Today is my sister’s wedding and, in the afternoon, Samara and I find ourselves alone in a room with the wedding cake.
It’s a beautiful, three-tier lemon cake and, so far as I know, none of the other guests has even seen it yet.
The excitement is too much for me and I decide that I want to touch the cake with my finger. Must touch the cake with my finger.
So what? I just want to be able to reminisce about touching the cake with my finger while nobody’s looking. I’m making memories.
“I’m going to poke it,” I say aloud, advancing upon the cake as if under the control of a hypnotist.
“Please don’t do that,” says Samara, but I pretend I haven’t heard her and I continue in my zombie march, my Judderman shadow cast upon said confection, eyes wide and finger extended like a malevolent Aye-Aye.
And I touch the cake with the tip of my finger.
What happens next is a bit of a blur, what with all the screaming devils in my head and all, but who’d have thought a wedding cake would be so soft?
My finger leaves a dimple in the icing.
It’s only slight. A minor imperfection. It’s not like I rammed my whole hand into it.
“Look what you did!” says Samara.
“Fuck,” I say.
The thought flickers across my mind that maybe I can correct it but, fearing a Father Ted-style “tapping out the dent in the car” situation–I throw the thought aside as most people would throw aside the thought of poking an unattended wedding cake, and decide instead to run away quite quickly.
If anyone should ask if I saw who touched the cake, I’ll pretend I’ve never even heard of cake. What is cake?
But, just as I turn on my heels, I find myself eye-to-eye with… some guy. A bloody witness!
A man with wire-rimmed glasses and a soul patch has come in and is staring at me. He’s seen the whole thing.
I consider pulling his trousers off in one sudden tug, but my wife is clearly already appalled enough by my behaviour for one wedding so we just walk past him sheepishly. It takes about an hour.
But whoever that guy was, he’ll always know that the bride’s brother at that wedding in 2019 poked the cake.
If he’s anything like me, the secret will nourish him for years to come. He’ll remember it at random moments–standing in line at the cinema, renting a lilo, repairing a shoe–and he’ll laugh. And people will look at him like he’s mad and this will make him laugh even more.
Or maybe–just maybe–he’s a TELL-TALE TIT.
Finding him and killing him is the only option now isn’t it?
Oh, why did I have to poke that wedding cake? I don’t even know anymore. But I think we can all agree that it was Samara’s fault. Imagine being in her position and not rugby tackling me to the ground. Honestly, you can’t take her anywhere.