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.

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