Nora Robertson

By Nora Robertson

1.  Mute as tongues silenced by mirrors, the cake sits there.  Flourless, serious, it started with 11 oz. bittersweet chocolate and 12 tblsp. butter in a double boiler.  Lined innocent white paper in the bottom of a 9” x 3” round cake pan and got the oven ready.  350 degrees, preset.  A cake saver sat on the counter pretending.  A sign of an eating disorder is compulsively checking your reflection, your image slipping apart from your body like a shadow.  Burlesque dancers used to silhouette like hourglasses, like greyhound bitches in corsets, their hips 36” and ready under the ostrich fans.  Some women need to get fucked, and some need to look like they do.

2.  On the scale this morning, 2 lbs. heavier.  Shouldn’t have beat 6 egg yolks with ¾ cup packed light brown sugar until fluffy and pale.  I’ve already figured out the number of calories I’ll need to burn at the gym.  My ass looms moonlike in the mirror, rounded and solid.  The problem with cake is it needs to be eaten.  Snow breaks too hard against my palate, too hot, too there.  It smells like steam of aluminum.  It wants to be gone.  There’s no food so empty.  Everything that comes out of my body is wrong, mumbled, spinning arms out from shoulder sockets into coffee cups, plates, the corners of bidets.

3.  Shouldn’t have scraped together the chocolate, the egg mixture and ¼ cup flour, tines grating against the steel like boning.  It needed bourbon.  It needed to lighten up.  Girls with bulimia break bathroom pipes with seas of vomit, riptides.  I know you have to shove your knuckles in past the gag reflex, but I can’t do it.  Something in my throat keeps me from breaking it, does not want anything more in.

4.  In a dry bowl, I did beat the egg whites with a smidge of salt until they held soft, turgid peaks and encorporated them.  When it was cool, I edged a knife between the cake and the pan and gently released the damp mass onto the pedestal.  Now it’s time to dust it with confectioner’s sugar, with cocaine and toilet powder perfumed by lilac armpits or lips pinpricked blue and swollen by bees, and serve.

Previously published in Redactions.