The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

Rose Edelstein, 9 years old, realizes that she can taste emotions in the cake her mother had baked.

Rose takes the first bite of cake and tastes “the chocolate, but in drifts and traces, in an unfurling, or an opening. It seemed that my mouth was also filling with the taste of smallness, the sensation of shrinking, of upset, tasting a distance I somehow knew was connected to my mother tasting a crowded sense of her thinking, a spiral, like I could almost even taste the grit in her jaw that had created the headache that meant she had to take as many aspirins as were necessary, a white dotted line of them in a row on the nightstand like an ellipsis to her comment: I’m just going to lie down … None of it was a bad taste, so much, but here was a kind of lack of wholeness to the flavors that made it taste hollow, like the lemon and chocolate were just surrounding a hollowness.”

Rose must find a way to live with her affliction in a dysfunctional but well meaning family. See the website of Aimee Bender here: http://www.flammableskirt.com/