Bake. Bake a cake. This is the main thing listed on her to-do list for the day, and so she is here in the kitchen, all smitten with flour on her face and bowl in hands.
In a kitchen where she can’t place where things are kept, can’t figure out why the beater isn’t quite working. But she manages to make her way around it. Manages to use its slightly unwashed rim, manages to drag her feet across the grimy, sticky floor, where something old and unnameable clung to every step, because she doesn’t want anything to ruin this experience for her.
She beats the eggs, adds the flour, makes a pinch of baking soda and pours in a tablespoon of vinegar, thick, sluggish, and deep red in color. The vinegar drops bleeding into the batter make her pause and she looks at them tentatively, as if she was meant to do this. Then she returns back to work, as there are a lot of things to be done.
Her batter is all prepared and now she is looking for baking paper so she could line the mold. She sets the paper inside, oils it, and goes to pick the batter from the kitchen shelf. She comes from around the kitchen counter and her feet stumble on some hard mass lying on the floor. The bowl slips from her hands but she manages to catch herself with the counter edge. There is cake batter everywhere, spreading, pooling, mixing with the blood on the floor. Blood from the body lying face down, skull split open, the blood long dried and darkened at the edges. And only then does she smell it, deep, rotten, heavy, the odor that she just couldn’t recognize all that time. The torso all seemed to be filled of wounds, and blood had dried all around them too. It is everywhere, thickened, congealed, lacquered to the floor. Sprayed up the cupboards. Smeared across the walls. Her eyes wander from the cupborads to the walls and set what was her reason for being there today. The bowl, half-broken and half-toppled, sits nearby, its contents being absorbed by the ground beneath it.
And then, and she realized immediately.
The batter was wasted.
