Cheesecake

Abstract

Cheesecake Anna Denejkina (bio) She was tall, but I don't remember her age. In fact, I don't know what age she was. All I know is she was tall, had black curly hair, long fingers, and wore tight jeans. It doesn't really matter what she looked like or how old she was or even her name, but what matters is that one morning she was walking to a cake shop near the beach in some suburb in Sydney's east. It was the day before Christmas. Half of her family met on Christmas Day, and the other, on this day in a house of one of her aunts somewhere by the beach in Sydney's east. Standing at the glass counter, the tall girl with long fingers scrutinized the display, thinking deeply about which cake to get for the faux-Christmas family lunch. She always did this; even at the bar in a club where the music was too loud to hear yelling in your ear, she would consider what she wanted, her arm on the bar, long fingers touching her chin, asking the bartender for options before ordering another sugar-free Red Bull with or without cheap vodka. And so she considered the cakes when another woman stopped at the glass counter. "What are you getting?" She asked the woman she didn't know as they both looked over the glass display, and they chatted about the cakes at the counter, considering out loud the pros and cons of each, describing their likes and dislikes, too rich, too dry, too big, too sweet. The girl with black curly hair told the woman-she-didn't-know that she was buying a cake for her family's lunch on that day. "But I'm also thinking about getting a slice of that cheesecake for the walk over." Her finger moved slightly from her chin to point in the direction of a baked slice of cake. "Though I feel guilty eating before I get to the lunch." "Just get the cheesecake," the woman she didn't know replied. The tall girl in tight jeans with long fingers and black curly hair looked away from the cakes in the glass counter and at the woman she didn't know. The woman was older, fifty, maybe sixty, and gaunt. A cream and red scarf was tied around her head, covering the baby hair regrowth that peered out at the sides above her temples. "Life's too short. Eat the cheesecake," the woman said again. [End Page 118] Anna Denejkina Anna Denejkina is a writer and academic based in Sydney, Australia. She is a Lecturer at Western Sydney University, and her research focuses on intergenerational trauma transmission. Her fiction, poetry, and journalism have been published in the United States and Australia. Copyright © 2022 Wayne State University Press