had been a regular occurrence recently for Lana to wake up in the middle of the night with headaches. It felt as though someone was inside her brain, poking it with hundreds of tiny, burning needles. She put it down to anxiety, naturally; she was living alone for the first time and had a lot on her plate at work, so there were going to be consequences on her body, and it just happened to manifest as headaches. It was frustrating, sure, but expected.
What wasn’t expected, however, was for Lana to walk into her kitchen for a glass of water to help with said headache, only for her to be greeted by an elephant. Not a full-sized elephant or even a baby elephant but a tiny one about the size of a Labrador. It stood on the kitchen counter—the reason Lana took this flat was because of the black marble countertops with streaks of pink running through them—and it was smiling to itself as it baked a cake. Well, it hadn’t baked the cake yet; it was mixing the batter in a bowl with a whisk in its trunk.
Lana didn’t quite know how to approach this situation; she had never seen a miniature elephant baking a cake before. Certainly not in her kitchen. She didn’t want to alarm the creature, but she did want to let it know that she had an electric whisk in the cupboard, which might be more efficient.
She let out a polite cough to make it aware of her presence.
The elephant dropped the whisk and spun to face Lana. “Good heavens! How rude to sneak up on a gentleman like that!” His tone was clipped, and a tiny chef’s hat fell from his head. Lana hadn’t noticed a little chef’s hat on his head before. It was too small for him, so he must have acquired it from a rat friend or a friend of a more diminutive stature.
Lana scurried forward. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you.” She picked up the chef’s hat and placed it back on his head.
He huffed.
“I have an electric whisk if you would find that easier” She opened the nearest cupboard and pulled out an old handheld electric whisk that her mother had gifted her as a moving-in present. It was the same one her mother had used her entire life, but Lana loved it.
The elephant, however, was not taken by this idea. In fact, he looked rather offended by the suggestion and scrunched his brow in annoyance. “I, Percy Benedict the Third, do not use electric whisks in my baking. I am a world-renowned pastry chef, from the streets of Paris to the coast of Spain, and I have never used an electric whisk!” As though to prove his point, he whipped the whisk into the air; it flipped a few times, and he caught it in his trunk one more. Lana wanted to say that Paris to Spain wasn’t that far, but she didn’t want to offend him further.
She blushed slightly at his outburst and nodded. “Okay, well, why not?”
He huffed. “Because, if I whisk by hand, I can control exactly with how much ferocity I do so, how much air gets whisked in, and down to the second when I stop. It is all too unpredictable with an electric whisk. It is the downfall of most amateurs.” He looked pointedly at her, giving her a once-over in her cupcake pajamas.
Lana placed the whisk on the counter and, now annoyed at his tone, crossed her arms over her chest and took a step forward. “So, famous pastry chef, how come you are here and not in Paris or Spain? Huh? If you’re so famous, why are you in my kitchen?”
He didn’t say anything for a while, and the guilt of possibly striking a nerve flooded Lana’s mouth, but before she could apologize, he put the whisk down. “I may or may not have burnt my last café down.” At Lana’s shock, he quickly added, “I fell asleep whisking and forgot I had biscuits in the oven!”
“I’m so sorry, Percy.” She yawned, her lack of sleep catching up with her.
He chuckled. “It isn’t your fault. I’m almost done. Why don’t you pop back to bed, and I’ll wake you when the cake is done.”
Lana nodded and turned to wander back to her bedroom. She sunk into her mattress and buried her head under the blanket, and before long, she was fast asleep once more.
*
Jamie and Ethan loved their jobs. They were nosy by nature, so what better to do for work than to organize dead people’s items to give the families time to grieve and get paid to do so?
That was how they found themselves in a lovely little flat, in a lovely little kitchen with pink appliances and baking equipment scattered across the counters.
“What happened here?” Jamie asked Ethan as he swiped his finger across the flour-coated counter.
Ethan was on a stool rummaging through cupboards as he answered. “Carbon monoxide poisoning. Poor girl had only been living here a couple of months.” It was a heartbreaking fate, he thought as he studied the cans of beans in front of him. It was a bizarre amount of beans for one person to have, but he didn’t want to judge.
“That is terribly sad.” Jamie picked up an electric whisk from the side and held it up.
“Weren’t you looking for one of these E?”
Ethan glanced down. “Ah yeah, the missus was after one. She’d love that.”
Featured image by Monica Grabowska.
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