mom would get us a sheet cake at some point during the year and it never celebrated anything in particular simply appearing without ceremony or decoration and we ate in silence never mentioning it didn’t have much flavor anymore or what we remembered when we were kids but we would finish it because her eyes suggested we should and we weren’t sure how many more cakes there would be so we ate even though it brought relief instead of happiness after the first piece we’d hide pieces in the trash later in the week telling her we’d eaten it and it meant a lot to us that she’d bought it for us and sometimes she’d glance at the cupboard we kept the trash in and cry and we’d tell her it was full of memories instead of cake which seemed to stop the crying for a bit later we’d fall asleep to the whistling in the holes of the moon and wonder when the next cake would appear