Jesus Cake Baby
by Stephanie Austin
My boyfriend likes to get high and sit in the shower. We took a shower together for the first time the morning after our third date. I asked him to pass me the shampoo and he said, “OK, but now I’m going to sit down.” So he sat down. That was two years ago.
This morning, he leans against the back of the tub as though he’s sitting against a tree in the park on a Saturday afternoon. He rubs his face like he’s washing it, but he’s not washing it.
I look down at him. “Did you know your trash is overflowing?”
He opens his mouth to catch the water. With his eyes closed, he answers me, “Which trash? Kitchen or bathroom?”
“Bathroom.”
“I’ll take it out when we’re done.”
The getting high part happens with or without the shower. He gets high even if he skips the shower, but when he is in the shower he is always high because he is always high. He’s a wake and bake, and at least six days out of the week, he’s a wash. Wake and bake and wash.
Sometimes we’ll be making out, and he’ll sit down. Sometimes I have to shave, but he’s in the way. I didn’t want to go to the place where I would ask him to hold my foot or let me prop my leg up on his shoulder. He sits if I’m not there or if I am there. I used to try to get out before it happened. He would start shifting around, getting ready to sit, and suddenly I would be struck with the need to brush my teeth, and I would say, it’s been great showering with you, but now I have to go. Jesus, my boyfriend likes to get high and sit in the shower.
It’s not a conversation with Jesus. I’m not calling out to Jesus. Jesus is just a word. It’s a word that is used in anger or exasperation or unconscious thinking. Yes, it’s a commandment, and yes, it’s broken.
* * *
Today I am menstruating. It’s five days early. It happened overnight in my nice, black Victoria Secret panties with seams that will split if I continue to eat the way I do.
At work there is always a megaload of calories in the break room: bagels, pastries, and cookies. Once, someone brought in mini chocolate chip pancakes. They were tiny, and they fit in your palm.
An email announcement goes out to the office: Food. Cake. Hey y'all, there’s a King Cake in the kitchen. Enjoy! Enjoy comes with an exclamation point. We have to exclaim our enjoyment.
Depending on who sends the email, there could be a Billy Joel theme. The subject could read: I’m in love with an uptown King Cake. The email could read: Tired of living in your white bread world? Your downtown man has put a KingCake in the kitchen.
Jesus.
I have been using the word Jesus a lot more often than necessary. I get stuck on a word and use it until it’s dead in my mind. Christ. I did Christ a few months ago. Christ this and Christ that. For awhile I was saying Hells Bells. I said it out loud to my boyfriend and he was like, “Oh my god, what did you say? My mom says that.”
I said, “Maybe I got it from her.”
I don’t know what a King Cake is, but it smells like a Cinnabon store. It’s purple, green, and yellow and maybe that’s red. People are taking small slices and putting their cakes on their napkins and then filing out and chatting with each other about being fat and going on a sugar high and neglecting themselves.
One of my co-workers, a guy I know through the office rumor mill as a guy who likes hard drugs, but who I just know as Dave who sits near me and plays good music from his computer and rolls his eyes during staff meetings, says something about the baby Jesus.
“What about the baby Jesus? Is he here with us right now?” I ask.
“There’s a plastic baby baked into this cake. If you find it, it gives you good luck,” Dave says, “and it’s supposed to beJesus.”
“Jesus is in this cake?”
Dave shrugs and cuts a piece off for himself.
A girl says, “It’s actually not Jesus. Jesus doesn’t go into a King Cake. It doesn’t have to be a baby, either. It can be anything. It can be a miniature rendering of Donald Trump. There’s no rule that says it’s a baby. Or that it’s Jesus.”
Dave puts a big piece of King Cake in his mouth. He chews. Swallows. “I always heard it was Jesus.”
The girl rolls her eyes. She cuts a piece and walks away.
Dave examines the rest of his cake. “No Jesus,” he says. He moves his tongue around in his mouth. “Not there either.”
“What’s the good luck? If you get the baby Jesus in your mouth and you don’t choke on it then you’re cool?” I ask.
I cut myself a piece. It reminds me of day-old coffee cake that isn’t good to eat, but I’ll eat it anyway. It reminds me of college. I peek into my slice, but there is no baby.
So then it’s just me and Dave and we’re eating our cake. He nods, like it’s so good he can’t stand it. I don’t think it’s all that good, and I want some milk. There is a knife next to the cake and it’s covered in frosting. I get a clean one from above the sink where the office manager keeps our fine plastic cutlery.
Probably you are not supposed to cheat and stab the cake with a knife until you find the baby. I guess you’re supposed to let it give birth to the baby on your plate. Dave watches me poke and prod, and then he picks up the dirty knife and starts to poke and prod. He leans forward on his elbows and gives it a half-assed effort.
“I should be doing work,” I say.
We stab, stab, stab the cake.
Dave says, “This is therapeutic.”
“We should do this with all the pastries that come in. Let’s not eat them. Let’s kill them.”
And then my knife hits something. I stop Dave from poking. I touch his arm, and he looks down at me touching his arm but not in a horrible way, in a kind of sweet way. I section off the area where I hit the treasure and there it is.
I scream with exclamation points! I wasn’t expecting to scream. I’m not sure why I’m so excited to find a little plasticJesus baby in a kind of cake I’ve never heard of before ten minutes ago. Dave tosses the knife in the mangled cakebox. “Congratulations on your bundle of joy.”
The baby is the size of a small grape. It’s curled in the fetal position, and it has no face. I wash it off and take it back to my desk. I try to sit him on my shelf, but he keeps tipping over. An hour later, Dave comes over with a crib he fashioned out of a piece of copy paper and staples. He drew lines to represent bars. We put the baby in it, and Dave reaches out with his finger and rocks it slightly. Dave and I stand together, and Dave smells good, like good soap.
“You smell clean,” I say.
Dave, still looking at the baby, says, “I take showers.”
“Standing up or sitting down?”
He turns to me for a second, and says, “What?”
“Nothing,” I say.
The faceless baby moves from side to side in the makeshift crib in a way that would cause serious damage to a realbaby.
* * *
At my boyfriend’s apartment, he is on the couch watching a Ghost Hunters marathon on the Sci-Fi Channel. There is a pile of weed on the table, and he has his eyes on the screen while his fingers remove the seeds. The seeds go on a candle holder. The candle in the holder smells like apple pie. It’s my candle, and my candle holder. I brought it over to mask the smell of the pot. I put my bag on the recliner with the torn headrest and sit down next to him. He pats my knee and asks me about work.
“I have a baby,” I say.
He is rolling a joint. He lights it, sucks it up, and then holds it.
“A baby,” I say. “I have one.”
When his face starts to turn colors, I tap his knee, like, maybe you should blow the smoke out. The cloud hangs over us and then moves into the other room where it will settle into the carpet and drapes.
He coughs for a long time. It’s a throaty, bronchitis cough. He falls back on the couch and wipes the tears away from his eyes. “That’s so good,” he says.
I lean back, too. I shift my body so it’s facing his and bring my face close, so close I can smell his pot breath. I whisper, “A baby.”
His eyes droop and his face becomes soft. It takes him a long time to say anything. “What?”
I get up and go to my purse. I bought a pack of cigarettes today, and I don’t know why.
“You’re pregnant?”
He is sitting up now. He’s as alert as he can be, which isn’t very alert. He looks like a cheap Halloween mask that’s melted. He looks ugly.
I tap the box of cigarettes against my palm and then unwrap the cellophane. I try to toss the plastic on the coffee table, but it sticks to my hand. So I shake it off. It doesn’t come off. I try to shake it off again. It continues to stick.
“Do you believe in that?” he asks.
I shake my hand again. “What?” I ask. Finally the cellophane floats down to the table. I take a cigarette out. “Smoking while I’m pregnant?”
He looks like he’s going to throw up. “No.” He rubs his head. He coughs a little more. He picks up the joint again. “I mean. I’m not really ready to be a dad.”
“Clearly,” I say. “You’re twenty-nine and not ready for a job.”
He acts offended. “I have a job.”
“You drywall.”
“I do other work on the side.”
“You fix your friends' cars in exchange for beer.”
“You hang out with me while I fix my friends' cars,” he says.
I go into my purse again and pull the baby out. I toss it to him and he catches it. We look at each other and that look says good catch.
He puts the joint on the table, and I pick it up. I take the smallest of puffs. He is looking at the baby. Turning it around in his hands. Rubbing it between his fingers.
“You’re mean,” he says, looking up at me. He puts the baby on the table. It falls over. He tries to sit it up against the candle, and it falls again.
I exhale. “Good one,” I say. I drop the joint on the table.
I pick up my purse, the baby, and the cigarettes and walk out of the house, tripping over his dirty work boots near the door. I kick them out of my way.
Driving home he calls me, and I answer as I’m turning, which almost makes me get into an accident. “Shit,” I say as I pick up the phone. “Shit, shit.”
He doesn’t say anything for awhile.
“Are you coming back tonight?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Probably not. Maybe tomorrow. I’m going to my apartment right now.”
I turn the phone off. I hang my left arm out of the window with my fingers wrapped around an unlit cigarette. I think about the baby in my purse.
-Originally appeared in American Short Fiction, June, 2009
Stephanie Austin's fiction has appeared in The Pacific Review, Fiction, Kitchen Sink, Thin Air Online, and The Blue Guitar. She has a story forthcoming in The Fiddlehead. She is working on her MFA in the low residency program at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.