Wednesday, February 8, 2012

6. Cake

She carefully laid out all the ingredients:  eggs, butter, flour, vanilla, sugar, chocolate.  She studied the recipe for a long time, glad that her mom had color-coded the amounts for her.  Pink meant the large measuring cup, yellow meant the small measuring cup, green was a spoonful.  Colors she could understand, whereas numbers tended to dance on the page, dance away to other deep places, places that were no longer involved in baking and creating, destinations where basic symbols and printed letters mysteriously flipped and reflected one another, playing cruel tricks on her brain, teasing her into believing she could decode them if she just concentrated a little bit harder …    
“Andrea!  You made a cake!  By yourself!”
She grinned shyly, nodding.  “Yes, happy birthday, Mother.”  Andrea lit the candles cautiously and began to sing for her mother.    
They ate the dry, overly-sweet cake together, and when Andrea left the room to use the bathroom, her mother checked the oven to make sure Andrea had remembered to turn it off. 
It was still on.  Of course it was.    

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this week's challenge: write a short essay using the word "deep" in the sense of "difficult to penetrate or comprehend"  

6 comments:

  1. Great last line, pulls it all together.

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  2. Way to go to Mom for waiting until Andrea left the room to check. I love how she expresses her delight and lets her daughter revel in the success. We readers know the cake is too dry and too sweet, but Andrea doesn't.

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    1. thank you. she does not want to hurt her daughter's feelings because the daughter was trying so hard.

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  3. Does Andrea have a learning disorder like dyslexia? Is that why she sees symbols and letters "flipped"? I like how you described it as "playing cruel tricks on her brain...." and teasing her. I think that is a great description.

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    1. thanks, yes, that was the idea, that the character has dyslexia.

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  4. Thank you for sharing your writing with Trifecta this week. I liked this piece a lot. Those last two sentences hint at quite a bit of underlying emotion, and I found that really relatable. Nicely done. Hope to see you back for the weekend challenge.

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