Cupcakes

“Do you like cupcakes? Of course, you do; everyone likes cupcakes. How could you not? Just like women, they’re beautiful to look at, and they taste great. The first thing you notice is the delicate frosting on top. There’s an abundance of possibilities! The icing can be frosty as an icicle or warm like a sunset. The colors can swirl and dance with each other or can make a bold statement with a strong but solid, singular color. It can thinly cover the exterior or tower over the soft cake underneath. Flavors can be mellow and sweet, like a gentle maiden with a graceful smile in a meadow full of pastel-pink petunias. They can be rich and overpowering, a queen clad in black with onyx jewels upon her crown. They can be as subtle and refreshing as a golden smile hidden behind golden locks. You can crush that sweet innocence with your powerful jaws for that delicious release. Or sometimes, they are even spicy with a kick of paprika or cayenne, a dancer from distant lands with piercing eyes of fire as she sways her hips to the beat of your quickened pulse. You get that adrenaline rush like a knife to the throat. There can be designs like a fresh flower or an adorable bumble bee, or additional toppings such as chocolate chips or some sour rainbow gummies: just like a woman can have a pierced septum, or a tattoo of a dove flying away across her collarbone.

What adds to the beauty is the fragility of the frosting. A single slight touch here, or a lick of the tongue there, and the frosting is ruined forever. No one else will want to touch it, it’ll be too disgusting to enjoy. You must catch a snowflake directly upon your tongue in order to enjoy that magical moment; you cannot first catch it gently in your hand only to later taste. The snowflake would melt and cease to exist. The icing of the cupcake is the same. While it is beautiful to behold, there is no point in viewing something that in the end, is simply meant for consumption.

While the icing is my own personal favorite part of the cupcake, the cake underneath is nothing to sneer at. Usually, the exterior matches the interior. A person with a kind face typically has a kind soul, just as a cupcake with vanilla icing typically has vanilla flavoring in the cake underneath the frosting. They are delightful but without surprise; you know exactly what you will get. Occasionally, the cake will be the opposite of the frosting. A woman is dressed in ivory and pearls with the purest of smiles and soft, cerulean eyes and a voice sweeter than nightingales song at sun’s first light; she is the one to wield the twisted, crystal dagger that pierces your heart through your back in the darkest nanosecond of the night, and it is she who cackles as your love and your fear and your pain trickle down your cheeks before your soul ebbs away from your broken corpse. Alternatively, a woman can have a harsher exterior: she can have short, coarse hair the color of blood dripping into an infinite abyss, with black lips that turn downwards and eyes that pierce through your mind with warnings of danger. All the while, she is the woman that brings a lantern of light to your bleakest moments, the woman that provides a strong hand to lift you up until you are strong enough to stand on your own and no longer need her. It is the same in that a cupcake can have vanilla frosting but chocolate cake. A cupcake can smell divine but contain the nutty, arsenic poisoning deep within.

No matter how different in flavor or exterior design a cupcake may be, they are all the same at their core. They are made with flour, sugar, and eggs. Sometimes they might be made slightly differently; one might have butter and one might have Crisco, one might use a little more salt or a little less baking soda. Still, however much everyone can crow on about how special and unique their own cupcakes are, they are all essentially the same. An individual cupcake is hardly more beautiful or more important than the next cupcake. Instead of fretting about getting one, perfect cupcake, it is much better to sample as many as possible and enjoy each one in the brief moment that they exist before they are gone forever. Soon they will be nothing but a distant memory on the tip of your taste buds, easily replaced by the next flavor that enters your mouth. All that matters is that they exist for enjoyment, women exist for consumption and nothing else”

His words lingered in the air and hovered ominously above the woman’s head, like fog after a rainstorm. Her dry lips held no reply, held back by the foul, stained rag that had been shoved between her teeth. Her cracked, bleeding hands bound behind her back quivered as she stared at the mountainous man looming over her body. She had no control over her voice, or her shaking hands, or her pulse that was increasing in speed as well as volume. The man’s voice returned, this time softer but hoarser, and his words fluttered like the beating wings of a rabid bat.

“Well, my cupcake…now you know that you exist for my consumption”.