Sugar, Spice, & Everything About Being a Person
By Allison Elizabeth
with quotes from Shelia Heti
“Women apologize too much, I once decided, and made myself stop, and now found it incredibly difficult to tell anyone I was sorry.”
By Naliyah Grant
In a dream I am making my sister a birthday cake. In the same dream I have forgotten to make your birthday cake. My sister’s birthday is tomorrow, your birthday was three days ago. Belated is such a tacky word, I can just wait until next year. Perhaps I can stop making this cake to even the score. Nobody gets anything and we’re all unhappy about it. Maybe even just neutral. Has a cake ever mattered that much to anyone? It’s just butter and flour and sugar mixed with my fingers that have been inside my mouth assessing the flavor of each bite. It’s pretty good I must say if I have a say and I am the one sucking on an index finger. I really gotta get in there to get the sprinkle out from under my nail. That’s right. This is a funetti cake. In this dream the sprinkles are all pink, and that’s maybe your third favorite color? Definitely not number one or number two. Nothing you’d want to wrap in tinfoil and put in the freezer until next year. If we’re not saving it we’re wasting it. If nobody is going to eat this cake because the sprinkles are pink than I am going to quit while I’m ahead, but this is a dream and in dreams there are no mistakes, only events. I blink and the cake is ready. It’s for my sister, but maybe I can just give it to you to say that I made you a cake. Then in four days from now I can make my sister a new cake. You don’t like pink sprinkles, it’s just a dream can’t we change the color of the sprinkles? The cake is made with pink sprinkles, they are not a mistake simply an event. I didn’t make you a cake it wasn’t a mistake it was simply an event. I’m sorry. I’m not going to serve you something you don’t like. Next year I will rectify this if I remember, but for now I have to deliver this cake to my sister.
“How else could I make the universe love me”
The view from up here is a wonderful place to project the life of myself on to others. My most recent setting is on the tops of the fingers of a boy whom I don’t know the name of and desire only to call him Ernest. Ernest has blond hair that appears well conditioned and easy to comb in the fingers through. I have already preplanned our first conversation in every way it is bound to occur.
ME
I like your shirt, did you pick it out yourself?
ERNEST
This is my costume. I was in the play.
ME
Oh yes I know. I was the person making the lights turn on and off.
ERNEST
You are the backbone of this whole institution.
ME
Oh not at all. You shined-
ERNEST
How much are they paying you?
ME
I do it for the love of the craft.
ERNEST
Well if it’s up to me I’d give you a raise.
ME
Why not just give me the whole building?
ERNEST
I’m resigning the deed in your name.
ME
You have the power to do that?
ERNEST
For you I have the power to do anything.
From there we lock eyes and then lips and then hands and we never part from each other. I tell Ernest I have to go home and Ernest tells me he shredded my lease and purchased us a studio apartment in Albany Park so I can wonder when I please and take the train when my feet have failed me and he will be there to take care of me. Ernest cooks me salmon and rice with a single strand of his hair so I remember who provides me with everything I need. I call out ballet steps and Ernest performs them across the floor.
He is perfect.
If it all times out right the perfect night should be tomorrow under the full moon with the herbs of a witch and a poem I wrote in red ink.
To know a flower is to water its bud
To love flour is to bake a cake
Flowery language softens the fall
Flouncing to fumbling to nothing at all
“I’m just sitting here, vibrating in my apartment, at having been given this one chance to live.”
After it all passes I will still have to reintroduce myself. There’s nothing more exciting today to make it stick more than yesterday. Maybe if I was covered in olive oil or lipstick I could explain how it happened so I could be remembered as the girl covered in olive oil or lipstick with the funny backstory. When I was in middle school I would answer every single question in choir class. The gift of listening ears and critical thinking had not been shared with my classmates, dwindling all purpose down to ending a conversation with our teacher, causing them to interrupt me explaining the necessity of a key change. Our teacher demanded they apologize to ‘Allison’ (that is me. Hello.) to which my classmates looked left and looked right, “who is ‘Allison’ again?” Again today like I did back then I grit my teeth knowing not else to say but, I AM ALLISON. What else do I bring to the table if not the answer? I am cheap, there is no reason to market anything. Ask me something with more consequence than who I am. Something that does not change more frequently than the moon. What flavor cake is my favorite? How do I get the timing on that queue just right? Something that will stay the same as long as it works. It is a gift to be forgotten. No stakes to pin myself on except the ones of my own making. Except no one having the desire for me to die makes me feel inconsequential. There should be more ripples in the water from my strides in problem solving, but I suppose when a problem is solved then it’s not a problem anymore. No need for further questions. If I covered myself in oil I could reach out and stain your shirt. Forgot my name? It’s right there. No I’m not named oil stain, but I was one who did that to you. You can’t wash it out with soap. The ducklings hate it! Tell me how much they hate me. Pull my hair, open my jaw, pour the oil down my throat while telling me how I am responsible for the oil spills and war and your mother leaving you to start a new family with the Italian chef down the road. I did it all. It was me. And my name is?
