Sick Day Abecedarian

A thin spun sugar drips gossamer cobwebs. Bakers drip these strands from rolling pins and circle them into amber sugar nests to decorate an elaborate cake laden with fruit. Egg custards wobble in their shallow tins. Fevers in the tent and on the couch as we watch The Great British Baking Show parading phantasmagoria. He watches in iron curtain silence, clammy and weak. I watch him watching and imagine thoughts of jackal-hunger, roaming with his moonlit pack, knowing not to eat is to die or to eat is to die. Lambs frolic in greeny fields dotted with buttercups. Marzipan and fondant enrobe a cake’s tall torso. Now the judges taste it treacly, under baked, overly moist, from lips rejecting what he longs to taste, perfection or not. Gingerbread is laced in icing to form a queen’s crown, broken unceremoniously, overly baked. Rain streaks the tent and our old farmhouse nestles into snow so deep it warms the foundation. I am thankful for treatment, so he can live with illness. Underneath the dense stratus snow clouds, veins and arteries scratched by sugar molecules, weathering the damage, tiny capillaries, trade x for y, glucose for insulin. On TV the cottony lambs yearn for pasture. Spring is in full rupture. They zigzag after one another, their future off-screen.