The Girl and the Chocolate Cake

The woods that shelter our small town are full of interesting things - things I've only heard of in stories, things I've only dreamt in my dreams. I've found animals that don't talk, strange sharpened sticks with metal tips, and strange plants that don't sing or sparkle or dance at night. In fact, they appear to just sit there!

Yet, the strangest thing of all that I've found in our woods was a girl.

She did not look like us, or sound like us, or act like us. She had smooth, round ears. She was quite tall, about half as tall as I am, but she looked like a child. She had colourless cheeks and flaming red hair. The way she spoke was accented and strange. Lilting. Her eyes flitted around everywhere, taking everything in as if it were the strange, new thing and not herself.

But there was something about her that made me think that perhaps she was worth keeping.

It was more of a feeling of warmth in my chest than anything else. A feeling that I should be smiling wider than I was even if it was as wide as my smile could go. It started very quickly after I bought her home.

I could see her look through the kitchen with wide eyes. She stared at the herbs growing down from the ceiling. She watched the birds flit in and out. The oven, stacked with flitterwood, burning its usual purple, made her gasp.

It was delightful to see the world as she must see it. To suddenly notice the blue bumblebees. Something as little as blue bumblebees! She told me they were yellow where she was from.

So while she sat on the bench and told me about her world where the trees only move in the breeze, the bumblebees are blue, and the pigs don't have wings except when joking, I made my usual dishes and sold them to the rest of us townspeople. She was a bit of a spectacle. The people stretched their necks to look at her. Just to catch a glimpse.

About a week after she arrived, I woke to find her in the kitchen, her movements mirroring my movements from the day before as she swung around. She removed the red whistle pastries from the oven and filled them with the ready-made beetle cream. Everything was in motion, practiced, rhythmic.

It was like magic.

She was magic.

The dishes clanged when she saw me standing there watching her.

I simply reached forward towards the tray of pastries and took a sample for myself. It was like magic. This girl had improved the recipe!

The red whistle pastries sold out soon after opening the store that morning.

So I taught her how to make horned pies, pumpkin strudels, and vanilla bean stews. Each flavour I showed her to make, she merely seemed to twinkle her fingers over it and the food was even more delicious than it was before. After she had conquered each, she turned to new delights.

She sighed and said, in her strange accent, "I wish you had chocolate here."

""Choc-lat?"

"It's like…," I watched her struggle. "It's sweet."

"Like a cust-ard?" I mimicked her word for the pastry cream.

The girl frowned and scrunched up her nose. "You can eat it as a hard sweet or you can use it to flavour things… like cake!"

I frowned for a moment and then nodded as if I understood. She reached for a berry growing on an overhead vine and plucked it, then pulled it open with her thumbs to smell what was inside.

She frowned and stood to her feet. She bounced around the room, pulling berries from their vines, snatching up crumpled raggle beetles, and collecting sasine flowers from the plants on the window sill.

I watched patiently as she ground the ingredients together into an unappetising brown paste. I frowned as she dipped her finger in and sampled it. Her eyes lit up.

The next ingredients were more familiar to me: eggs, flour, butter. I scrambled to watch every moment. I asked if there was anything I could do at that point. But there was nothing, she was in her own little world. She fluttered around as if dancing.

I felt my stomach sink the more I watched. I felt happy in the surface. I felt a smile frozen in place. But I had lost track of the ingredients filling the iron pot.

My stomach churned and gurgled when the pot went into the oven. The room filled with a mouth-watering scent. A lump grew in my throat.

I watched the girl clean up and silently seethed. A realisation had suddenly hit me. It left a horrid taste in my mouth, sour and musty. I felt the thought take hold, sink into my chest.

I watched in a bizarre trance as the girl mixed up another batter, with milk instead of the other ingredients. Then she slathered it on the outside of her oven-creation once it had cooled. It wasn't much to look at but she picked some vine flowers and placed them on top as if the brown lump in front of me could look glamorous.

I picked up my trident to try the piece of chocolate cake the girl cut me. The cake was delicious. But that horrid taste in my mouth grew stronger and the feeling in my chest spread to all of me. It had taken root and the thoughts in my mind were shadowy and marked with anger.

I am not proud of what I did next. I walked the girl back to the place where I found her and I left her there. Her cheeks were streaming with tears, her face red, as I left her there.

I am proud of the chocolate cake that I sell in my store though. Everyone loves it, I sell more of that than anything else. No one asks where the girl went.