Recipe

It is Sally’s turn to teach her daughter Eli how to bake a chocolate cake. She flicks through the pages of the old recipe book that has been in her family for generations until she reaches a page with what looked like a clipping from an old magazine with a beautiful slice of cake, moist, brown, airy looking. Her grandmother’s notes in the margin of the notebook, delicate, carry within them the marks of a somewhat carefree past, one in which children knew what chocolate tastes like.

Sally herself does not know: the closest approximation she has had was so tainted with the taste of chicory and dust that it hardly resembles the substance so languishingly described by the rare elders who can remember it. Their accounts, so full of contradictions: sweet, yet bitter, dark yet light, filling, versatile, paired just as well with nuts, fruits, and spices Sally cannot recount as eaten by itself.

Eli looks up at her mother with inquisitive eyes as Sally pitifully attempts to recreate the mix of ingredients that have been known to form a somewhat palatable mix of margarine, flour, and agave nectar, the words in the original book: cane sugar, butter, eggs, rendered as obsolete as the delicate markings that used to represent them on paper, long, long ago, before the collective blackout.

Every night, before going off to bed, Sally carefully closes her grandmother’s book, seals it in an envelope which she places in a box. The box goes in the space under the wooden slats of the bedroom floor. It seems futile, as it is well-known within the community that Sally can read. She showed the first signs when she was around four and deciphered an old obscene message that had been carved into an old tree. Her face flushed when asked by her supervisors where she had learned the word, she finally brought them to the tree and pointed at the markings, much to the dismay of the community.

The following day, the tree was chopped down, and her mother received an in-person warning of the severity of the breach and advising her that any follow-up incident would result in appropriate repercussions.

Nearly a year has gone by since the incident, yet Sally’s alert, expecting someone to burst through the old door at any time, demanding an explanation for one of her daughter’s unexplained whereabouts. Eli looks at the make-shift stove with impatience, not so much for the result, but because it is her cake that will come out of it.

Even though she is nearly five years old, Sally cannot speak. Numerous visits to the local counsellors have not elucidated the mystery, and Sally has had no choice but to continue raising her as normally as she possibly could, amidst the backlash and bullying of older kids in the community. A mother’s unconditional love, she firmly believes, will cure whatever ails her daughter, who will one day be just as normal as her peers. As much as she can sense her daughter’s primal needs, Sally wonders how much their connection could be stunted, as the years go by if Eli was never to show any sign of progress.

Yet as Eli paces around the oven, she picks up a small piece of slate from the ground and traces a zigzagged line, followed by a circle and another identical zigzag line against the stone wall of the room.

The cake is dry and bitter, but Sally has coated it in more agave syrup, so Eli gleefully takes another bite. When the mother comes back to the room and stares at the ground in fatigue, she sees three letters staring back at her:

M-O-M.