CNF: Cake
by Nathan Long
My father turned ninety this past week. At the birthday party, my two sisters sat at the table as our mother, younger by nearly a decade but aging faster, brought in the cake that my youngest sister had baked. Nine candles, a thin stick of wax to represent each decade. I stood by the wall, turning off the light as my mother entered the dining room, staring at the flowers of light as they seemed to float toward the table in the dark, illuminating the sunken face of what was once my young mother. As she passed, I saw the outline of her body, bent now perpetually forward from scoliosis, looking not unlike a candle left out in the sun. She held the cake out in front of her like an offering, and I saw below each flame the wax turning to liquid and running, drop by drop, down the candles’ edge.
I’d always thought of candles on a birthday cakes as a celebration, a rare moment when we let ourselves sit in the dark and allow fire into our lives, into our homes. But now I saw how they represented how years pass so quickly, the present illuminated by burning down the wax of the future.
Shakily, Mom placed the cake on the table in front of my father, his face now glowing, and hers receding into the darkness of the room, where she found her chair and sat down. We were all finishing up the song, a song so old and familiar and always so imperfectly sung, that I could almost not hear it at all. As we drew out the last quivering you and silence overtook us, I looked at my father’s eyes, glassy and bright above the flames, and I wondered for what he might wish. What was left to want at ninety, with four healthy adult children and a wife still by your side?
We all watched as he blew out the candles, that tiny sport at the end of the ritual which everyone must witness, to make sure a flame is not missed, and which proves that because you still have breath, you are still alive. And then there was that brief silence, after Dad had exhaled and the candles had expired, when the room was dark and quiet and still, except the ghostly thin grey trails of smoke rising up like spirits from the wicks.
I turned on the bright overhead light, announcing the ritual was over, as they do at the end of concerts. There was my family then, a still portrait around the table. Before I sat down to join them, I watched Dad happily taking out the candles one by one, licking their bases clean of frosting, as though he were still a little boy.
Nathan Alling Long’s work appears on NPR and in over fifty journals and anthologies. His collection of fifty flash fiction, The Origin of Doubt, was released in 2018 by Press 53, and his collection, Everything Merges with the Night, was a finalist for the Hudson Book Manuscript Prize. He is the recipient of a Mellon grant, a Truman Capote literary fellowship, and three Pushcart nominations. He lives in Philadelphia.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Cake”? I love that such a familiar thing as serving a birthday cake can still be examined in a (hopefully) new light–at least new to me. As cliche as it is, the ritual is quite poetic and beautiful. I think the only other thing that’s left out of the piece, the only thing left to say, really, is that I’ve become more and more aware of how rare the moments are when all or most of my family are together, and yet we don’t treat them as rare. We often eat and drink and make jokes, which is great, but the time just slips by, consumed. This time, I concentrated hard to be very present, to observe the details of the few hours the five of us were there together, and it made me appreciate the event more, and be able to write about it with a new clarity. by Nathan Long Gabriella and I were throwing words off our balcony, watching them spin like maple seedlings or drop like unopened cans of beans, then split apart on the sidewalk. Sometimes a letter separated in midair turning ‘mugs’ into ‘mug’, the s floating freely by itself until it caught on the front side of the word, changing it into ‘smug’ a split second before it landed on the ground and shattered into gibberish. Two little girls were playing hopscotch nearby and we threw them ‘daffodils’ and ‘candies’. To the man who spit on our hedge, we dropped ‘ink’. The three letters soaked into his hat, and he looked up bewildered. “I’m no kin of yours,” he said, and we giggled, as we watched the liquid stain his hair. The poor man must have been dyslexic. Gabriella and I drank gin and tea, a concoction her grandmother passed on to her, her secret recipe for surviving the long hours of afternoon bridge parties. Her grandmother would always bring a flask of gin mixed with a milk which would not curdle no matter what the proof, and claim it was her special creamer. Here today, we use lowfat milk and only a drab of gin, but it takes to us. We pour ourselves another cup and salute Gabriella’s grandmother, then drop ‘cream’ over our balcony rail and watch the white letters of the word spill over the grasses. Next, I throw over the word ‘rupture,’ and we laugh as we watch it do just that against the concrete. The sun slips behind clouds, then buildings, then the immense curvature of the Earth, and all is orange and warm, as if only now to reveal that the sun is truly made of fire. I look at Gabriella and see her nose and cheeks glowing crimson and wonder if it is the sunlight or the tea that makes her shine. She stands and laughs aloud. Then, without letting me see it, she tosses a word over the balcony she has had hidden in the pocket of her house dress. “What was it? What was it?” I yell, bending over the rail to read the twirling thing. I should be able to make it out, for as it falls it grows larger and larger, longer and longer, but I can’t. By miracle, before the word lands, it straightens out for a moment, and I manage to read it: “Century” it says, then splinters into a hundred pieces. “We’ve lost a whole century,” I cry and look up at Gabriella, only to see that she has grown quite old. The tea pot and cups are empty. The flask is dry. Then I feel it in my own bones, a wrinkled, crippling force, like gravity exponentialized. Gabriella begins to shiver. The sun light is all but gone. “Come on,” I say to her, “it’s time to go inside.” Nathan Alling Long has stories and essays published in forty anthologies and literary journals, including Tin House, Glimmer Train, Story Quarterly, The Sun, and Indiana Review. His work has appeared on NPR and has won him a Truman Capote Fellowship, a Mellon Foundation Fellowship, and a Pushcart nomination. He lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Richard Stockton College of NJ. More information can be found at http://wp.stockton.edu/longn/. What do words mean to you? What do you see as their power? A word’s meaning, besides its denotation and connotation—the difference between ‘caviar’ and ‘fish eggs’—is shaped, it seems, by our personal experiences. ‘Dog’ feels drastically different, depending on whether you were just bitten by one, hope to be rescued by one, plan on eating one, or just lost the one you cared for for years. Beyond that though, I think we have personal relationship to words that have nothing to do with literal meaning. I savor the way ‘murmur’ rumbles in my mouth, I have a sense of pride at finally being able to properly pronounce the words ‘linoleum’ and ‘litigious’, and I draw anxious around ‘eschew’ and ‘officious,’ both of which I learned during volatile arguments years ago. But these feelings about certain words must shape their meaning as well. About power: What first comes to mind is that story of two men walking down the street holding hands. A car drives by and the passenger shouts out “Faggots!” to which the men respond, “Really? So are we.” The story always reminds me that the most powerful words can still be altered, redirected—or in post-modern parlance, reclaimed. It reminds me that, ultimately, we can refuse(or maybe the better word is ‘defuse’ ) any emotional message offered to us. Lastly, the story reminds me that perhaps the most powerful force conducted through words is humor. A good pun or play on words disorients us momentarily, reminds us that the language we take so seriously is a made up system, not completely anchored to the real word. Maybe this is the real power of words—that they can mean so much and simultaneously mean nothing.That Long Evening on Our Balcony
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
Upcoming
05/04 • Leath Tonino
05/11 • Chris Pellizzari
05/18 • Chris Clemens
05/25 • Clayton Eccard
06/01 • TBD
06/08 • TBD
06/15 • TBD
06/22 • TBD
06/29 • TBD
07/06 • TBD
07/13 • TBD
07/20 • TBD
07/27 • TBD
08/03 • TBD
08/10 • TBD
08/17 • TBD
08/24 • TBD
08/31 • TBD
09/07 • TBD
09/14 • TBD
09/21 • TBD