The Great Cake Prophecy

Today’s story is brought to you by a pregnant woman who wanted cake and didn’t have any.

It was not his cake. Terrible things would happen if he ate that cake. Or any cake, for that matter. But still, he stared at it, ensnared by its chocolate swirls, envisioning the buttery moistness of the cake itself.

A woman and her son (proper customers, not ones burdened with portents and empty pockets) walked through the doors. The boy was tossing a baseball from hand to hand and his mother was scolding him. “Derek, put that ball away!” The door jingled and shut behind them, letting out a puff of warm air, sweet with scent of heat and butter and all things golden-brown.

He shook his head. No, no. He should walk away right now. The mayhem he would cause if he bought a slice of that cake…. Besides, you don’t have any money, he reminded himself. You’d have to steal it, and that would make things worse. He sighed. Of all the people to get his fortune told by a centaur, why did it have to be him, Brine?

Everyone knew centaurs were aloof, hard to find, and incredibly fastidious. If you did find one, and it considered you sufficiently intelligent, or well spoken, or if it thought you remarkable in some way, it might foretell your future by the stars. It was a great honor and usually a very learned, solemn affair full of gilt-edged words of six syllables or more. This was the kind of thing academics wandered around in the woods dreaming about.

In Brine’s opinion, you probably had to have a first rate education simply to untangle the double meanings and riddles centaurs spoke in. Seeking the guidance of a centaur was the last thing he’d considered as a possibility. His talents lay more in the simple enjoyment of day to day life; finding a meal, eating the meal, and having a comfortable place to sleep at night.

Not only was he content being a nobody, he looked like a nobody. He was plain-faced, gangly to the point of absurdity, all knees and elbows and Adam’s apple. His only redeeming physical feature was his large, sad, brown eyes.

Besides, more importantly, he barely counted as educated; certainly no one had ever mistaken him for an intellect. He’d been taught to wash his hands and apologize when he burped, but that was it as far as his nice company manners and eloquent speech went. If there was a list somewhere with People Centaurs are Unlikely To Be Interested In, Brine was at the top.

And yet.

A year ago he’d been walking through the woods on the way back to his small cabin after a long day of odd-jobbing and pilfering, not really looking at anything, just letting his feet take him home. When there it had been. Massive, standing in the middle of the path, its burly arms folded, its beard cascading down its chest in golden curls, its brows dark and lowered at it stared at him.

“What is your name?” It boomed.

Brine stammered, “Brine, uh, sir.”

“Brine.” The centaur said in deep disgust. “Well…Brine…”

Brine gulped. If he’d had the kind of vocabulary the sort of person likely to talk to a centaur would have, he would have said the centaur’s tone was portentous. As it was, he didn’t think anything and simply mumbled, “Yessir?”

“Brine,” The centaur heaved a sigh. “You do not interest me. But the stars have been read and your fortune is clear and some of us are more compassionate to the unfortunate than others. So, we warn you: do not eat cake. I put this in simple terms, just for you. Terrible things await you if you eat cake.”

“S-sir?”

But the massive horse-man only sighed, muttered something about it all being a waste anyway, and clopped away into the trees, leaving Brine baffled, and, unfortunately, thinking about how nice it would be to have a thick slab of pound cake topped with berries and whipped cream right about then.

He withstood the temptation, though. He may not have fully appreciated the blessings of a centaur’s fortune, but he knew enough to understand that you don’t take what they say lightly. Even more impressive to him was the fact that they’d bothered to make it understandable to a simple guy like him.

Still, it was a hard year. He’d never been aware of how many types of cakes danced in and around his life, and he wasn’t sure exactly at what level a type of pastry became a cake. Initially, he eschewed even corncakes and ate his mum’s beans and pork without anything to sop up with. After a while he decided savory cakes weren’t cake, not really, but that left far too many cakes still out of reach.

There were the strawberry shortcakes the pastor’s wife had offered him last spring.

He’d slunk into the Ladies’ Neighborhood Society Meeting to schlep off with some free food and nearly forgot himself over a mint chocolate truffle cake

While taking a lunch break from work a friend had offered him a chunk of spice cake. The cinnamon and the cloves and the lovely dense butteriness of it nearly won him over.

At the bakery one day when he was passing by right after payday, there was a three layer double chocolate cake with candied cherries glistening on top.

He’d been nose to nose with the raspberry almond wedding cake at his friend’s brother’s next-door-neighbor’s wedding and he’d had to sit there and watch everyone else eat it. He couldn’t even ask for a non-cake dessert because then they’d notice him and realize he hadn’t been invited.

And with the holidays came even more pitfalls—pumpkin cake with cream cheese icing, fruitcake, Christmas cake, plum cake, teacakes of all types and sizes, jelly rolls, panettone, cheesecake, King cake, croquembouche—all of them he firmly resisted.

But now he stood in front of the bakery and his mouth watered.

After avoiding them all, he was hesitating before this simple creation: a yellow cake with chocolate icing in rich, thick swirls.

If he’d left in that moment, he would have been fine. Because in the next moment, the bakery window shattered into a thousand pieces. Inside, he heard the mother shriek, “Derek! I told you to put that ball away!”

As the shouts of the baker and his employees filled the air, Brine saw only one thing. The cake. Unprotected, undefended and unharmed. Glass lay glittering on the sidewalk, nobody had yet made it out of the bakery—and he took his chance. He leapt forward, snagged the cake on the cake stand, and hurried away, balancing his prize delicately.

A block later he realized that no one was following him. He found a nice bench, sat down, and looked at the cake. There was a piece, already cut, lying on its side, waiting for him. He picked it up and took a bite.

It was everything he’d dreamed of. Chocolate and vanilla, fluffy cake and thick icing—he became aware suddenly that he was eating the cake from a different angle. He tried to sit up and found that sitting up seemed to be a different procedure than he was used to. He looked down.

Instead of human hands, there were dog paws on either side of the cake. Large, gangly hound paws, to be precise. He swung around and looked in the back of him and there, wagging on the sidewalk like it was glad to be noticed, was a thin, whippy tail.

While he was still examining himself a pretty girl stopped, right in front of him and said, “Aw, what a cute doggy!” She patted him on the head. Brine grinned up at her; pretty girls didn’t generally look twice at human Brine. She went on down the sidewalk. Brine looked back at his paws. He looked at the cake. He grinned a very doggy grin again.

Maybe the idea of being transformed into a dog was a terrible fate—to a centaur. But as for Brine…he settled down, quite contented, to enjoy the rest of his cake.

P.S. I got my cake, too.

#cake #humor #random