A Breezy Recipe

In life, Lysie had summoned the same sort of tempestuous force that a gust of wind through a window mistakenly left open before a rainstorm might, only she tended to relegate the worst of her devastation to the kitchen.

A more gentle breeze swept through now, ruffling the delicate lace on the curtains framing the widely open casement windows above the kitchen sink. Rather than announcing an incoming torrent, however, it brought with it a much needed reprieve from the balmy air rising from the oven, which was preheated to a persevering three hundred and fifty degrees. Anaïs, who had moments before had the moisture wicked from her eyes by the burst of heat that accompanied her fourth peek on the oven’s three occupants, was persevering less well.

She was alone in the cramped kitchen if you didn’t count her slowly—so, so slowly—baking creation or Lysie’s spirit, which seemed very much alive in the pages of her haphazard cookbook. Neither were able to tell Anaïs that she had cake flour smeared across the left side of her cheek where she had tucked and re-tucked a particularly stubborn, shorter curl behind her ear during all of the whisking—there had been so much whisking. Her boisterous black curls were otherwise corralled into submission by an industrial strength tie so that they wouldn’t sneak their way into the concoction she had created that was supposed to be a two-layer, nine-inch cake but looked more like twin puddles of mud if you asked her, complete with bubbling and cracking.

The page that ‘Blood, Sweat, and Chocolate Cake’ was catalogued on had been lost when the night breeze rustled through the homemade book’s pages, flipping through the nonsensically categorized recipes until it landed on something that was so hastily written in Lysie’s loopy scratch it took Anaïs’s abused eyes a few blinks to discern ‘Wormwood’s Granny’s Pie’ from it—and even then she wasn’t entirely certain. Unlike the carelessness of the breeze, Anaïs turned the little pages reverently as she searched for the one she had been following. Each page was delicately lifted by her forefinger as it ran from the top corner to the bottom where her thumb joined to pinch and slowly turn the page. Forgetting all about the old oven, she was momentarily lost in the world preserved within the aging paper and dried ink—skimming each recipe’s page even after she knew it wasn’t the one she was looking for, an amendment here or there catching her eye where she could tell that Lysie had been particularly frustrated by a roadblock or overjoyed by a breakthrough that turned the corner of Anaïs’s mouth into a private smile. There were polaroids of the final result of each recipe paperclipped in alongside amendments on almost every page, either tucked away in the margins with a long arrow with a pretty loop-the-loop, or on a variety of taped-down sticky notes, or, sometimes, the original writing was scratched out in a different color and scrawled directly above that were the new instructions.

A long, sustained and insistent beep from the oven was enough to snap her out of the trance with her eyes sufficiently rehydrated and the echoes of Lysie’s voice in her head. Upon opening the appliance with her head of curls at a much safer distance, she pulled the oven’s rack forward and toothpick tested each cracked, chocolatey surface. Not only were they beginning to resemble what a finished cake might actually look like but her toothpick also finally came away clean! She quickly stuffed her hands back into the trout-themed oven mitts and closed the fish’s mouths around the circular pans to set them on the awaiting racks.

Now, all she had to do was wait… Again. And for longer. A lot longer.

But, this time, Anaïs could busy herself during that wait with making the cream cheese frosting for the next step. She returned the trout mitts back to their hooks at the end of her counter and began navigating her way through the cookbook once more until she happened upon the polaroid that started her on this path tonight.

Lysie’s chocolate brown eyes matched the massive slice of cake she held proudly on a glazed ceramic plate from their old apartment. Her other hand was posed in an enthusiastic but painfully awkward looking thumbs up, but her smile was so wide and genuine that it crinkled said eyes. It was hard to truly fault her for such unadulterated happiness at a perfectly frosted slice of chocolate cake that looked like it was meant for someone twice her size. She wasn’t looking at the camera; her expressive eyes were angled too high.

Anaïs remembered the snap of the shutter so vividly she almost heard it in the silent kitchen just as another breeze playfully blew the curl from where it was tucked behind her ear.