Art Here don’t let them eat cake

Fiction by brendan Slocumb • illuStration by m ariano Santillan

He smelled like the cake factory: frosting, the yeasty stench of batter and butter, but more than anything else, sugar. Baked sugar, tangy and sweet, that coated the back of his tongue and the inside of his eyelashes. Leaving the factory at the end of the shift, he could feel the sugar aroma around him like a coat or a fog, always moving with him. Of course, his friends started calling him Bon Bon. He’d hated the nickname, but by now it had hung on him so long that he didn’t mind it.

He ordered another beer and checked his watch. His buddy, Tig, was late, as usual. Meet me at the bar at 6:30 and DONT BE LATE, Tig had texted him. SERIOUS!!!

Now it was 6:49, and he’d finished the first beer and ordered a second. Why Bon Bon had believed Tig that this time actually was urgent, Bon Bon didn’t know. He’d shown up in his work clothes without changing back into his street clothes, the King Arthur Brand cake flour misting up from his pant legs every time he shifted on the bar stool.

“You makin’ me hungry, buddy,” Alan, the bartender, told him for the third time. “What do you think of carrot cake? You a big fan?”

“I figured you for a chocolate cake man,” Bon Bon said. “That was your wife in the shop the other day, wasn’t it? She bought the 14-inch and the 18-inch. Double chocolate.”

“Wife loves them,” Alan said, buffing the bar and looking away. His A-shirt, with dozens of stains on it — bourbons, whiskeys, wines — barely covered his paunch. Seemed like Alan loved those chocolate cakes, too.

Bon Bon nodded politely, tried to squeeze out a smile and looked again at the door.

“You must get sick of cakes,” Alan said. “All them sweets. That vanilla confetti cake is my favorite.”

“Never touch the stuff,” Bon Bon said. “I only eat salty stuff. You got more of these?” He pushed the empty dish that had con-