eat. revised.

Kelly had crossed the street several times already, crisscrossing her way down Lex into the lower 40s and finally 30s. Had she been tailed by police or private eyes, the follower would have suspected she knew: the erratic movement, the stop at every corner even with no light, the jerk of her head.

She was not followed. There was no one to observe the furtive glances shot at certain shop windows, or the awkward shuffle she would make when she half turned in the doorway and then quickly walked away. At each entrance a new deterrent stood behemoth in her head. The jingle from the door opening. The sudden turn of all the patrons of a bakery to look at her, standing—
She mumbled and left.

Close to 14th street, she got trapped. The door was not flush with the side of the building but instead was recessed. She had seen, perhaps absurdly, that there was no bell attached to the door. The door was glassed, and as the inside was hot from ovens, steamed just slightly. She stepped away from the bustling of the street into the enclave. The smell of the bakery was indiscernible through the transparent panes, but the heat came off in waves. The mist on the door clung to the middle, and at her height she could see in, could see the golden tops of buns, brightly decorated cupcakes and napoleons. She leaned in on the warmth of the door, almost pressing her face to the glass, when a man, a few inches shorter and several years older, moved abruptly into the condensed space of the enclave with such sudden force that she was barreled past the door and inside.

The warmth within was somewhere between the tropics and a return to the womb. A window cracked open and the swinging door to the kitchen did little to alleviate the heat, but instead kept the the thick air moving in wafts. The walls perspired. The man peered at her. He had apologized effusively and with a strong accent, but dazed by the sudden rush of being in, she said nothing in response. Her gaze did not even remain on his face in a pretense of politeness, but wandered over the abundance, absorbing each little baked soldier in its row, and the crusted empire as a whole facing off against her from behind display glass of the shop. Which reminded her so suddenly and so completely of not a bakery but a butcher shop, that the sheen off bread menaced her from the sidelines of her vision.

The counter girl's smile was genuine, but growing thin with being ignored. Kelly realized the man was trying –and failing—to allow her to order first. The girl too with her absurdly round curls and bubbly cheeks and volley-ball eyes, paused as if each singular swollen roundness of cheek or curl might pop if not spoken to and taken out of the tension of waiting. Kelly flushed and pointed to a lemony looking tart with gleaming gelatinous fruit dying across the top. She didn't bother to try and say the name on the card and purposely did not reflect on the calorie content newly insisted upon by the city, or the probably acid reflux response from the sugar crust.

The girl asked how many and she found her mouth affirming 5 no 6. The man, finger tips lost in his bushy mustache didn't seem to notice. He was looking at the thin Italian wafers on the top shelf. Kelly strained to keep her face from grimacing and watched as the bubble girl selected the tarts, arranging them in a pink cardboard box.

“Party,” Kelly volunteered.

“Oh,” the girl trilled politely.

“Do you think I should get something else?” She could feel the desperation, the drive to convince becoming a frenzied necessity. The bubble conglomerate cooed that tarts were always a hit.

“But is it enough—I don't want to have to cut them, they're so pretty just like that.” Little self-contained monstrosities of denaturalized fruit and color.

“Oh well how many people?” Kelly felt her hands thick, enormous, swollen, traveling to her bag, she kept her gaze on the girl, unsure if she willed herself, or was unable to avert her eyes. “I'm not sure—you can never tell, who actually will show up, who might bring someone—”

The bubbles blinked. “But you must have some idea.”

“Seven.”

“Well, then,” the bubble conglomerate bounced/rolled it's way back to the remaining tart, this one with a burst side, oozing lemon-flavored cream out from between the sugar-crust and on to the bottom of the display case.

“Thirteen.” The bubbles jiggled, poised with the confusion of arthritic.

“Carnation,” the man grumbled.

“No, no,” Kelly tried to sound definitive, “I have flowers, or someone might bring them.”

“For the guests.” She realized he meant the carnation shaped creations on the bottom rack of the display case, the shape carved lovingly from pure confectionery sugar. She could envision a thousand lain upon a field of green jello, which reached indefinitely on all sides, and the carnations placed with mathematical certainty the same distance from one another.

“They're smaller than the tarts,” trilled the counter girl and Kelly thought she heard a vague southern twang.

“Six then.” she rushed out with the second part of her request.

“You still have one left over.”

“What?”

“You have but 12.” Kelly could feel a screaming, not hers but only heard by her and felt the vertigo of standing beneath racks of carved flesh—but really it was baskets swinging above her head.

There was a pause as the girl scraped the carnations from the metal, and then the door burst, with several chattering middle aged women filling the small space of the bakery.

“She has party—“

And she was gone, leaving change, leaving dumb startled faces, breaking into a trot, down the steps to the subway, legs bowed wide in that hurrying-in-heels manner. And it seemed there was nothing thought, a pure agitated waiting for the train, and then the silence on the train.

She slid down, finally in the apartment, against the door, slid till she was sitting, and her knees up too high until she kicked off the obtrusive heels. She wrestled with the bag for all of three seconds before tearing the plastic and cardboard, releasing a shower of sugar-crusted flakes and the colored crumbles of carnation edges. She popped two in her mouth, knowing without a mirror that she looked fully rodent. Something to watch. She fumbled forward for the remote control, crushing the pink cardboard box and squishing a loose tart into the carpet. She managed CSPAN and then a comedy and finally something an indecipherable drama with looming and extreme close-ups. She found, fingers moving with their own purpose, a tart, first the one crushed into the carpet, and then an entire one. Round. She dug her nails into the former fruit entities, smearing the kiwi into the strawberry. She didn't look, but kept focusing on the screen.