A Spoonful of Cinnamon (Helps the Memories Go Down) by Kendra Jackson, freshly made egg nog

Sarah turned the pages of the cookbook to the recipe for a Christmas cake and used her 1kg dumbbell to hold it open at the list of ingredients.  The irony of her bookmark wasn’t lost on her.  Once she’d finished baking the massive amount of calories, the dumbbell would be retired to its more traditional use, in her house anyway, as a door stop.

 

‘Raisins, cherries, nutmeg, mixed spice.’  She rattled off the ingredients to herself as she lifted the large shopping bags onto her worktop.  ‘Eggs are in the fridge, flour in the cupboard, and whiskey is in the jar.’  She laughed to herself. 

 

‘You should have taken the eggs out of the fridge before now,’ her mother said.  ‘Now you’ll have to wait until they get to room temperature before using them.’

 

‘That would be the case,’ said Sarah as she rummaged in the lowest drawer of her kitchen unit.  ‘If I was planning on baking the cake today.’  A hand blender, a muffin tin, and a Pyrex roasting dish (with matching lid) were taken out before she finally located the round tin with its most useful spring release.  Reloading the drawer with all the other ‘once a year or less’ used items she kicked it shut.

 

‘What do you mean, you’re not baking the cake today?’ asked her mother.  ‘You know that’s why I’m here.’

 

‘I am not ‘baking’ the cake today,’ said Sarah as she put the tin down on the table with maybe a little more force than was strictly necessary.  ‘Today is for soaking in alcohol…the fruit that is, not me.’  Although give me another hour with your backseat baking, she added to herself, and who knows?

‘Dried fruit, zest and juice, a grated apple, mixed spice, and cinnamon.  A few other bits and pieces and then soak them overnight in whiskey.’

 

Sarah’s mother sniffed a bit disdainfully, ‘In my day, we just threw everything into the bowl and mixed away.’

‘Yes, but in your day, you were baking a dozen cakes for the season and wouldn’t have had enough bowls to soak everything.’

‘We could have used the bathtub.’ 

 

Sarah laughed with her.  ‘Your cakes were wonderful, and I’m not just saying that because of all the icing.  But the smell of them through the house.  It always reminds me of Christmases growing up when I take mine out of the oven.’

 

‘Even though you don’t actually like fruit cake and are only doing it for the tradition?’

 

Sarah ignored the comment as she laid out the ingredients in the order they were listed.  ‘Golden syrup, vanilla essence, mixed spice and cinnamon…’  Her voice trailed off and she searched through the shopping bags, emptying out the ingredients onto the table.  A bag of brown sugar ended up on the floor, but luckily didn’t split. 

‘Cinnamon…there’s no cinnamon, why is there no cinnamon?  I’m sure it was on the list!’

‘You have nutmeg there,’ her mother pointed out.  ‘You can just use it instead.’

‘That’s not the way the recipe goes,’ Sarah snapped.  ‘I can’t change the ingredients.’

‘You’ve already changed the method, why not skip an ingredient or two?’

‘It’s not the same.  It has to be perfect.’ 

‘No, it doesn’t.  That’s what the icing is for.’

 

Sarah’s face lit up.  ‘Maybe I still have the jar from last year.’  She could feel the smug look on her mother’s face, ‘Yes, because I’m a hoarder and don’t clear my cupboards often enough.’ 

 

‘Did I say anything?’ muttered Sarah’s mother under her breath.

 

It was now time for another search, but Sarah knew exactly where the cinnamon would be if the cinnamon was to be.  And less than a minute later, she had the jar in her hand.  The jar that had a best before date of six months earlier.  ‘Spices don’t go off?’ she asked her mother, hopefully.

Her mother shrugged, ‘Don’t look at me.  I baked so often that nothing had a chance to go off.  But cooking will kill any germs.  Well, those that you haven’t drowned in whiskey.’

 

Sarah opened the lid and sniffed it gingerly (or rather cinnamonly, she thought with a wry smile).  It smelled…well it smelled spicy, that was all she all she could say about it, since she didn’t really make a habit of smelling spices.  With a shrug, she replaced the lid.  ‘If I double up on the amount it should be okay,’ she said, trying to convince herself as much as anybody else.  She put the jar in its place in the parade of ingredients, grabbed the mixing bowl and set to work weighing and measuring. 

 

Reaching the final ingredient, Sarah added the required three tablespoons of whiskey, and then another one for good measure.  ‘Well, just in case it’s going off,’ she said aloud.  ‘And now for my annual upper arm workout.’  She stirred the mixture with a wooden spoon that was almost as old as she was and had certainly tasted far more Christmas cake mixes than she had made.

 

‘It’s starting to smell a bit like Christmas,’ said Sarah, a little wistfully, as she covered the bowl with tinfoil and carried it to a cool corner of the house.  ‘But it will be even better tomorrow, won’t it, Mum?’ 

She didn’t expect an answer.  She hadn’t had one in over twenty years.  But sometimes, with her mother’s old recipe book and spoon on the go, she could almost hear her voice as well.

 

‘Same time tomorrow for the baking?’ Sarah whispered to herself as she switched off the light.  

 

About the author

 By day, Kendra Jackson crunches numbers for a living. By night (and sometimes into the early hours of the morning) she expresses her pent up creativity by crunching words instead. For many years, those words consisted of fanfiction under the name Cein/Ceindreadh, but now she's switched to original work. 

 

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Primal recollection by Kendra Jackson, hot milk coffee

 “I remember being in a tunnel,” said Karl, “The walls were so close around me that I could barely move a muscle.”  He took another swig from his pint.  “And I knew that all it would take was another few centimetres and I’d be free.  Felt like hours before I was finally dragged out.  And there were lights shining down on me, almost blinding me they were.  And people standing around trying to help.”  He took another drink as he watched his audience hanging on his every word.

 

“Whoa, that sounds gnarly dude!” said Trevor.

“I remember it felt so much colder once I was out,” continued Karl, “And I was crying, and the next thing I heard one of the people shout, ‘it’s a boy!’…”  He sat back and watched with amusement the way the expressions on his friends faces change from rapt attention to various shades of annoyance and chagrin.

 

“Oh, come on, Karl!” said Sarah, “That is some bullshit.  No way in hell you can remember your own birth!” 

It had started as an exercise in team bonding.  Karl and his co-workers had gone out for drinks after work and Sarah had suggested a round robin of questions to help the newer members of their group get to know everybody. 

She had already relayed a story of sitting on the carpet at her grandfather’s feet and watching the sun shine in through the window onto his bald head.  “I remember thinking that I wanted nothing more than to play with that shiny ball.”

Trevor had claimed to remember a trip to see a shopping centre Santa one Christmas and being so scared that his mother had to take him outside before he got his gift. 

And then Karl had outdone them all with his story of being born. 

“Well, you’ve always said that I have a good memory,” he’d grinned at the look on Sarah’s face.  “Okay, okay, you want my actual earliest memory?”  He searched through the recesses of his mind.  It took quite a while before he found an innocuous one about unravelling a string of beads belonging to his sister, swallowing them, and nearly choking. 

 

Trevor frowned as he listened to the story.  He could have sworn that he’d heard that Karl was an only child.  Shrugging, he finished his drink, thinking that he must have been mistaken.  It was difficult trying to remember what he had been told about which of his co-workers.  Still, a few more sessions like this and he was sure that he’d get to know them all a lot better.  He wished he had Karl’s memory though.

 

Karl saw the look on Trevor’s face and cursed inwardly.  His legendary memory had let him down for once.  “Ah well,” he thought as he emptied his glass, “By the time we leave here, nobody is going to have a head for details and if they do remember, I’ll just claim that I said ‘sitter’ instead of sister.”  He offered to buy the next round and headed for the bar with the drinks orders. 

The incident that he’d talked about had actually been a true one.  It just hadn’t happened to Karl, or at least not when he had been known as Karl.  No, that memory had happened to Irene, and they hadn’t managed to get the beads out in time.  After that there had been Francois, whose first memory had been of the shiny stove in his mother’s kitchen and whose last had been of leading a doomed charge on a muddy battlefield.  He’d been followed by Kathleen whose memories stretched from the Armistice celebrations, to simply turning out the light when she’d gone to bed on her seventy fifth birthday. 

There had been more before Irene and Karl was reasonably sure that there would be more to come.  Not that he cared to put that theory to the test.  He lived each life as if it was the only one he was going to get and had never succumbed to the occasional temptation to see if the grass would be greener the next time around. 

 

And of course, there was always the interval, the limbo between lives that seemed to take somewhere between an instant and an eternity before he was once more dragged forth to yet another existence. 

Karl took a quick sip from his pint to make sure it wouldn’t spill on the way back to his seat.  Of course, the worst thing might well be the eighteen to twenty years between alcoholic beverages, he thought as he sat down. 

Reincarnation did have its downside, but on the upside, there was always something new around the corner.  

About the auhtor

 By day, Kendra Jackson crunches numbers for a living. By night she expresses her pent up creativity by crunching words instead. After many years writing fanfiction, she finally worked up the nerve to give original fiction a go. 

 

Did you enjoy the story? Would you like to shout us a coffee? Half of what you pay goes to the writers and half towards supporting the project (web site maintenance, preparing the next Best of book etc.)