Dolores I
“How big a cake will you have on your wedding day?”
Dolores asked me in a dream one night. I paused - to finish chewing my candied oatmeal snack. I gulped and swallowed, contemplated the question. Is size important for a cake? Surely - taste, texture, appearance, and general deliciousness are more important factors. Size then is by the by, a secondary or even tertiary consideration.
“I don’t care,” I responded curtly, “I care more about its general deliciousness.”
“Oo, well look at you,” she said, mounting a broomstick to fly to the corner shop. She returned promptly with half a pint of milk, the other half dribbling from both sides of her mouth like some vampire of the dairy.
“But no,” she said, wiping her mouth, “in all honesty - how big?”
I paused in my knitting and gave her a stare as cold and hard as a February pavement.
“General deliciousness is all - size immaterial. That’s it.” I pick up my knitting needles once more, to show her that it was indeed, it.
She began then to rock back and forth a little manically at first, and then increasingly so. “Size,” she wheezed, “size.”
Perturbed and annoyed, I looked up and askance. “What does size have to do with it?” I demanded, not a little aggressively. “Size is nothing, just occupied space. How well is the space occupied is the question that concerns me - what fills it, not how much of it is filled.”
Dolores disagrees. She shakes her head like a dog dejected and sinks down into her arms. I do not know what irks her so. Why this emphasis on size with wedding cakes of all things.
“But it must be big,” she harrumphs, “it must be.”
“It will be big enough,” I say now attempting to reassure and placate, tired as I am of our circular exchange, “but that is not the primary factor in my mind.”
“Hm,” she pauses, seemingly at ease for the first time in this dream. “How big though?”
We begin again - to déjà vu.