Cast of Wonders 609: Devil’s Food

Show Notes

Image by Dennis Wilkinson


Devil’s Food

by E. M. Dasche

Tristan was not what you might call a traditional evil sorcerer.

For one thing, he didn’t quite look the part. Most evil sorcerers do not wear Star Wars backpacks, or shoes that fasten with Velcro, or short-sleeved button-downs tucked into belted-up shorts.

For another, most evil sorcerers lived in exciting, exotic places. Brimstone castles with ghouls for guards. Ice palaces with magical moats. Underground crypts and catacombs crawling with spiders and slithering, slippery things. Most evil sorcerers do not live on cul-de-sacs, in the stumpy roots of suburbia, surrounded by kids on scooters and corgis on leashes and middle-aged men on put-puttering lawnmowers.

Lastly, and most importantly, most evil sorcerers could cast spells. Tristan could not. Not while anyone was watching, at least.

Now, this didn’t stop Tristan from indulging in the dark arts. He’d only been a tottering kindergartner when the principal had called him into her office over an accusation of raising a squirrel from the dead during recess—or, maybe killing it, considered the teary-eyed eyewitness, “Because it was still squirming around in his hands, even with that big gross hole in its guts, but then it just….”

But the girl had decomposed (much like the squirrel, but into sobs), and the principal had dismissed Tristan back to crafting cotton-ball cows with his class, fully acquitted. If Tristan had truly let the squirrel die, the principal had reasoned, then he also must have brought it back to life first, and it would’ve been poor form to discourage such beneficent acts in the student body. (Anyway, she had other agents of Hell to worry about—she’d been summoned to a meeting with that multiheaded beast, the school board, with its insatiable appetite for soul-sucking fundraising reports and stale pastries and coffee.)

In truth, the squirrel had only died—the second time, that is—because the girl had come looking for Tristan behind the dumpsters, where he spent every recess, for that was where all the most wonderfully goopy and gruesome things were found. Tristan could, and often had, cast the spell for corporeal reanimation in his sleep—but once he’d realized someone was watching him, his words had fumbled and faltered and faceplanted. Just like always.

Tristan had never had a problem with stuttering before starting kindergarten. He’d arrived at his first day of school with a neon-green skeleton t-shirt stretched over his little pot belly, eager to make friends (or better yet, minions) with a display of his evil artistry. His mother had told him over breakfast (cereal for him, black coffee and newsfeeds for her) to really get out and network, and though Tristan still hadn’t known exactly what networking meant, he’d heard it enough in his mother’s conference calls and corporate parties to get the general idea, and it’d seemed so supremely self-interested and immoral that he couldn’t wait to try it.

While his teacher had handed out name-tag stickers, Tristan had checked the tattered and brittle-paged spellbook in his backpack one last time, then dug the class’s hermit crab from its burrow—shown it to the crowd of kindergarteners, wordlessly, letting the anticipation build—intoned the start of an ear-cracking incantation—

—but before he could turn the crab into a house-sized monstrosity, his teacher had turned around, gasped, and whacked it from Tristan’s hand with her rolled-up sticker sheet. Tristan startled, stuttered, his spell spurting out prematurely as a thin green fartcloud of evil energy so foul and wretched and ashamed of itself that it immediately imploded with an embarrassed squirmp. The children giggled, then grimaced as the smell wafted towards them, then pinched their noses and giggled even harder.

That’s when they gave him his nickname.

Not Tristan, as he’d painstakingly Sharpied on his nametag sticker with a bloody black heart over the i.

Not Mr. Lovelace, as his mother called him on those rare occasions her dagger-point gaze did not suffice to pin down his temper.

Not Vortlescaub, or The Pustulator, or His Evil Lordship Bow Down in Worship Lest Thine Souls be Forfeit, the top three evil-sorcerer names he’d crayoned into his bedside diary, which was enchanted to strike anyone who peeked inside it blind, and unable to taste anything but mustard no matter what they ate, or drank.

No. They called him Stutteristan, or Stuttutteristan, or Stuttuttutteristan, depending on how many syllables they felt like jangling him with that day. The nickname stuck in his subconscious like a trail of dog droppings trodden into a pristine white carpet, soiling his self-confidence whenever he tried to cast a curse, or speak a spell, or otherwise unleash the evil inside him.

Tristan began staying late after school for speech therapy, in a windowless classroom with walls painted the color of anemic, store-bought eggshells, with a squat and round and squishy bald man presumably standing in for the yolk. Their first meeting, he greeted Tristan with the oozy smile of an incurable do-gooder, dribbling scrambled metaphors all over the desk: how they’d work as cogs on the same team, how they’d crack this case and then stitch it up, how he’d helped plenty of students out of far worse jams and pickles and who knows what other kinds of jarred products before.

No matter what he tried, though, Tristan’s stutter had the bald man completely beaten. At each parent-teacher conference, he would inform Tristan’s mother of all the progress that hadn’t been made, always concluding—not meaning to get anyone’s goat ruffled—that Tristan might have a disability. And his mother would turn towards where Tristan sat on a hard blue plastic chair in the hallway, and she would sigh, “I know,” never suspecting he was watching the conversation through the closed door with his x-ray enchanted eyes.

Of course, Tristan didn’t need to stop his stutter, only find a form of spellcasting that suited it. Any evil-sorcerer school’s speech therapist worth their dragon dung would’ve recognized poor Tristan’s shattered sense of sinister self-acceptance, so critical to the healthy development of any evil sorcerer of his age, and swiftly set his magic churning again with state-of-the-art taunt-therapy techniques, and field trips to the various underworlds, and miniature dungeon-design kits with penitent souls that actually screamed.

But Tristan had no evil-sorcerer school. Having foreseen his struggles in their registrars’ crystal balls, they’d denied Tristan’s applications years before he could even submit them, delivering the news through their messenger mice, or the last Lucky Charms swirling in Tristan’s cereal bowl, or a creeping premonition set to explode into terrible technicolor certainty just as he was falling asleep. So instead of learning dark magic alongside all the other kids who would become the world’s next Saurons and Voldemorts and Napoleon Bonapartes, Tristan had to go to normal school, with normal kids, learning normal-kid things, receiving the normal-kid treatment for stutters, and getting nothing from it.

The kids at school kept calling him Stuttuttututtteristan, until they all forgot he had a real name at all. The teachers kept looking at him down their noses, whether snub, or hooked, or Roman, and telling him, quite matter-of-factly, that he would amount to nothing—less than nothing, they would often add, once Tristan had reached fourth grade and been initiated in the arcane art of negative integers. The speech therapist kept making Tristan speak into a recording device and listen to his own words wobble back at him, each stuttered syllable like a gentle smack on the cheek with a wet rubber glove.

When the bus dropped Tristan off at his house every afternoon, he would unlock the door using the key hidden underneath the leftmost gargoyle, drop his backpack to the marble floor and trudge upstairs, then upstairs again. He would find his cat, Dog (named in homage of how it had once been a dog, before Tristan had accidentally transformed it into a cat, with a horrifying but thankfully brief intervening stint as an octopus), sometimes prowling around the conservatory in search of dozing fireflies, sometimes lazing on a futon in the second spare master bedroom, sometimes watching the fish in the balcony fountain. And Tristan would bury his face in Dog’s dalmatian-spotted fur, ignoring its startled meow, and then, finally, all the tears he had swallowed throughout the day would come up in a miserable regurgitation.

His mother was never around to notice, of course. She would, and did, sacrifice everything—her sleep, her lower back, her relationship with Tristan himself—working to provide all the things for Tristan that she hadn’t had in her own unhappy childhood, and which she thus thought absolutely necessary for any child’s happiness. Very large books, very large televisions, very large couches and beds. A very large house once seen to by their very large dog, and now overseen by their very large cat. Very large birthday parties, which she herself never attended, and so never realized Tristan’s very large lack of friends.

Once Tristan had sufficiently suffused Dog with snot and saliva, he’d wipe his own tears, since he had nobody else to do it for him. Then, he’d go downstairs—

—and downstairs again—

—and again, twice over—

—into his under-underground lair.

(Technically, it was a wine cellar, though Tristan’s mother had no taste for wine, and thought it too volatile a financial investment. Tristan had taken it over as his lair, even though he had two more playrooms upstairs without rats and ghouls and gurgling pipes and interior designs inspired by medieval dungeons.)

He spent every afternoon and weekend and holiday there, hunched over the tattered and brittle-paged spellbook he’d found behind a moving bookshelf in the public library’s children’s section, studying the mustiest of magics, the most sinister sorcery, the most pernicious permutations of the arcane arts.

Alone.

Cackling amidst the purple clouds sparkling off his potions, the deafening silent implosions as monsters appeared from nothing, the hyperblack portals whirlpooling to other dimensions.

Alone.

Casting horrible hexes, even eviler enchantments, stutterless spells so horrific they would peel milk and curdle paint off the walls, if there had been any of either yet unbefouled.

Alone.

It was, in a word, Hell—and Tristan would know. He visited Hell quite often.

No husband or wife or nanny, very large or otherwise, had figured into his mother’s vision of the perfect childhood. So Tristan was left to tuck himself into bed, where he would flip forlornly through his spellbook’s brittle pages, snatching his hand out of the way when they tried to strike back with a papercut. He hated his teachers and the name-calling kids at school with the heat of all the underworlds put together. His feelings towards his speech therapist would cause the conflagration of the page onto which they were written (he’d discovered, when he’d tried to put them in his diary). But without them around to sneer, or jeer, or tell him, “Let’s take a step back and persevere,” Tristan felt more invisible than ever. And he knew the curse for making people invisible—the spell to do it was on the very last page of his spellbook, in curlicue script reminiscent of basilisk tongues, with a footnote beneath the steadily writhing scrollwork that read simply, “FOR THINE WORST ENEMIES ONLY.” Tristan couldn’t imagine using it, ever, on anyone. Falling under such a curse was unspeakable, unthinkable—and, as far as Tristan could tell, undoable.

Every curse, however, has a countercurse. It’s one of the first things they teach in evil-sorcerer school. Which is why Tristan didn’t know it—or recognize his countercurse when it came—or even realize when he began to cast it, though the formulae and spell schemata were far too long and complex to fit into a single book.

The opening steps came to Tristan in the flyers printed on flimsy school-budget paper that his teacher passed out during the final week of fifth grade. When one landed on his desk, Tristan glanced up from the voodoo doll he’d been carving out of his pencil—and gaped down at the grainy black-and-white photos, the children in them, the children that could be him.

Exploring dark forests with secret waterfalls.

Waging brutal battle royales with foam sabers and dodgeballs and trivia cards.

Bringing ghosts to life by campfirelight, sacrificing live marshmallows to the flames, reading each other’s fates in the embers and ash.

And across the top of the flyer, in scrawling digital font, SUMMER CAMP.

That evening, Tristan stayed up far past his bedtime, waiting for his mother to come home, dwarfed in one of the two very large armchairs set on opposite sides of the very large dining room table. When her very large car finally rumbled up to the front gates, through the archways, under the porte-cochere and into the garage, Tristan straightened the paper umbrella he’d placed in her favorite ginseng-basil-citrus cleanse smoothie, before flipping the plate off the top of his microwave mac-and-caviar that had gone cold hours ago.

As soon as his mother cracked open the door, before she’d even taken off her very large satchel or needle-sharp heels, Tristan took a deep breath—steadied himself—and blurted, “Let-me-go-to-summer-camp-please-if-you-don’t-I’ll-scream-or-combust-or-something-else-so-much-awfuller-you-can’t-even-imagine-it!” Tristan had imagined it, though. In great detail.

But his mother simply nodded and took her smoothie upstairs to drink while she performed her nightly portfolio rediversification in her very large bubble bath. After all, she had never gotten to go to summer camp as a child. And she’d thought Tristan needed more practice networking.

That very night, Tristan bought a suitcase and started to pack. He didn’t waste space on clothes, or shampoo and soap, or a beach towel and sunscreen—he’d long ago learned the spells to take the place of those. Instead, he packed his under-underground lair. All of it. Potion kits and cauldrons. Scrying boards and wands. The little wooden box filled with desiccated remains that he used to practice raising zombies, albeit only zombie mice and birds, the only corpses Dog would supply him with. He even packed the empty wine racks, and the stone walls and floors, and the stairs leading down from the billiards room, zipping it all up neatly into the suitcase with just enough room leftover for a toothbrush.

(Tristan had purchased the suitcase from the plasmafiend living in the endless reflections of his very large bathroom mirrors. It wouldn’t accept his mother’s credit card, or even cash, but Tristan had never found much use for his left clavicle, and he was fairly certain he knew how to grow himself a new one.)

The next day, Tristan rumbled the suitcase into the principal’s office and handed her the summer-camp form. She squinted down at it—not that there was much to read. Over the blanks for name and address and emergency contact, in ink such a heavy shade of purple that it seemed to press through the paper and into some dimension beyond, Tristan had written only one word.

YES.

Tristan looked up at the principal.

The principal looked down at Tristan.

Tristan scooted his suitcase closer and slid his mother’s check (normal-sized, but with a very large number written on it) across the principal’s desk.

The principal thought of her next meeting with the school board for fundraising reports, and, for the first time in years, she smiled.

The private camp bus arrived just before day’s end. Tristan rolled his suitcase down the school’s front steps, triggering a series of minor earthquakes. Somewhere, deep within the building, a crack ran up the inside of a windowless classroom.

The bus rolled to a stop on the camp’s gravel driveway in a swirling cloud of dust, specially conjured to give the impression when Tristan stepped out that he was several times more mysterious and tall and handsome than any fifth grader has any right to be. A counselor with ripped jeans and a face full of metal slouched him to gloomy dormitories with ghostly hole-ridden curtains, loose nails covered in rust and disease, and spiders of the kind that always scurry just a bit too fast to see clearly, that sneak up behind you to stroke your ankles with their furry feelers, that explore your pried-open mouth while you sleep. The counselor droned in a very loud voice that Tristan should behave and refrain from pranking his fellow campers—then bent over and whispered fervently, almost threateningly, that Tristan must prank them back whenever they did, and worse, lest their evil go unchecked.

A dark spark of hope fizzled oilishly in Tristan’s chest.

And when he met Frau Gospodin, it flared into a smoke-belching bonfire.

The camp had hired the opulently famous pastry chef to teach patisserie skills every afternoon, considering, perhaps optimistically, twelve to be the age at which children might be armed with whisks and frying pans without posing a serious risk to themselves, or each other, or society. On their first activities rotation, Tristan’s troop of campers shuffled into Frau Gospodin’s tented kitchen classroom, pushing and shoving for the spot nearest the front.

And what a show she provided.

Before their very eyes, Frau Gospodin crafted chalky paste into miniature marzipan golems—transmuted butter and sugar into crystalline sin—spilled cherry-red gore into fleshy dough lumps that bubbled and throbbed to life in the oven. Tristan had never seen such powerful evil sorcery. He trembled with delight.

Once she’d finished, she swore, in front of the entire classroom, that she would take as an apprentice any student that proved themselves sufficiently prodigious, ambitious, or delicious.

She had promised this very same thing, each year, for twenty years.

She had never taken an apprentice.

Tristan vowed—silently, as the most powerful promises are sworn—that he would be the first. And with that, he began casting his countercurse in earnest.

The rest of the camp, Tristan soon learned, didn’t have anything at all to do with evil, or sorcery, or evil sorcery, as all those brochure pictures had promised. The lake held no ghost ships or girl-gulping sea serpents. The fire had a brimstoney pit around it, but it burned warm and orange with a comfortable crackle, not cold and serpent-green with the sucking sound of the gasp just before a stifled scream, as Tristan preferred. What he’d taken in the brochure for an ogre was only the camp cafeteria’s cook, glaring at campers over shimmering trays of steaming uncertainties, beating the head of an oversized metal spoon against one meaty shoulder with a slow and insistent thump, thump, thump. The scariest thing was the rumor about a camper who’d gotten eaten by a monster suitcase in the middle of the night, though Tristan didn’t find the story nearly as tummy-tingling as everyone else (after all, he’d been the one to hear the stubbed toe, the soft curse, the gasp cut off by a zippery zzzuulp!).

But every afternoon, after all the morning’s knot-tying and finger-painting and wilderness exploring, Frau Gospodin would welcome him and the other campers into her haven of delicious depravity. She would scrawl fiendishly complex recipes onto the classroom’s chalkboard, leaving half the steps as simply Improvise. Then, she would heave herself around her kitchen classroom—plump as an overfilled cream puff, and equally prone to outbursts—to sample the daily delicacy and savor each opportunity to crumble like cinnamon streusel the confidence of any camper who had failed to satisfy her standards, which is to say, everyone.

Tristan had thought he’d hated his teachers at school, but Frau Gospodin, he loathed. Envied. Worshipped. She knew how to evoke the same existential, intestine-emptying dread that Tristan always aspired to inspire himself. He did everything he could to charm Frau Gospodin into taking him as an apprentice, conjuring clouds of meringue from egg whites and sugar, bewitching burbling chocolate into devilishly dark bonbons, lighting blue-flamed pyres atop baked Alaska that could divine its devourer’s deepest desires.

Tristan discovered he could do magic while baking without speaking at all, channeling his evil-sorcerer spells through texture and taste, developing flavors never before known to human tongues, almost unpalatably powerful, but not quite, not for Tristan. He bewitched the tongues and mesmerized the mouths of the other campers with samples of his pastries, which were—they all agreed in a blank-faced monotone, nodding in perfect unison—absolutely to die for.

Frau Gospodin, however, wouldn’t bend under the intricate alchemy of Tristan’s pastries, no matter how soul-stealingly succulent or torturously tempting, for Frau Gospodin never tasted them at all. “What is this?” she’d spit, then spit, pteweh, on whatever Tristan had offered her and jab one of her thick, creamy ladyfingers at the chalkboard. “Can you not do the reading?” And she would smack the pastries away with her sugar-slicked bear claw, splattering them across the floor with a puff of powdered sugar for the other campers to scrabble and snarl and snap their teeth over.

The solstice came and went. The summer yawned and swayed and tipped towards fall. The bus lurked among the trees at the edge of camp, biding its time, creaking hungrily for a warm bellyful of children.

And still, Frau Gospodin refused to taste Tristan’s pastries.

Tristan turned twelve, the witching age, on the final day of camp, though his only celebration was an envelope dropped unceremoniously onto his breakfast tray during the morning mail call, containing a very large stack of cash and no words apart from his mother’s digital signature, thin and bony and cold. Tristan crushed it into a ball and threw it into the compost bin, money and all, to soak in the runny yolks of his untouched fried eggs.

And still, Frau Gospodin refused to taste Tristan’s pastries.

With the leaves outside threatening to change, an ominously cool breeze blowing through the tented kitchen classroom, and all of the other campers having finished their final creations hours ago, Tristan wobbled up to Frau Gospodin, his legs jellied from exhaustion, to present the coconut-cream croissants with pamplemousse pudding that he’d spent all day and the better part of the night baking.

Frau Gospodin plucked a croissant from the tray, ripped open its soft neck, sniffed the flakes of leprechaun gold Tristan had added for a garnish of good luck and greed.

She kneaded her face to one side, then the other, surreptitiously slurping the saliva trickling down from the corner of her lips.

She opened her mouth—

—and she told him, in a voice thick and sickening as overcooked custard, “You will never be a pastry chef,” just as the evil-sorcerer schools had told him through runes burnt into his morning toast, “You will never be an evil sorcerer,” just as the speech therapist had told him through soppily sympathetic smiles, “You will never be normal,” just as his classmates and teachers and mother had told him through action or word or complete lack of either, “You will never be anything worthwhile at all.”

Frau Gospodin flicked the croissant to the ground and left Tristan alone in the tent, pausing by the last oil lamp still burning only long enough to crush its flaming head between her fingertips.

As soon as she’d disappeared, Tristan lit it again with a spiteful stare. He reached into his jean-shorts’ back pocket for the tattered and brittle-paged tome improbably squeezed in there, slammed the book down onto the countertop amidst the flour and baking soda and pixie dust, flipped it open—then sagged, shut the book again, and slumped forward onto his forearms, sighing with the despair of the dying, or the dead, or those who’ve made it to death’s opposite end and kept breathing anyway. It wasn’t worth it to try to curse Frau Gospodin, Tristan thought darkly, and not with his typical, ticklish, mustache-twirling darkly-ness. Probably, Frau Gospodin would resist that magic, too. It would only prove how inept he really was. Why he was in normal-kid school. That he deserved to be called worthless, and disabled, and Stuttuttuttuttutteristan.

Tristan squashed down his puff of hair with his hands, waited for it to leaven again, then forced himself upright and wiggled his fingers. A mixing bowl and whisk and measuring scale peeked out from the cabinets, looked both ways, then shyly sidled onto his countertop.

And, finally, Tristan cast the final step of the countercurse that would render him un-invisible—though he still wouldn’t realize for a short while longer.

For once, Tristan baked not to impress, or entice, or enthrall, but instead just because he wanted to, and needed to. It was still his birthday, after all, even if it was the worst one he could remember among his already underwhelming backlog of birthdays. He made a simple chocolate layer cake, the kind he’d always heard other kids had at their parties and which he’d always hoped to have himself, though his mother had only ever bought him very large croquembouches and coffee mousses and angel food cakes that Tristan found in very poor taste.

Tristan’s cake came together in a vortex of cocoa and vanilla and earth dragons’ blood, semisweet chips for the sides and chocolate frosting between the layers and a strawberry-sweet nymph’s heart on top (plus one last ingredient too secret even to mention). Tristan snapped his fingers, once, twice, twelve times, stabbing each candle into the cake as it appeared in his hand, already sputtering sinisterly with frosty-blue flames that wouldn’t burn if touched, though would do something far more painful, and disfiguring. He hummed “Happy Birthday” to himself, as he did every year, alone, and then, with nobody but the pot-bellied moon to watch, he closed his eyes and imagined his deepest, most delicious birthday wish.

Sweet revenge against the bullies and teachers and evil-sorcerer schools.

Salty satisfaction watching Frau Gospodin gorge herself on his pastries, and on her words.

Slightly bitter, but most craved of all, his mother’s approval.

Then, he blew out the candles, and he left the cake, untouched, suddenly too sickened to eat it.

The next morning, Tristan and the other campers watched sullenly through their greasy dormitory window as cars crowded into the camp’s circle driveway, some very small, some very medium, some even large, but not very. He rolled his suitcase outside, leaving two perfectly parallel rifts in the hard dormitory floorboards, then set it on the porch and tickled its belly until it burped up the camper it’d swallowed months ago. (The boy seemed not that much worse off for his stay, only slightly moth-eaten, and dazedly confused at how the summer could be ending already, though this could be said of all the other campers, as well.)

As the boy drifted off towards the crowd of waiting parents, Tristan dragged his feet through the gravel to the bus that waited, hungrily, at the driveway’s opposite end.

He’d just set his foot into the bus’s open mouth when the howling began.

“Who has done this thing?”

Tristan looked over his shoulder. Frau Gospodin burst through the flaps of her classroom tent, crushing the frail frosting ribs of a chocolate cake wedge in her hand.

“Who has broken into my kitchen and made this…this sacrilege?”

She spotted Tristan—stomped seismically through the parents stumbling out of her way—and threw herself at Tristan’s feet, holding the cake aloft like an unholy relic.

“It is…it is…sinfully delicious!” Frau Gospodin said, icing on her lips and a sugary glaze to her eyes, chocolate crumbs between her necks and gluttony in her voice. “Such devil’s food, I have never…the rich bitter rebellion, the slap of the sugar, and to triumph over it all, the warm…the fudgy….”

But even Frau Gospodin didn’t know the word for a secret ingredient that might give that elusive, irresistible flavor.

“You cannot be going,” she gurbled. “You must be coming to be my student. Must! Must-must!”

Tristan looked up at the parents, all of them curious and concerned and vaguely uncomfortable at the emotional outburst. He looked at the other campers, all glowering at Frau Gospodin and the cake in her hand with a menacing, hive-minded hum. He looked at the bus driver, still back-braced from wrestling his suitcase into the luggage compartment at the summer’s start, who widened her eyes and nodded enthusiastically.

Then, he looked back towards Frau Gospodin, still holding the slice of his cake, now two bites smaller. “But,” he began, “what about m-, my speech therapy and s-, school, and—”

“You’ll be learning all you need to with me!” Frau Gospodin declared through another mouthful of cake.

“—and my house—” Tristan went on.

“You shall be living with me, and be liking it better, this I am guaranteeing!”

“—and d-, Dog—”

“I am loving the dogs!”

“—the cat—”

“Oh, ah…yes, the cats, I can be learning to love them, also.”

“—and my…?”

Tristan trailed off. He’d never told his mother about wanting to become Frau Gospodin’s apprentice—she was too busy to write him letters at camp, or to read any that he sent her, and she didn’t recognize dreamwalking as a valid means of communication.

But Frau Gospodin had promised to take only the most worthwhile students. And if there was one thing Tristan knew his mother thought that he was not, it was worthwhile.

That was when Tristan realized his curse was finally broken.

“Yes, yes?” Chocolate sprinkles sprinkled Tristan’s shirt. “Your what? I will find you a better one. I will be making it myself, if I am having to!”

But Tristan had stopped listening. A smile smeared itself onto his face, sweet and salty and bitter and more delicious than anything he’d ever tasted before. “Actually, I th-, think the rest will take care of itself.”

It was only later—after Tristan had taken his suitcase in one hand and helped Frau Gospodin to her feet with the other, boarded a limousine to the airport and a jet to her home bakery across the ocean, told his mother’s voicemail that he would not be returning for the new school year and to please send Dog as soon as she could—that Tristan realized he’d stuttered while speaking to Frau Gospodin, and that, for once, it had not bothered him, and might never again. In fact, he had never felt more powerful.

Tristan’s teachers did not miss him the following year, nor for many years to come, not until they spotted him, one by one, in the nightly news or international baking shows or the culinary magazines colonizing hair salons and hospital lobbies like literary crabgrass. Then, they would squint at his image, and wonder if they were only imagining that Tristan had just winked, and made a gesture that should’ve earned him many weeks of detention.

The speech therapist, balder and blander than ever, now remembers Tristan as a star pupil, a diamond in the rough that he turned into a hole-in-one.

Tristan did, in the end, earn his evil-sorcerer name. It appeared everywhere, in people’s dreams, and their nightmares, and their subconscious cravings. But rather than any of the names he’d listed in his bedside diary so many years ago, he instead chose the name that he’d come to desire more than any of those put together: Tristan. As for his old nickname, nobody has thought about it. Nobody even remembers the people who used to use it.

Frau Gospodin taught Tristan the deceivingly diabolical art of desserts, unraveling with him the skillet’s secrets and the mixing bowl’s mysteries—and then, she died. It’s something people tend to do, eventually, but she’d made prior arrangements with Tristan to ensure hers would be a less permanent death than most. Tristan left her bakery to crumble and started his own from the sugary dust. It’s one of the world’s largest. You might even work for him, somewhere way, way down the ladder, so far below him that you’re practically underground.

You’ve definitely eaten one of his pastries, though.

People would sell their souls to learn his secret ingredient, but Tristan never tells, no matter how many interviewers and Nobel Prize committees and evil-sorcerer schools plead. He might—might—tell his mother, if she asked, though she has never thought to. She’s proud of her son now, of course—his is the most profitable stock in her portfolio—though of all the things she’d ever provided Tristan, her approval was the one thing she gave him in size very small. When they run into each other now, at the corporate parties she still hosts, and at which Tristan is now both caterer and guest, she still sighs that she’d always hoped he’d choose a more ambitious profession. A ruthless entrepreneur, like her. Or perhaps the founder of a world religion. Or the kind of surgeon that charges the most exorbitant prices to pull out a person’s heart and sew it back in again almost exactly as it was, only changed somehow, imperceptibly, forever. She might’ve even preferred that he’d become an evil sorcerer, as she remembered him so often pretending to be as a child.

She has never tasted one of his pastries. If she did, perhaps she would realize that he has, in a way, become everything she’d ever hoped he might be, and more.

About the Author

E. M. Dasche

E. M. Dasche is the admittedly pretentious penname of a scientist, medical interpreter, and award-winning writer. Their growing portfolio may be found at emdasche.com

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About the Narrator

Bryce Dahle

Bryce Dahle is an upbeat and expressive voice actor with a love for the recording he does. He’s recorded multiple stories for the Tales to Terrify podcast as well two of the Escape Pod podcasts Pseudopod and Escapepod. If you’re interested in listening to more of his work, you can find his website at BDahleVoices.com

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