Frosting: A Surreal Short Story
Sofia licked the frosting from her fingertips. Two minutes ago, the cupcake had been there in her hands, borne of a strange conflagration of flour and sugar and god knows what else. Eggs. Probably eggs. And butter.
Animals in the yard. The farm fields. Stinking and eating and being there for no reason other than for us to eat them or their young or their milk, which was created for their young. Their babies in our stomachs. And the baby’s mothers and fathers on our grills.
But the cupcake and the egg. The egg inside the cupcake and the baby inside the egg. Not yet a baby but just the chance of life. Maybe something else. Possibility and virtue combined into one. Honest and devoid of vitality. Nothing but potential.
Cracked and broken. Mixed and beaten and stirred. Baked in an oven. Into something tasty and disposable. To be expelled from our bodies. The bad parts. The good, absorbed. Until we died. Until Sofia died. Not from the cupcake. But from life. That subtle killer we all fall victim to somewhere along the way.
The sugar rushed through her body. A drug of everyday life. The most addictive, some say. But she savored it. Bathed in it. Reveled in it. For that one instant. Until it was gone. Metabolized and spent.
