Catherine Lacey on Pleasure, Persistence, and Viral Cookie Lines
Read her excerpt from our new issue, Tough Cookie, in Bomb Magazine
Cake friends,
This week, we’re sharing something special: novelist Catherine Lacey’s flash fiction on the surrealism of waiting in viral cookie lines, titled We Are Waiting for Joy and We Hope We Deserve It, published in our new winter issue Tough Cookie.
Catherine is the author of five books including Biography of X and Pew, and the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and the Young Lions Fiction Award from the New York Public Library. We’re thrilled to share her Cake Zine debut with you here. Read on for an excerpt and a link to the full piece in Bomb Magazine.
We Are Waiting for Joy and We Hope We Deserve It
We have been waiting for too long to get out of this line now. This is a line for baked goods. More specifically, it is a line for Artisan Crafted Cookies. We, in line, are adults in the thirty to forty-five age range. We are grown, but we do not wish to be, and so we have queued up here in the midday heat in order to purchase one of the many expensive and pleasurable consolations of adulthood.
More people are joining us now, compressing us in place as the values of our particular stations increase. Some of us are economists who think too much and talk at length about the unjust flow of resources throughout society. Some of us are unusually menacing divorce lawyers who set our hourly and retaining rates high enough to make even the most miserable consider, briefly, turning back to bad marriages. And some of us are not exactly or conventionally employed. But, by the time we reach the front of the line, we will all have the same opinion about money and time—namely that three to six hours in line is not a waste of an afternoon and nine dollars and eighty-five cents is not too much for one Artisan Crafted Cookie weighing approximately one hundred grams.