lay off the sweets.”
Tanner was now a deer in the headlights.
“We can still hang out,” I added. “But . . . I don’t know, maybe come over once a month with a cake – a single-layer one, at that. What do you think?”
It took a while for Tanner to snap out of it, but finally, he said, “. . . Yeah, that makes sense.”
A month later, Tanner appeared at my doorstep with a cake that tasted like a pile of mulch from a playground taken over by junkies.
When I told him as much, he replied: “It’s not supposed to be sweet.”
“It’s definitely not sweet,” I agreed. “But it’s also not edible, which defeats the purpose, right? What happened?”
“I tried to follow your advice,” Tanner explained, after some hesitation. “And I tried to combine four weeks of memories into one cake.”
“Oh.” It was clear that I had set him up for failure, so I needed to make things right again. “Why don’t you choose the best memory, and bake a cake for that?”
But my suggestion only seemed to make things worse. Tanner looked at me like I had told him to murder all but one of his kids. “How would I choose?” he asked, nearly whispering. “Doing so would give one day more value over another. They should all be the same, or as close as possible to it.”
Familiar with byzantine scheduling and project allocation at work, I offered several options: random selection, rotating weeks, alternating even and odd dates, and anything else that was mathematically sound. Tanner didn’t like any of it, deeming the methods “artificial,” so he began to warm up to the idea of choosing a day based on its merits. Since neither of us knew exactly what that would entail, I jokingly suggested that the “best day” should be the one when we laughed together the most. Tanner didn’t say anything, lost in his own thoughts, but I could tell that he had taken my words to heart.
In fact, over the course of the following month, any time I saw him, Tanner would tally our mutual laughter in a small notebook, which he labeled “Laugh Tracking.” I found this practice a bit heavy-handed, if not outright distracting, but I was also curious how it would affect the quality of the cake. That’s why I held off on voicing any displeasure.
The next time that Tanner came over, he brought a chocolate fudge cake. I knew immediately that it was meant to memorialize the day we had gotten caught in the rain while hiking. We had made several jokes about the mud, trying to stay positive while also cautiously stepping over gigantic puddles.
As we ate, I was pleased that the taste had vastly improved from the previous disaster, so I gave Tanner my deepest compliments. He beamed with gratitude and said softly, “Thank you. That means so much.”
After we finished the cake and Tanner left, I swallowed two ibuprofen tablets and fell asleep thinking that the matter had been settled.
During the next month, however, I was struggling at work, which meant that I wasn’t in the most jovial mood when I met up with Tanner. Previously, this was never a problem, since we were both blowing off steam, but I could tell now that he was concerned, especially when he discreetly peered at his notebook again and again, as if doing so would elicit laughter on my part.
One time when he did this, I let my anger get the best of me. While sitting on a park bench during a glorious sunset, I yelled, “Quit looking at the damn notebook!”
Tanner nearly leaped from the bench like a spooked cat. Then, after regaining his composure, he said, “Sorry. I’m just worried that there may not be a ‘best day’ this month.”
“The cake shouldn’t take priority over the moments themselves,” I replied tersely.
“I know; you’re right,” Tanner said, later adding: “But you complain about the same thing all the time. What if the cake is what can change your days? What if thinking about how the memory will form can inspire the moment? If you laugh more now, maybe you’ll be happier.”
“Why stop there? Why don’t we simply bake cakes together?” I fired back. “Let’s cut out going to the parks, and hiking in the woods, and sitting here right now. If everything amounts to cake, let’s just bake.”
Tanner didn’t say anything for a while, which gave me the confidence to add, “See how dumb that sounds?”
“Huh?” he said. He then shook his head. “No, no, no. I was thinking how that’s a great idea. Am I wrong?”
“What?” I replied in disbelief.
“Think about it,” Tanner said. “We can continue to make a cake for any time we hang out. Which means we don’t have to track the best memory anymore.”
“I can’t eat four cakes a month,” I reminded him.
“That’s okay,” he said. “If we bake together, then we can sell the cakes. You’re always talking about needing to save. Well, now you can make some extra money.”
I had to admit, it was an interesting proposal. “Who would buy the cakes?” I asked. “It’s not like we’re professionals.”
“People love homemade goods. They feel more real,” Tanner said. “Someone will buy them.”
We gave the idea a shot, but after beating dough in Tanner’s kitchen and only breaking even at a local bake sale, I decided that my free time could be better spent on something else. The problem was, I wasn’t sure how to say this without Tanner throwing the words back in my face as some new scheme. So I went along with the baking and selling for a while, until I was finally able to convince my boss to assign me so much work that I’d be paid overtime. Then I came clean with Tanner.
We were in his kitchen, baking a gingerbread cake shaped like his apartment.
“So, this is it?” he said.
I nodded. “For now, yes.”
“What should we do with the cake?” he asked. “We can’t eat it because we made it, right?”
“Um,” I said, opening his freezer and peering inside. “Why don’t you stick it in here? Then, when I’m done with my projects, we can eat it together.”
Tanner considered it. “With enough time,” he eventually said, “the cake can be a memory like all the rest.”
“Exactly,” I replied.
I never saw Tanner again. I guess you could say that we had a falling out. I didn’t mean to blow him off indefinitely, but I never really felt the urge to make time for him. Because I was at the office so much now, it was just easier for me to go to happy hours and social events with my co-workers.
We did have one other interaction, though. After maybe a year had gone by, Tanner left the gingerbread cake at my office’s reception desk. There wasn’t a note, and he didn’t stick around long enough to say hi, but the cake simply being there meant that his presence was felt. I called everyone on my team over to the break room, inviting them to take a slice. After eating a few bites, however, we all came to the same conclusion: the cake had a bitter, plasticky aftertaste. I decided then to put the rest in the freezer, where it has remained ever since.
Ryan Bender-Murphy received an MFA in poetry from the University of Texas at Austin and currently lives in Seattle, Washington. His fiction has appeared in BRUISER, Hominum Journal, Maudlin House, Roi Fainéant Press, and Tiny Molecules, among other publications. He is also the author of the poetry chapbook First Man on Mars (Phantom Books, 2013). Find him on Instagram @ryan.bender.murphy.