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FUNERAL CAKE
(CW: Death of a loved one, brief mention of stabbing)

I don’t recognize a single person in the funeral parlour, which shouldn’t surprise me in the least.

In the past two weeks, I’ve come to realize that I knew much less about my brother than I

originally thought. When I was called into the police station to aid their investigation a few days

after his death, I couldn’t believe that we were talking about the same person.

“Can you think of anybody who would want to harm him?”

“No,” I had replied, flustered. “Not at all.”

The officer sitting across from me, whose name tag read Davis, slid a photograph across the cold

metal table towards me. I looked at it for one second before glancing away and trying to suppress

the bile that was rising in my throat.

“This kind of violence usually indicates that the assailant knew the victim.” He had already told

me this, but he said it again with exasperation, as if hoping that the repetition of facts would

somehow jog my memory.

“I’m sorry, I can’t think of anyone.”

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A week later, Davis and another officer that I had never met, Cleary, showed up at our door to

inform me that they had solved my brother’s murder. He’d been mixed up in something seedy,

something that had gotten him killed.

“We understand if you need some time to process this,” Davis had said, when I didn’t

immediately burst into tears at the revelation.

“I’m fine,” I told him, and I was. Sometimes you love somebody, and then they die, and you

realize that you never really knew them at all.

The person in the closed mahogany casket across the room is not somebody I know. He may be

wearing a familiar face, but when he died, he took the brother I knew with him and left me with

somebody that I am meeting for the first time. I wonder if all these other people knew him better

than I did. I wonder if he loved them enough to let them in, if they loved him enough to ask.

I’ve been here for an hour and no one has offered their condolences, which is both relieving and

aggravating. Maybe I’m just as much a stranger to them as they are to me—it’s possible that

nobody in this room even knows that he had a younger sister, and I’m not exactly making myself

the centre of attention. I am sitting in the corner, my back against the wall and my knees drawn

into my chest.

“Would you like a slice of cake? I accidentally cut too much.”

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I look up and see an older woman smiling down at me, holding two paper plates. For a moment

she looks like my mother—hard eyes and a soft smile—but the moment passes and she is just

another stranger. For the third time, I wonder where my mother is, why she’s late to her own

son’s funeral. I am gripped with the fear that something has happened to her too, that I’m sitting

on the floor in this funeral home while she is being stabbed eleven times.

“Would you like a slice of cake?”

I forgot about the woman.

“Oh,” I say flatly. “Yes, thank you.”

She extends one arm towards me and I take the plate from her hand. I think it’s strange to have

cake at a funeral, but it’s a chocolate cake that looks soft and spongy, and I dig a piece out with a

fork. While I’m chewing, she lowers herself down to the ground, multiple joints cracking and

groaning under the pressure.

“I wish they’d start the service already,” the woman says in a conversational tone. “I think we’re

still waiting on a few more.”

I think of my mother dead in a ditch. I wonder if I’ll see this woman again at the next funeral.

“I don’t mind this part too much,” I counter. “I’d rather put it off for as long as possible.”
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The woman glances at me out of the corner of her eye while I take another bite of the cake. “You

cared for him deeply, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“You miss him?”

My eyes begin to sting, and I stare hard at the plate in my hands. “Yeah.”

“I knew him when he was younger, you know,” I look at her properly for the first time since she

approached me. Her eyes are a soft shade of green, her hair is brown but graying at the roots, and

cut into a bob. She looks like she could be my mother’s age, if not slightly older—she might

have been a friend of my mother’s from around the time my brother was born. He and I are only

six years apart, but I often feel like I missed out on a whole lifetime.

“What was he like?”

She sighs fondly. “Full of life. Carefree. Marched to the beat of his own drum. There was this

one time, at the county fair, we lost him for two hours,” she’s no longer talking to me, her eyes

are cast upwards at the ceiling and she’s watching the memory play out before her like a film

reel. I fight back the strange and sudden urge to take her hand. “Your mother invited me along,

she knows how lonely I get during those autumn nights. We followed him around for an hour,
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letting him drag us from booth to booth. He even managed to convince your mother and I to play

one of the games. You know the one where you toss a baseball at a row of glass bottles and hope

they break?”

She looks at me for confirmation and I realize that she has not forgotten about me after all. I nod,

I know the game well. I have played and lost it many times, but I always come away with a

prize, thanks to my brother. I think of my large stuffed panda bear at home, and smile to myself.

The woman continues.

“Well, he paid ten dollars, just so the two of us could play two rounds each. We got really into it,

poured all of our concentration into those little glass bottles. I think we only hit three between the

two of us, which doesn’t win you anything. Anyway, when we finally ran out of baseballs, we

turned around and he was gone. We were both calling his name, even split up and covered the

whole fairground, but we couldn’t find him anywhere.”

My eyes begin to sting.

“They had a few officers stationed at the corners of the grounds, to keep the peace and whatnot.

We begged them to help us search, to stop the whole fair so we could find him, anything at all.

Your mother was near tears. One of them pulled out the walkie from his car, the way they do in

those cop shows during a car chase, you know what I mean. He turned the volume way up so

people would hear it from far away, called his name, and told him we were looking for him.

Within two minutes, he comes running up to us looking as frightened as I’ve ever seen him.”
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She pauses to take a bite of her cake that I think we both forgot she was holding. She closes her

eyes as she chews, savouring the bite, but I want her to continue the story. I want to know where

my brother was hiding, where they could have found him if they had just looked harder. After a

few moments, when she has recollected herself and I am only seconds away from shaking her

shoulders, she continues.

“We started yelling at him in unison, asking him where he’s been and who the hell does he think

he is, running off like that. He didn’t say anything, which you know drives your mother crazy,

but I think she was too relieved to put up much of a fight. Instead he took us both by the hand,

dragging us further into the fair, all the way to this small booth that neither of us had noticed.

There were two chairs and a little girl sitting in one of them, her face half-painted into a butterfly.

She looked up at him and broke into a smile, gesturing towards the face paint and brush that had

been abandoned on the table, asking him to finish the job.”

I reach up subconsciously and wipe my own face, my hand coming away wet with tears. They’re

coming out faster than I can stop them—running into my mouth and dripping down my chin. My

lips taste like salt, and I chew on another piece of cake to cover them in sugar instead.

“We had been fearing the worst, thinking he’d been kidnapped or whatever else… and there he

was… painting a butterfly onto a little girl’s face.” She turns to look at me, smiling, but her face

falls when she takes in my expression. “Oh, sweetie, it was just a fun memory. I was trying to

cheer you up.”

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“You did,” I insist. I need her to know how much it helped, but I don’t know what else to say.

“You really did.”

She cups my face in her right hand, a touch so motherly that it makes me cry harder. With her

thumb, she wipes away my tears, and I lean into her touch.

Quietly, she says, “Your father loved you.”

The world spins.

“What?”

“You were his pride and joy, Annie.”

“I’m not Annie,” I force out, backing away from her.

“Aren’t you Annie Roth? Max Roth’s little girl?” I shake my head feverishly, and look around

the room once more. The large photo next to the casket had been facing the wall, but somebody

must have turned it around during our conversation. The face peering out from the photo is

decidedly not my brother’s, it is a man that I have never seen before.

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“I’m sorry,” I say suddenly, standing up from my spot on the ground and stumbling. The plate

falls from my hands and goes splat when the cake hits the ground. “I have to go.”

The woman, whose name I never even got, calls out after me as I tear past everybody in the room

and crash through the double doors that lead to the lobby. On the sign by the door there is a

listing of all the funeral services taking place today and their room assignments. I find my

brother’s name and walk down the hall, towards the right room.

The service has already begun—my mother, who is still alive despite my worst fears, is in the

middle of delivering the eulogy. She glances up when she hears me come in, frowning slightly. I

can hear her questions now: Where the hell have you been, Liv? Are you seriously late to your

own brother’s funeral? I get that this is hard for you, but could you not have at least shown up on

time?

I slide into the nearest seat and I stare back at my mother and I answer: I’m sorry, I got lost. I

was in a room full of strangers and I lost my brother, and I was trying to find him but I got lost

too.

Well? She asks.

There was no little girl with butterfly face paint. If I shouted his name at the top of my lungs and

told him where to find me, nobody would come running.

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I couldn’t find him, I tell her. I’m sorry.

At the front of the room, next to the casket and the photo of my brother taken a year ago, my

mother continues to deliver the eulogy.