Jae Hamilton

Chocolate Covered

My hand rises slowly to make shadows over my eyes, the blue of the sky matched the blue rim of the white plate, as it framed the slice of chocolate cake perfectly. The soft pink of the thin candle lightened by the tiny yellow and orange flame atop a small white wick. It glowed from the side of a rosette dancing swooping up and down beckoning me closer and closer bewitching me to ignore all the signs, it seems Icarus, and I native sons. She began singing the words softly, happy birthday to me, to baby, to beloved, to you, to everyone. I tried not to listen I knew that I could not let her words become tones; those tones hitting my ears, traveling through the canals into my veins. That tainting my life’s blood traveling from the atrium into my heart, to the ventricle, out to my arteries, those tones coursing through my body to warm me, soften me from the inside out. Melting my memory of what has happened and yet in that moment I can’t stop it from reaching the filled underground anthill of my soul. I could feel them racing towards their true queen leaving the blind naked king behind. I knew it was the hunger they needed to be fed that drew them nearer, closer to the chance of being something to someone. Running over each other to get to the surface only to be burned and twisted under the magnified truth. It is the siren song of chocolate covered lies that called to them. Called them to get in a line and follow one after the other blindly towards the sweet to only find brown covered dust to choke on. The blue rim covered as the plate’s edge now alive with the army seeking pieces to feed the youngest and the wisest. Them marching to the slice five layers of dark chocolate cake with milk chocolate frosting with tiny rosettes piped on the top, I can see them in my mind all in a circle so that every slice would get at least one rosette. I know just how long it took to bake, frost, and cut. I know how many sticks of butter, eggs, teaspoons of vanilla, cups of sugar, flour, ounces of chocolate. How long to bake, mix, melt and whip. I knew how many bites it would take to eat a slice that size, three thousand four hundred and eighty-seven, it isn’t a big slice, but I learned to savor it take small bites to ingest the meaning let it congeal into a ball that made my belly button it’s point of attachment. I knew all of this at the age of ten. Having once said it was my favorite then it became part of her vernacular to me, being southern she now the teacher she taught me that food had meaning. That food will speak when the human was silent. And while pie and cobbler spoke briefly and sparingly, that chocolate cake spoke the most, and said the most: sorry, the black eye will heal, the burn marks will fade, don’t tell them at school, stay here with me, be nice to the man I chose over you. But sometimes only sometimes it said the thing that brought me to kneel, you mean something, but I always missed the… right now, at the end. Truth is I could make my own by twelve and I was selling them by the age of fifteen to cover the rent, yet here I am staring at the cake now covered in ants as my body is empty.