The Hidden Life of Cecily Larson

by Ellen Baker

Every day, she’d smile through her tears and make up something new. The moon is so far away. I don’t think Goldilocks really ever found the right-size chair. Bessie Smith will never sing again. Spiders die as soon as they lay their eggs. So many people are starved for love all their lives. Her dark eyelashes were always spiked with tears; her eyes were an extraordinary sapphire blue.

Sam thought he’d rather be like his father, who tried, than like his mother, who watched her life go by like she was a spectator at a parade that slightly displeased her.

Sam had ideas about justice, and that his father terrorized his family on random occasions did not seem just to him.

“My grandma back in Alabama,” he said, and it was as if he was telling a secret. “Every year, on my birthday, she would make me a cake fifteen layers high. Fifteen thin little layers, you know? Cookin’ each layer separate on top of the stove in her little old hoecake pan. Now I don’t know how she came up with the money to do it. She must’ve saved all year.”

not to convey the sweet pain in her heart at the thought of it, nor of all the birthdays he’d missed since leaving home at eleven, nor of the fact that no one had made her a birthday cake in all her life, at least not that she could recall. “What kind of icing?” she asked. That quick grin again. “Chocolate. Spread on the layers warm.” The words themselves, staccato at first and then drawn out in his gentle accent, sounded like poetry, to Cecily.