ANNINA CLAESSON
Leftovers
We commemorate the anniversary of our cat’s murder with cake. We call it a commemoration to avoid the word celebration. This year, I have cooked up a variation on a Träubleskuchen, draping deciliters of mascarpone and redcurrants fit for the bed of a princess. She calls it a step down in maturity from last year’s Black Forest. I tell her she always liked me better in chiffon and loose teeth and plastic tiaras. I expect her to laugh at that.
Instead, she scoops up a spoonful of cream, only cream, and asks if I really have to go to Turin. The one place where she might sink into her concert hall seat and let her eyes dart from my viola only to find the back of his head in the second row. Or worse: that she is not there at all, leaving us within the same four walls, without the power to drag me out.
I try not to slam my coffee mug into the counter. Instead, I open the drawers to find the cling film. The roll rests next to our measuring cups, all neatly stacked. I am still not used to entering the kitchen and finding things where I have not left them.
I run my hands along the plastic curvature of the measuring cups, red marks quantifying time:
– One cup, filled generously: her faith in German train schedules has crumbled like the After Eight thins she crushes with her spoon, she missed her connection and spent the night at Stuttgart station, but both the canapés and the brass section were scrumptious enough to make up for it, I don’t tell her I had stared at my phone all night waiting to hear the voices of weaselly men asking for her ransom.
– – Half a cup, measured using coffee mugs decorated with little treble clefs: my failed Schwarzwald, too soggy, not real Kirschwasser, she would rather I learn to like wine, I have started to sip Radler with the girls at school but they would like me better as a wine-drinker too, no one is hiring people under eighteen, she says she could try again with the child support thing.
– – – One tablespoon, clumsily carried, flour everywhere: frozen strawberries, cream unevenly spread, Lidl ready-made cake base the texture of an aging mattress, there is a shower in our kitchen, I know she has dimples on her back now, no space for us to practice, she wishes I had chosen the flute, maybe we should go back to the shelter, they had dogs there, she does not know I have texted him, nor that he never replied.
– – – – A teaspoon of sugar in her coffee at four in the morning before we leave: I left the stove on, she lets me go back while she starts the car, in the kitchen I find no one but the cat, mewling too loud, I scoop him up, his birdlike heartbeat against my palm, and I have never stopped to really feel it, the rhythm of it, as if he is prey and not predator, he has never really hurt me, and I am hurting him now, and I do not want to pay this price, so I carry him all the way down but the door is open and he wriggles free in a blurred line of movement and she is pulling out of the driveway and the cat runs and she does not notice and does not stop.
He was such a glutton, don’t you remember?
I pour her a new cup of coffee, with two performative spoonfuls of sugar.
Perhaps we should get a dog, she says. Her breath is a reed whistle, somewhere around a G.
I do not point out that dogs are more expensive than cats. If I want her to let me make my own bad decisions, I have to extend the same grace. An old phone number burns in my pocket as I wrap plastic around every crumb left uneaten.
Annina Claesson (she/her) is a researcher and writer currently floundering around Paris. Her work is featured and forthcoming in journals including the New Reader Magazine, Stone of Madness Press, and Lost Balloon, and has also won awards at the Charroux Literary Festival. She can be found on Twitter @AnninaClaesson.