Mirror glaze looks toughest right before the knife goes in.

The knife hesitates anyway. The glaze has a surface that wants to stay whole.

I make the first cut and the glaze cracks. Not dramatically. More like ice on a puddle when you step on it. Small fractures spreading away from the blade.

The slice drags a bit. Crumbs cling to the knife. I wipe the blade on a damp paper towel between cuts. The towel turns purple, then grey, then sticky.

Two plates on the counter.

One slice from the white cake. One from the purple cake. Set down side by side so the interiors face up.

Cross-sections are blunt. They show you what happened when you weren’t looking.

The crumbs aren’t identical. One cake rose higher. One has a tighter crumb near the bottom where the heat held longer. Little air tunnels. A darker line where the batter folded over itself.

Sometimes the inside matches the outside. Vanilla under white. Chocolate under purple. A neat story.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

A clean white shell can hide a dark interior. A galaxy coating can hide plain vanilla. You stand there looking at it the way you look at a paint sample after you’ve already painted the room.

The fork presses down and the glaze fractures into shards. It’s sweet and a little rubbery from the gelatin. It sticks to your teeth for a second before it melts.

The cake underneath tastes like cake. Eggs. Butter. Flour. Whatever vanilla was in the cupboard. The purple doesn’t taste like space. The white doesn’t taste like weddings. It tastes like sugar and chocolate and dye, because that’s what it is.

I eat the two slices slowly. The glaze makes a thin snapping sound when the fork breaks it. The crumbs leave a trail on the plate.

The tops still look like mirrors on the counter. The cut faces look ordinary. Sponge and air.

Leftovers go back into the fridge. Plastic wrap pulled tight over the exposed interiors. The glaze dulls overnight. It loses that showroom shine and goes a little satin.

In the morning the cakes are still there, quieter. The drips are stiff. The colors are the same, but the reflection is gone. Nobody photographs the morning after.

There’s a thumbprint in the purple where I grabbed it wrong moving it. The white has a hairline crack near the edge. Handling marks. Proof that it was in a kitchen.

My grandmother’s cake pans are in the cabinet. Dented aluminum. Forty years of birthday cakes. The edges are worn bright where they’ve been washed so many times.

These two cakes will be gone by the weekend.

The pans will still be there.

I wash the knife. Dry it. Put it back in the drawer.

The sink still has a purple stain near the drain.