She bakes me in different sizes, adding vanilla pudding inside, warm like her heart no one sees. I’m frosty, they say, eyeing my cream cheese icing—the pudding, the interior, unseen. They swallow bundtinis, bite into bundtlets, slice bundt cakes. They cut or bite or swallow my heart. Like hers.
Shanti Chandrasekhar, who savors every bit of banana bundt cakes, wrote this story based on a prompt.
Fireworks finale—a descending canopy—envelops them. “Whoa!” Her five-year-old’s hand, she holds. Through his eyes, awestruck, she watches. Her husband’s forced-enthusiastic presence, this moment excludes.
Faraway pops-and-crackles, she hears from her bed. That little hand, she misses. Her now-adult son will hold her hand when she needs, she trusts.
Motherhood and writing are two things Shanti Chandrasekhar finds most rewarding and fulfilling. She writes from her home in Maryland.
She shreds the cloak of past trauma. She defies present challenges.
Then, she stops fighting. She treasures her newfound peace.
A trace of sadness lingers somewhere within; the remnant is part of her now. If she lets that go, she’d be incomplete. She wouldn’t know how to grieve for herself.
Shanti Chandrasekhar writes and lives in Maryland. Her work has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, Braided Way, Literary Mama, The Washington Post, and elsewhere.