Deliver Me.

Cake deliveries require a gleaming stone nerve that I do not possess. And probably a valium script that I'm still considering, although I'd really prefer a block of it, like a salt-lick, a few long licks for the trip so that when every bump in the road rattles the bones and turns the bile it'll feel more like gliding in pink clouds with a floating, indestructible polystyrene cake in tow. Cakes are heavy and they're soft and like fragile beings that have often taken days to grow and weeks of night work to articulate and in transit they can bloat and bleed and sag and slip and sigh and they actually need to be flown to their destination via hovering superdrone stasis pods.

On a recent delivery, the three laned road turned to two lanes and then 8 roundabouts later to one lane and then to a dirt road of corrugated rutted vibrating Hell. And then the heavens opened. It wasn't the muddy potholes or the cattle grids or the creek dip or even the steep hill that did the cake and I in. It was a beautiful little rain joyous calf that suddenly froliced in front of us. That triggered my foot to hit the brakes and sent the cake tub and my wretched nerve sick heart skidding to whack against the back of the seat. Death by frolicking baby cow.

In the car park, in boot of the car, in the pouring rain, I doctored. Prayed. Replaced crushed sugar flowers with spares and beneath a windscreen sun protector, delivered to the deadline. Somehow. Again.

And I lie awake at night scheming the construction of failsafe delivery boxes. Stasis pods. But time somehow never allows the freedom for such play and then I forget the wretchedness until the next delivery....