Unicorn Cake

Lydia thinks of herself as a maker. She makes lunches and beds and soft blankets with colorful hearts stitched around the hem. She makes strange contraptions. Saucepans that walk on mechanized legs fashioned from tongs, twine balls that fly on coffee filter wings to amuse the cat, reconstructed mechanical babydolls with opposable thumbs whose only job is to find the TV remote. She makes and makes. And, of course, when the occasion calls for it, she makes cakes. Today she’s in the kitchen putting the final touches on her six-year-old daughter’s unicorn birthday cake. She spies her husband watching her as she ponders the candle placement.

Her husband is decidedly not a maker. He spends his days inside an elevator. On their first date he’d taken her, after hours, to one of his job sites, where they’d spent the night climbing and dropping. She, hitting buttons in patterns only she could discern, watching the lights shine out like constellations in the sky. He, pausing from time to time, removing panels, sinking hands into gears, testing the tenacity of cables. His job was to ensure something wouldn’t unmake itself. He lived his life like he inspected elevators: meticulous, gentle, a little afraid but resolute. It’s why she fell in love with him.

Lately Lydia is frenetic as she creates. There is a stich in her chest that infects her, the ache reaching even the fine hairs on her upper lip. She’d hoped that if she baked the cake just so, the contagion might pass. But even as she mixed the funfetti batter, she felt spasms of disgraceful longing emanating from some unnamed organ. She’d stayed up all night before the birthday party, letting wind blow through the frosting mane, coating it with sweat and salt, weaving moonlight into the ice-cream cone horn. Her husband finds her in the morning, staring silently at her creation. He puts one hand, fingernails dark with grease, on her shoulder and squeezes. Lydia’s daughter enters the room, face distorted, refracted, through the bundle of balloons she carries, says she loves the cake, but could there be more sparkles, Mama?

Now the children in the other room are getting anxious. Their voices rise and slot together, a grating hum blanketing the house. Lydia vibrates. She grips a pink and white-striped candle so tightly the wax begins to warp and just before she unravels, thrusts it into the unicorn’s delicately constructed eye. And as it slides through the blue-frosting iris into fluffy cake, she remembers.

She is a child. She is arthritic, thin-skinned and toothless. She is a wee babe, crying and never satiated. Sometimes she dies without even knowing, buried beloved but ignorant. She has tried to explain, been locked up, medicated. Other times she wakes from a dream and understands what she must do, runs away under cover of night, her sparkly pink Mary-Janes leaving footprints disappearing in the rain. She is names upon names upon names, a kaleidoscope of identities, horribly limitless.

She remembers all her lives, but never quite the one she treasures most. That first one. That one is merely an impression, the feeling of floating on the ocean in the rain, both warm and cool, staring at a gray sky, being carried out to sea, content, unbothered by the land slowly disappearing.

She knows she has always been loved, until the one time when she wasn’t, when it was all lost. She did something, she knows, to deserve this. So she must get back. Remedy. Rectify. This is why she is a maker. Because no simple car or plane can take her where she needs to go. She has built obsidian carriages drawn by conniving early-morning mists, blimps buoyed into the heavens by the dying wishes of prima ballerinas, trains powered by thousands of starving sewer rats racing on little wheels. In one life she cut out the last page of 100,000 books and fashioned herself a pair of glorious wings. And yet here she is, here and not there, her hand still stabbing the candle through the cake-eye of a unicorn. A vessel of failures.

She plants the other five candles and carries the cake out to the table. She imagines setting it down, then walking out the door, never returning, like she’s done so many times. Too many sad faces muddled in the wake of her departure. Instead, she watches as her husband lights the candles. The children begin to laugh. Her daughter is the loudest; she squeals, pointing to the cake, to the candle sparking in the eye. Years from now, long after this daughter and this husband have been buried—just once—and Lydia has been named many times and buried just as often, she will think back on this special iteration. Perhaps it’s the sunlight shining through the windows, through the balloons, turning the dining room into the inside of a rainbow. Perhaps it’s her daughter’s laugh, her wide smile showing the gap of her first lost tooth, or the image of her husband running frosting-covered fingers through his hair. It could be the memory of that first date, her screams as the elevator stuttered then dropped. How she clutched her not-yet husband’s arm a little tighter each time. Or maybe it’s the knowledge that no matter how many things she makes, how hard she tries, she will never get back to where she longs to be. Even so, she thinks one day I will make an elevator, its gears forged not of metal but of memory. All of me, stretching backwards and forwards. A single red birthday balloon tied to the top where the cables should be, filled with nothing but hope, to carry me away.

But for now, Lydia settles herself at the table, cuts out what’s left of the unicorn’s eye, eats it, and decides to stay a while longer.

***

Claire Alongi is a Pushcart Prize nominated fiction writer whose work has appeared in The Timberline Review and in collegiate publications at Willamette University and Pacific Northwest College of Art. She is a current fiction candidate in the MFA program at the University of Montana where she also serves as the social media and online managing editor for Cutbank Magazine. When she isn’t writing she enjoys going for long meandering walks and searching for cats to pet.