LAMBETH CAKE FOR THE DAMNED

Coco-Lily Garrett-Kellett

 

There’s a fly flattened in my dream journal. Its legs bent in prayer, its body fossilised mid-sin. I left it there on purpose. A relic. A threat. It stares up at me every night before sleep, reminding me that nothing dies without meaning. Not even me. Especially not me. 

The curtains are green and aggressive. They hang like execution robes and turn the room septic. That colour? It triggers something feral. I cry so hard my eyes blister. Holy water, radioactive. My face? A cracked chalice. I sob as if someone just broke God in half. 

I went to church yesterday—not to confess. Not to kneel. I went to hand out candy bracelets to the virgin girls with mosquito knees and chemical smiles. They’re fast, glossy, egg-pure. They float down the church steps like spilled glitter. There’s nothing behind their eyes except helium. They speak in a pitch only angels or marketing execs could love. They believe in God the way that babies believe in mirrors. They shine without shame. 

Their teeth are orthodontic miracles. White picket fences in God’s cul-de-sac. I want to smash each one with a hammer just to see what grows in the gaps. 

They adore me in the way you adore a cat with mange: fascinated, but always out of reach. I wink. They twitch. 

For the boys, I make tangerine lollipops. They watch me stir sugar with my fingers. I let them. They want me like a nightmare they jerk off to and then pray away. They say my name in locker rooms and confessionals. Their blazers match the curtains, and I flinch at the colour. It’s the colour of guilt crawling up your legs. 

It’s the colour of May pretending not to be winter. 

There’s dirt under my Persian rug. Decades of it. I peel it back like scabbed wallpaper and find history bleeding through. I’m giving the rug to a woman whose husband opened his own stomach with a bread knife after watching QVC. He bled out on their IKEA mattress while she watered the fake fern. When I hand her the rug, she thanks me with copper breath. That’s what grief smells like when it’s been microwaved. 

Under the rug, something’s growing. A weed with ambition. A single pink sprout, obscene and erect. It winks at me, daring me to step on it. Somewhere offscreen, a man narrates birds in a tweed voice. He tells me my shoes are too pink. He tells me that girls like me end up in stories that don’t end well. I tell him that I don’t believe in birds or men who wear binoculars as jewellery. 

I tell him that I’m baking a Lambeth cake instead. For the children. For the perverts. For the saved. 

I’ll pipe it with royal icing, dead-white, bridal and choking. I’ll make a carrot stew so sweet it feels pornographic, then coat it in cinnamon dust like cremation ash. I’ll serve it on porcelain that moans when you touch it. The fork? A crucifix. I’ll say: 

‘Here. Eat this. This is what faith tastes like once it’s been molested.’ 

When they thank me, I’ll chew my tongue until I hit syrup. Then spit it into the soil behind the church just to see what kind of sin grows from a sugar wound. 

Strawberries sprout first—wet, swollen things. I crush them in my fists, smear them down my wrists for perfume. I want to smell edible. I want to smell alive. Not the kind of alive that gets married. The kind that gets exorcised. 

I am a waitress. A prophet. A dirty postcard from the afterlife. I’m carrying a message, but I’ve forgotten the language. All I know is it itches. It purrs. It wants out. 

What is the message? 

Who sent it? 

And why does it sound so much like me when I scream? 

Author: Coco-Lily Garrett-Kellett

Artist: Tia Shang

Edited by: Charley Anderson and Lara Madeline Rand

Editors: Coco Thompson and Tia Shang