Flash Fiction 3rd Place: Additives, Preservatives and Fear by Nola Addison
Dad’s setting out the ‘good’ plates, the octagonal ones with painted roses.
“We’ve had these since you were nippers,” and so begins his ‘good’ plate monologue. “We didn’t have much, but your mam saved up, bought one a month, then saved for the four cups and saucers.”
I exchange smirks with my brother across the table. We must have heard this a million times, baffled how Dad thinks this nugget of family history has somehow passed us by. As he reaches the inevitable crescendo, we snigger and join in, “bloody Thatcher’s fault we couldn’t afford the matching teapot.”
“It’s my birthday, so no Thatcher, no politics, no winding each other up!” Mam reminds us, as she lurches from the door frame to the sideboard to the dining chair, swatting away my brother’s attempt to assist. “The tea’s brewing, so how about a bit of that cake?”
A store-bought celebration cake sits on Mam’s cake stand in the centre of the table. We’ve all avoided looking at it, knowing it shouldn’t be there. Knowing in its place should be three glorious layers of light sponge sandwiched with buttercream and homemade jam and topped with a perimeter of peaked icing and fresh strawberries. I’m relieved I forgot to buy candles, glad not to further illuminate this birthday anomaly, as I cut it and serve Mam a slice.
“Lovely.” She lies. Tries to make this departure from tradition seem ok. To make the fact she no longer bakes seem ok. Mam made the best birthday cakes, made everyone’s birthday cakes — including her own. “Don’t ever buy me one,” she’d insist. “Those things are laced with additives and preservatives and horrible things you can’t pronounce.”
She motions for us to dig in.
‘Mmmm,’ we say in unison, but don’t mean it, as we can only taste one thing. An ingredient which should have been listed in bold on the cake box—FEAR—alongside the additives and preservatives. A taste so bitterly at odds with this snapshot of our family, of the four of us in our usual formation around the solid mahogany table. A taste of all the things I’ve tried not to notice; the handrails in the bathroom, boxes of pills on the kitchen bench, her unkempt hair, and the flecks of dust hovering over our younger framed faces that line the usually pristine sideboard. And swallowing it down can’t make it go away. It’s indigestible. A churning reminder I’d used work as an excuse to avoid coming here recently, that my brother had done the same.
“We’ve not had a cheers,” Dad says, breaking the silence and fetching the mismatched teapot.
We perform our customary birthday clinking together of rose painted tea cups. Forcing smiles as we sip. Allowing the familiar ‘two bags in a warmed pot’ flavour of Mams tea to wash away the lingering tang of additives and preservatives and horrible things we can’t pronounce.
