July/August 2014
Christine Venzon is a freelance writer residing in Peoria, IL who dreams of returning to her former home on the bayous of Louisiana. A former education writer, she specializes in all things food, especially sustainable food systems and food and social and environmental justice.
The story we present in this issue won Third Place in the 2014 Bethlehem Writers Roundtable SHORT STORY AWARD competition.
The Devil You Know
Christine Venzon
Sitting at the kitchen table, fork poised, Carmen eyed her nemesis. Its feathery layers were cinnamon-shaded, studded with flecks of real raisins and faux carrot. Buttercream frosting rolled like fresh-fallen snow, adorned with a demure squiggle of orange and curl of green.
Who's stronger? Carmen challenged herself. You or the cake?
She knew her foe: one-twelfth of a boxed cake prepared according to package directions (and that was easily one-twelfth of a cake), 260 calories. Canned frosting, approximately four tablespoons at 70 calories per, 280 calories. One tablespoon raisins, 35 calories. Grand total: 575 calories.
And that wasn't counting the buttercream carrot.
On her side: lifting fork to face and chewing, approximately 12 bites (she was practiced in small bites), maybe four calories, over and above the basal metabolic rate of one calorie per minute. Estimated eating time: optimistically, two minutes. Grand total: six calories.
Hardly a fair fight.
Ironic. Her earliest memories of food involved carrot cake. She was six years old, helping her sister make one for a high school home ec assignment. Just the two of them, measuring, stirring, conferring. It got them an A.
It was a carrot cake her mother baked for her twelfth birthday (at 114 pounds), because horses loved carrots and she loved horses. She imagined slipping out to the barn that didn't stand on the small farm where her family didn't live, to share her piece with the handsome Arabian stallion she pretended she owned. He would snuffle the cake and get frosting on his whiskers.
And it was a carrot cake her mother bought when she graduated high school (147 pounds), a small, beautiful, round cake Baroquely ornamented with yellow roses and green shell trim. It was for just Carmen and her parents, the only ones at home after her sister and brother left for careers and marriage.
Carmen had yelled, "Why do you always try to buy love with food!" and slammed her bedroom door, coming out after they'd gone to bed and eating the rest of the cake with her hands.
Not that carrot cake carried more significance than the Suzy-Q's her father picked up at the Hostess bakery outlet or the day-old donuts they earned by behaving at church. It was only that carrot cake overran the table at the Zion AME Church bake sale outside the library when she left work. Normally she would have walked past without looking. But it was late afternoon and few people were buying. The girls looked as disappointed as she always felt, leaving that bright-lit place of possibilities, where she thrived on tracking down that book or article or piece of information (the timetable for the Eurostar from London to Paris, proposal guidelines for National Science Foundation grants in geochemistry). Keys that opened a world for another to explore.
So she bought a piece, paying twice the asking price. And left smiling, because maybe the Zion church choir could afford to go to the competition in Springfield. And she would give the cake to a neighbor who had cut up a fallen limb in her yard last week and hauled it to the curb. Then it would have played a noble role, bringing joy not once but twice, and she the unscathed facilitator.
Only the neighbor wasn't home. Night closed in, her weakest hour, when one piece of cake could start her down a slippery slope to the morass of self-loathing. She'd spent 10 years clawing her way out, marking the ascent with descending numbers. At 138 pounds, she stopped being ashamed of her body. At 127, she started believing compliments about it. At 119, she was almost proud of it.
No one would blame her for falling. But would they love her afterward?
Who's stronger? Carmen challenged herself. You or the cake?
She decided.
She raised the plastic wrap from the cake, like lifting the veil on a bride. A tide of nutmeg and vanilla flooded her nostrils. The fork pierced the frosting, severing a tender morsel that bathed her mouth with luxuriant, longed-for sweetness. She stopped counting bites. She lost track of time, savoring each mouthful, until neither crumb of cake nor smear of frosting remained.
She lingered, staring at the oily blot on the paper plate. She had to tell someone. Someone deserved to know what she'd done.
Carmen punched the number on her phone. "Mom? Nothing much. You? I just wanted to . . ." She took a steadying breath. "I just had a piece of cake. It was really good. . . . Mom?"
Breathless silence was the response, then sobs. Carmen felt her own eyes dampen.
Afterward Carmen stripped before the mirror, seeking reassurance in the reflected image. She found it: in legs, spindly as a robin's; in skin, dry as deer hide stretched tight over a washboard of ribs; in knobby arms, hanging like broken branches on a dead tree.
At 87 pounds, she was starting to believe when people said it wouldn't hurt to put on a little weight.
The Top Ten . . .
Skills I Learned from Reading the Bible
Christine Venzon
I think every struggle with self is a struggle between good and evil. For guidance on writing, then, what better source than the book of good and evil, the Bible? At risk of committing sacrilege, I offer this list:
10. Go larger-than-life. Drama sells. Think parting the Red Sea, the feeding the 5,000. (Even Julia Child never pulled that off.)
9. Trust readers with nonessentials. Sure, I'd like to know what Jesus looked like, but it's irrelevant to the purpose. (I see him with a beard and dark hair – and ripped from all that walking and carpentry work).
8. Lay a solid foundation. Paul converted whole cities by pointing out the ways that Christianity fulfilled the Jewish Law. Whether you're building to climax or leaving clues to a mystery, make your argument just as sound.
7. Mine rich veins of symbolism and metaphor. Healing the lame, curing the blind – there's more than physical therapy and ophthalmology going on here.
6. Speak the language of the times. When was the last time you walked beneath the terebinths or played a timbrel? People in the Old Testament did it all the time. (Today we call them oaks and a tambourine.)
5. Stick with one genre per story. Poetry, history, allegory – it's all there, and it confuses people who don't know how to read them differently.
4. Make a mess. The Bible is full of contradiction. So is life. Predictable characters, neat story lines, and wrapped-in-a-bow endings are contrived and boring.
3. Write about rebels. They have the greatest potential for change and conversion. Think about the Prodigal Son and Jonah (of whale fame).
2. Use one-liners sparingly. Some people write dialogue like the Book of Proverbs – one pithy line after another. This gets tiring to read.
1. Let yourself be inspired. Sometimes something in you says "This must be told." Don't deny the S