By Erin Jamieson
Without asking, you dump confetti sprinkles in the pancake batter while I’m stirring. You smell like jasmine tea and anger, and we reach for the spatula at the same time.
Your hand is smooth; mine is calloused.
I just thought you could use some help, you say.
I pull away, as I have been for over a year. Since the day you came home with a receipt for Starbucks: two vanilla chai lattes. The cheating bothered me less than you becoming the type of person who drank vanilla chai lattes, when, on our first date, you took me out to McDonald’s because you said all coffee tastes like dirt anyway.
But today my stomach bubbles with the bubbles of the batter on the frying pan. The sprinkles fuse, as I knew they would. A rainbow pancake, a dream for our child. He’d be 5 years old today.
Why don’t you get out some fruit, you say. Only I feel your words more than I hear them. I scrub the counters clean while you keep making more and more pancakes. Soon, your scent is overpowered by the saccharine batter. Soon, my scent is gone too, and it might be anyone’s home, a happy home, if one exists.
I set the table for one. I start back for my plate and fork and knife, but then I spot an open cabinet, just slightly ajar. The one where we keep the cookbooks we received as wedding gifts. The last time we used any, our son was still alive.
What are you doing? you ask.
But before you can stop me, I swing open the cabinet, cookbooks, crammed haphazardly, spill out. I see the 100 Quick Meals cookbook my mother bought us, kick it aside. I reach for a slim paperback in the very back. Pale blue.
Don’t, you say, and try to pull me away.
The pancakes are going to burn.
Why are you looking at that?
But you know. We both know why. The reason this cabinet has been locked for a year is because I can’t look at the cookbook without seeing our son, milky blue skin and long eyelashes. Baby’s First Moments, crammed alongside recipes for gyros and baklava.
Steam, then smoke. Our fire alarm sounds.
Neither of us move.
You stand beside me, and for the first time in a year, I see it: the haunted, fearful look in your eyes.
I don’t want to pretend like he didn’t exist. Like we didn’t exist.
I turn off the stove top. The pancakes are charred black. I pull up a seat- your seat- and eat one, chewing through the thickest parts, dousing it with syrup.
At least I can no longer see those damn sprinkles.
You’re still standing by the cookbooks. I’m sorry.
It’s what I’ve been waiting for, since that day. Maybe for five years.
I stack the dishes in the sink, and walk out the front door, leaving you and the pancakes.
Erin Jamieson’s writing has been published in over 100 literary magazines and nominated twice for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of Net. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including Fairytales (Bottle Cap Press, 2023) and a forthcoming collection, and a historical novel, Sky of Ashes, Land of Dreams (Type Eighteen Books, 2023).