Caramel Muffins

Message from the author:

My first idea was to write a short story about a little girl trapped inside her aunt’s memories. I never gave up on it, but everyday life got in the way. I was overwhelmed with boring tasks that couldn’t be ignored, so I ended up focusing only on the story you’re about to read. And it started with an idea from our host: vampires who love the Sun.

I started thinking about how a blood-drinker could fall in love with what kills it, and I realized that this kind of feeling would require a distorted relationship with the supernatural. I decided to turn something deeply melancholic into irony, taking domestic gothic to a thin line between innocence and delirium in my character.

I recommend that you read the rest of this note AFTER reading the story.
Seriously, go ahead. I’ll be here.

Akily has a strange kind of affection for everyday human life. She holds on to small, almost meaningless things instead of facing her real powers. This works as a way to escape herself over time, and it helped her keep her sanity for longer than we can even imagine.

She worries about forgetting to take the trash out, about not having a place to hang a supposedly mystical mandala, while trying to hide from herself that she is the same being who can levitate and control people. This contrast shows a constant choice to ignore her own nature, which, for me, was the only personality trait that truly made sense in this story.

There is one image that I think shows her personality very clearly: “She had forgotten her keys inside; she pushed the gate shut and skipped along with conviction toward The Good Witch.” This description seems simple, but like all simple things, it only hurts after the bite. It shows how she lives, turning ordinary things into something special while ignoring what is truly extraordinary. This pattern repeats throughout the story because it repeats throughout her life.

Her connection to the sun comes from this. It is more than fascination, even if she doesn’t fully understand it. It is something deep and instinctive that asks for a break, as if her own nature were asking her to stop the performance her life has become.

I chose to avoid using too many commas, trying to keep a rhythm that follows the flow of Akily’s thoughts.

The repetition of gestures like smiling and letting her body grow heavy is intentional, just like the use of verbs like “feel” and “notice.” Akily is going through a moment where her choices are guided more by emotion than reason. There is no fear of repetition here, and no attempt to soften it. Instead, it shows how she uses her power to romanticize life so it doesn’t lose its meaning. Until, in the end, meaning itself becomes the complete loss of life.

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Akily thanked Alberto for the roses with a quick kiss. She threw them in the trash as soon as she realized he wasn’t coming back, since he had already come back once just to give her a second kiss. She smiled as she rearranged the magnets on the fridge. The smile faded, heavy along the line where wrinkles should one day have been formed, and she noticed she was aligning magnets that were already straight. Her favorite one was starting to peel off the cyan paint on the freezer door.

She forgot to take the trash out. The rotten shrimp would have to wait until the next day, trapped in a warm plastic bin with eggshells and Alberto’s roses. She spent the whole day by herself, though it didn’t really feel like it. She started by making her caramel muffins, a recipe she could swear was the first of its kind in the world. She divided the batter into small islands and slid them into the oven. Then she turned on the small Philco hanging from the ceiling, tuned to one of those channels where she could never quite tell if the French women were arguing or making up. It wasn’t that she hadn’t learned French over the centuries. She had just stopped listening when she no longer needed to.

The timing was right. She opened the oven’s wide steel mouth and burned her thumb without meaning to. Black smoke had never come out with the muffins before. The heat rose in a violent breath, so aggressive that she dropped the tray onto the table a second before it could shatter on the floor. The more she fanned it, the more it twisted into distorted, dramatic shapes. The more she stared, the more it seemed to stare back. It traced the outline of her body and found her face from some strange, shifting angle. Akily let out a quiet huff. She had lost count of how many times she had checked the texture of batter before placing it in a preheated oven. Cooking came from the same place as music. One small adjustment shaped everything, the recipe, the melody, the proportions. What she had done with meat pies and apple tarts a century ago was no different, except for the absurdly delicious sugary poisons of this generation. To her, it was happiness with instant promise and delivery. Her stomach would grind down anything. The toxins would feed her blood with the same vigor as fruit picked from a peach tree nourished by the remains of Salem’s last witch.

She turned off the TV. The French was making her feel too hot. She heard the garbage collector passing again and opened her mouth, feeling her lungs tighten. When she came back to the kitchen, she saw that the tray had grown a second skin of brown and black scales. It looked like the upper half of a baby dragon, if such things weren’t just fantasy. She stuck her finger into the batter and licked it. The familiar taste of caramel cubes never came. The melted pecan crust turned bitter against the roof of her mouth, but the sugar had softened enough inside the dense mass. She decided it was fine. She grabbed a handful and ate while watching her gray reflection on the TV screen.

The feeling of satisfaction still lingered in her body when she decided to bathe by the light of grape-scented candles, as if the caramel had slipped into her heart. She remembered she should drink from her new stock of blood soon. Three bags in the fridge beside discounted butter, and the warm blood she had left in the cabinet near the two large jars of hazelnut spread. She would do it after the bath. Her thin robe let the cold air reveal parts of her body she liked very much. Her hair, once painted for centuries as flat and lifeless, now tucked away in forgotten canvases, had grown into soft, full waves that echoed the curves of her breasts, her thighs, even her toes.

She stepped into the warm bath and only then remembered the rose petals she had bought from the esoteric shop two blocks away. She went to get them. On impulse, something that rarely happened to her, before noticing they were already wilting, she didn’t drop them into the water. She threw them upward.

The water reached her waist. A cold breeze brushed her collarbone, and she smiled in a way that made her skin prickle. It felt like a small taste of life, the way living things received water and sunlight. The sun. Her face tightened as she ran her wet fingers over her dry stomach. “If life was a cosmic waltz with the divine, a vampire’s would always lag one beat, never guided by the sun’s hands.” Her sister’s words still clung to her. Even so, she would not let the waltz stop. Her heart filled so completely that she saw her condition with something like maternal love, like a newborn with a severe allergy. Even its sneezes would be perfect, bringing its mother closer to the divine. She stood up and let her fingers trace the aluminium edge of the window frame carefully. Then she opened it a little wider.

Once her breasts were already swaying in the soft pull of the water, she felt no urge to touch herself. When she returned to the bedroom, she had made a decision as intimate as her own name, or as drinking blood.

She opened the old mahogany wardrobe and let her fingers drift across the dresses hanging inside, stopping only at one she had never worn. She chose the blue one with ivory details, bought in a moment of quiet generosity for her sister, before the freckled customer of the shop came by the next day. She had forgotten to give it to her in the end, but she could still see her sister’s face between the folds of lace that smelled of talcum powder.

She spent two full hours in front of the vanity mirror, brushing her hair with soft bristles that had been left too long soaked in conditioner. She would smell the soap on her skin and then smile, her eyes nearly spilling over, the forming droplets making them ache. Her stomach growled. Just thinking about the fresh blood bag in the fridge felt like it satisfied her in almost every way. She spent another two hours feeling the room grow colder as the air conditioner hummed at sixteen degrees. It reminded her of the gentle winds of Ireland, the cold breeze that brushed her warm skin and filled the lungs with air.

She only stopped smoothing the bedsheets when the silk began to wear against her palm. Then she lay down on her side, the way she used to when she shared a bed with her sister, and let her eyelids grow heavy.

The next morning, she wanted to see the sunlight through the bottom of the muffin tray.

She scrubbed the sugary crust off roughly. It smelled faintly artificial, and she had no time to make up for the mistake of not soaking it overnight. Back in the bedroom, she slipped into her new purple rubber sandals and put on the thick raincoat she used to collect Alberto’s flowers every day. She stepped outside, her shoes tapping against the tile, and stretched her arm until the metal met the brightness of the sky.

Suddenly the entire balcony turned blue, so intensely that Akily felt as if she had grown wings. She was flying through a cloudless summer, and only then did she realize how many creatures in the world could fly. She could sink her painless, smiling fangs into feathered bodies and still, freedom would never grow from her back. One eyebrow lifted slightly. Of course she could levitate. But there was nothing enjoyable about bending gravity while that tingling spread through the soles of her feet, the tips of her fingers, her ears, running up her neck to her jaw. She wanted to fly like angels. Not like the ones painted on cathedral ceilings in 1823, which had always irritated her. She hated that weightlessness. What she wanted were the erotic muscles she had admired long before that, the kind that would turn her into a goddess made of impossible curves. She envied the power of flying toward the sky with the promise of becoming one with the universe. Deep down, even if she disliked the idea, she knew her flight would always look lighter than she wanted.

She was still contemplating that endless blue light with a kind of gratitude, wondering if the sun itself might also be blue, when the tray slipped from her covered fingers. The sharp crack of tile breaking made her ears shrink inward, and the burst of sunlight hit so violently that she recoiled into the kitchen. She slammed the door so hard she had to check if it had broken. Her hand pressed against her chest, eyes wide. She didn’t know what inside her hurt so much. Then she let out a shaky, off-key laugh that drove away the spirit of the old healer who had cursed her decades ago. Soon she noticed she was breathing too hard, staring at the gas company calendar as her soul, which had been flying so high, slowly settled back into place. She would have waited until nightfall to go out again, but her throat tightened. Waiting even a few hours felt unbearable. She opened the door just a crack, and a blade of light reached all the way to the cyan fridge. Such an overwhelming, absolute light. She closed the door again, slowly this time, without laughing.

A sharp cramp tore through her. Her vision burned. A strange, ominous smell moved through her body. The trash inside the house felt like it had been aging for years. She crouched down to grab the jar of hazelnut spread, her body heavy with exhaustion. She went back to the bedroom and turned on the TV. The French made the pain worse. She spent the entire day and night in bed.

She didn’t remember her dream from the early morning, but she woke up with the urge to throw petals into the air again. She had seen the sun. She closed her eyes with a soft, foolish smile, as if she could ignore the ache in her joints. For a moment, she imagined herself reflected again in that vast blue midday sky. It almost felt like she had childhood memories of bright, enchanted days, even though she knew she was completely mistaken. She preferred not to correct herself all the time.

She tried to get up. Her body refused. Then she sneezed so hard it forced her back down. When had she caught a cold? She ran her hand along her arms, the trail of it hurting all the way into her skin. The kitchen door must have felt exactly like that, she thought. The jar of hazelnut spread had gone to sleep beside her, and luckily she had closed it before they both drifted off. There was still some Nutella left on the spoon, so she brought it to her mouth as she opened the jar again.

By the end of that same day, she was so hungry she had to drag herself across the floor in her pink silk robe toward the kitchen cabinet. Her elbows were still reliable, but her legs trembled like sticks, and she thought that hysterical laugh had cost her dearly. It had scared away something important, something that used to take care of her. When she reached the cabinet, she noticed how much dust had settled over the thin fabric. She thrust her arm inside and tore open the blood bag with what little strength she had left. Then she turned onto her back, letting her head rest on the hard pillow of the cabinet floor. She tilted the liquid, far less pleasant than hazelnut, toward her mouth, but her weak arms spilled the first rush across her robe.

Her neck lifted to bite into the torn plastic, and the blood flooded her mouth completely. Her body stirred slightly. She drank everything before remembering to breathe, and then a spasm ran through her, stretching her out as if she were finally waking up. She moved her feet for a while, feeling the numbness retreat, her chipped red nails catching faintly in the air. She was completely replenished, and that irritated her deeply. She managed to stand, muttering at the stained robe. The floor wasn’t nearly as filthy as it looked, that wasn’t true. She turned on the tap and drank until the metallic taste faded. When she went to pour the rest into the sink, her joints still protested. She would return to the esoteric shop for more petals after sunset, before six if she felt better. In the end, she understood it would be better to sleep in her coffin that night.

She only lifted her face from the red upholstered lining weeks later. The old alarm clock had suddenly decided to work, the first time in the entire year, and Akily took it as a sign. She jolted when she checked the time. Five thirty in the morning was, in fact, five thirty in the afternoon. She climbed the spiral staircase to the bedroom and changed her clothes. She tied her hair, slipped into her sandals. Took the rotten trash out to the street bin. Picked up the tray from the balcony floor. She had forgotten her keys inside again, so she pushed the gate shut and skipped her way, with surprising conviction, toward The Good Witch shop.

She decided to buy one of each kind of candy hanging beside the counter. The girl at the counter blinked slowly, in a way that made her feel comfortable enough to look at everything. Ah, I’ll take this mandala too. She paid for everything on her phone.

She closed the gate and locked the door carefully. She spread the mandala across the kitchen table, already regretting not having a nail in the wall to hang it above her bed. She ate the three seaweed candies all at once, certain the different colors made no difference in taste. If the sound of metal hitting the ground hadn’t been so loud, she would have tried to bring the sun through the muffin tray again the next afternoon. She opened the carob bar and made a face, then pressed the taste against the roof of her mouth until it settled. It was better than her failed muffins.

When she went to bathe and throw the petals into the air again, she passed by the bedroom and saw the jar of Nutella. She took it with her.

The steam from the bath refused to rise, holding the heat inside the water, turning the tub into something like a white ceramic pot. Akily sank slowly, balancing the jar and spoon as her body gave in. When her breasts settled into the water, the scent of roses overflowed and dampened the soft rug outside. Somewhere in the background, a neighbour’s TV played loudly, tuned to the same soap opera that had been on at The Good Witch. She smiled softly and brought a full spoon to her mouth. After the second or third bite, she decided she didn’t need sweetness to feel happy, so she set it aside and took a deep breath.

She stared at the window, imagining she had turned night into morning, receiving sunlight directly on her face. She thought the heat that surrounded her came from it, from it alone, and caught herself biting her lip. She looked at the petals floating around her, as wilted as the tips of her fingers, her fragile little babies with severe allergies. She stayed serious for the rest of the bath, her eyes so light she barely needed to blink.

She stepped out of the tub, said goodbye to the window, and went to the bedroom. The wet footprints didn’t bother her this time. She dressed while her skin was still damp, putting on the blue dress with ivory lace she had worn for the first time weeks ago. Only now did it feel like she understood everything. She dared to spin in front of the vanity mirror. Her sister would have pulled her into a dance if she had told her about this discovery. She covered her mouth with both hands and spun a few more times. Then she stared at herself as if she didn’t recognize her own features, though she still found herself very beautiful. Maybe she was a bird. Maybe an angel. That was the missing step in her waltz.

She made muffins again, but this time the caramel had been proudly replaced with hazelnut spread. Akily had discovered a new wonder in the world.

Since it was still before eleven, she called Alberto. This time, she didn’t want him to pick her up by car. After all, she was immortality made flesh, or so she concluded after centuries. She forgot her keys again, but still shut the door and gate with certainty. Her hair was still dripping, leaving cold trails down her back as she let the tingling start in her feet. She levitated just enough so the asphalt wouldn’t hurt, moving herself forward. But the tingling wasn’t worth the slowness. So she threw herself upward, fast enough to make her body twist with cold.

How beautiful the neighbourhood she had chosen to live in was, she thought, at night. Only a few golden lights glowing, no overwhelming vertical sprawl like polluted cities. She landed right in front of Alberto’s house and went in without ringing the bell.

Alberto touched her with hunger. She had already told him she travelled sometimes, and he made up for every second of absence with firm, relentless thrusts. Akily let him admire her new skin without realizing it. She wasn’t the same as before. She was preserving the virginity of this new self. She imagined what it would be like to truly see the sun. It wasn’t a stray ray slipping in before dawn to pinch her cheek. It wasn’t some stupid glare on a stupid tray. It was nothing like that.

Her mouth opened into wet sounds when she imagined the sun seeing her back. It would open its eyes, maybe one at a time, maybe both at once. It would understand her features, the tone of her skin, and tell her who she resembled more, her mother or her father. She no longer remembered, but she melted in Alberto’s arms, convinced she must have looked more like her mother.

The next day, she put on her raincoat over the same blue dress and went to collect the flowers from the mailbox. Red roses. She didn’t throw them away this time, because this new version of her liked Alberto’s red roses very much. In fact, she liked him as a whole. Enough to stop by the bank and transfer him a generous amount of her centuries-old money before returning home to get ready. She had a date, after all.

She packed a small lunchbox from the time when schools had only just begun accepting women. The kind of object she never quite knew why she kept, but now it felt useful enough that she didn’t question it. She prepared a meal with two cheese and butter sandwiches, then went to the bathroom, grabbed the jar, and spread hazelnut cream onto two more slices of bread. She still needed something to drink, but she knew she could stop at a stand before boarding the train and buy a Coke. She placed the bouquet inside as well.

Sorry, miss. We’re closed.

Akily couldn’t understand how the train station had so few options at night. She swallowed and slowly moved her thumb. The man behind the stand lost all expression in his eyes, becoming something she didn’t like very much. He shoved his trembling hand into his pocket, searching for the right key. He opened the small, noisy door and grabbed a can of Coke and a bottle of sparkling water, the coldest ones in the fridge, placing them on the dirty station floor. She picked them up and wiped them against the hem of her blue dress. She opened the water, took a sip, then stored both inside the lunchbox and walked toward the platform. She only let him regain control after making him walk far enough away, hoping she had sent him in the direction he had intended to go.

It was 10.10 when she received a message from Alberto. He was panicking, typing words that barely made sense. Someone had sent three million to his account. He was afraid he might be a witness, or an accomplice, or worse. He sent an audio message saying his chest hurt. Akily pressed a hand to her own chest and remembered when hers had hurt too, understanding that what she had felt when she saw the sun in the tray was the same absurd sense of luck he was feeling now. She sent him a message, making him promise not to tell anyone the money had come from her account. She didn’t want him to die, not from worry, not from happiness. Finally, she sent a selfie and, without waiting for a reply, locked her screen. When she heard the train arriving, she threw the phone onto the tracks and prepared to board.

Only once she was inside the train did she feel calm enough to look around. Everything beyond the stained glass seemed to collapse into a single image, a teenager who had taken her seat. She looked away so naturally that she forgot she had meant to observe. She settled into the tall wooden bench and let her bare legs swing, gently brushing the collar of her dress as she watched men in hats pass toward another platform. The station wasn’t nearly as well lit as the city she had seen from above with her tingling feet, and she assumed the cleaners weren’t paid much.

When the train began its journey toward the Whispering Dunes, something inside her opened into a deep, overwhelming joy, as if Alberto had finally understood her. This new flesh, freshly born, still rising like the sun of the next day, felt unbearably good. She would reach the desert at four in the morning. She picked up one of the cheese sandwiches, already thinking about the hazelnut one. A faint weakness gnawed at her arms. She cracked open the Coke with a sharp sound and watched the landscape as if she were seeing it for the last time. She knew the small town would soon give way to endless buildings, windows stacked over windows, thick black smoke, traffic she would rather die ten times than face. After a few hours, she leaned to the side and pretended the red upholstery was the inside of her coffin.

She woke with a jolt of tingling and panicked for a second, thinking she was trying to levitate inside the train. The darkness outside was so complete it nearly swallowed everything, held back only by the small, kind lights stitched along the cabin floor. She could have brought a book, or even her Kindle, if she had understood earlier that this new version of herself liked reading so much. She got off at the right station and found it strange that she was the only one. She slung the lunchbox over her back and began to levitate slowly.

Akily knew she had to move as far away from the tracks as possible, in a straight line. Soon the only thing she could see was the thin moon in the sky, the ring the day had given to the night as proof of its love. Her big toe struck a higher mound of sand, and she realized it was time to rise higher. She threw herself forward in a sudden rush of excitement, her heart pounding. She hadn’t felt that in longer than she could remember.

The desert played tricks on her eyes, as if there were small colored lights scattered inside the blue darkness. It felt like moving toward nothing, the cool wind piercing her skin with grains of cold sand. They were as untouched as she was, she decided, brushing against a living being for the first time. Weakness returned. If she wasn’t already in the heart of the dunes, then at least she was in their lungs.

She let her weight fall onto the sand when she felt a slight slope. She opened the lunchbox to take out the bouquet, but ended up devouring both creamy sandwiches before they could spoil. She closed her eyes, and every time she opened them again, a new wave of brightness wrapped around her body and made her tremble. Which one of them was the true face of the sun?

She shivered when she remembered it. She had been avoiding it ever since she left the coffin, but every inch of her new skin cried out for it, longed for its presence the way people did in the time she had been born into. She said its name out loud. Her chin trembled, and her laugh broke into a painful sob that spilled from her eyes. She looked down at the petals tickling her lap and smiled, noticing how her tears had begun to stain some of the red roses blue.

A gust of wind made her body expand until she felt cold. She tilted her face to avoid breathing in sand, but could still feel it dancing through her hair. Her eyes watered again. She could see everything, anything, in front of her. The dunes reminded her of the cathedral ceilings that had always irritated her. The ridges echoed the curves of her body, endless lines of sand shaped by the wind, arranged like clouds in a Renaissance sky. She was getting married. She closed her eyes, weakness flooding her, and imagined Alberto as a proud witness, happy with the gift he had received. But from where she stood, at the start of the aisle, she still couldn’t see her groom.

The bouquet in her hands kept shifting. The roses that had already turned blue had distorted ivory centers, as if she were holding tiny skulls. She couldn’t remember when she had planned a bouquet like that. But it didn’t matter. A bride was supposed to remember a thousand things and forget a thousand others.

And then she saw him.

He didn’t open one eye or two. Fire surged across the trembling horizon, riding a great golden horse. Akily let out a broken sound when she felt her forehead burn, her eyes unable to understand what they were seeing, while somehow understanding everything. The world was golden for those who could fly.

Her neck barely moved, her bones creaking with every small gesture. Only she could marry him. She held onto that certainty as she realized she was no longer holding the bouquet. The two remaining red roses melted into blood against the sand. In a sudden motion, she grabbed them back and licked them, the metallic taste flooding her with a heat almost as intense as his.

Her stomach twisted. Ash blurred her vision for a moment, but when it cleared, she felt light, like the angels she had always disliked, and she began to laugh. Fire spread from her chest into the desert. Her eyes burned white with the brightness that consumed her completely. She was the most beautiful bride. She received the merciless Sun. It tore through her raw. She didn’t recognize the pieces of skin rolling across the sand in the strong wind.

She was all Gold. She was all Angel. She received the solar crown over her burning hair, over the new skin she had given birth to just for him.

When he finally took her and carried her across the blazing horizon, Akily rolled her eyes back and let one last tear fall, forgetting every caramel muffin she had ever made.

Written by:
Sophia Kaiser

S. Kaiser is a contemporary Gothic fiction writer, fascinated by vampires that parasitize the human brain in the form of guilt and desire. She has always written about wounds that scream before words can decipher them, usually from the perspective of the rejected monster, trying her best not to romanticize it in real life. She is strongly influenced by the melancholy of Louis XIV in "Interview with the Vampire," the visceral narration of "Empire of the Vampire," and the psychological complexity of Dostoevsky and Clarice Lispector. Currently, she is revisiting her work for a re-release on Amazon.

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