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scattereddreamer · 3 years

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Baking For The Paranatural

Word count: 1,746

How It Began

My husband always brought me a cup of tea in the evening after I returned home from work, which was always appreciated. Given our jobs, we couldn’t always spend time together, so he would make me tea and I would bring him home desserts. I own a bakery while he works with paranormal entities as a paracommunicator. Helps to keep things civil between the normal and the abnormal. Not only because he was fair and a great listener, but he could see them. And sometimes his work came home with him.

Entities would escape the confines of buildings and items to follow him home, all because they had heard about my baked goods. How otherworldly beings knew? I don't exactly know, but I suspected it had something to do with my husband telling people I ran a bakery. He would tell anyone who would listen. I guess otherworldly beings could all communicate on the same level, hence why they showed up at our door.

When it first happened, I was glad I had brought home some cake home for my husband that day. He gladly gave it to the entity, which I couldn't see until it revealed herself to the both of us.

"I suppose I can destroy libraries another day," she said as she took another bite of the cake. I silently wondered what her problem was with libraries but was glad she would spare them. The weekly trip to my local library was a highlight of my week. It was a good way to start the weekend on Saturdays, seeing as my bakery was only opened five days a week. So to say that it would be terrible to have the weekly trip cancelled was an understatement. Old cookbooks were abundant in the library.

I didn’t doubt her ability to do it, either. She said she wasn’t a demon, but never bothered to specify what she was, either. Her name was Lavi, and she was an entity who could breathe fire, so her burning down a building filled with paper wasn’t impossible for her.

Once she finished her slice of cake, Mark took her back to the fire station she was being held inside of and was placed inside the confines of a new fire extinguisher. The first one had imploded from her grand escape the first time. Well, not grand enough to alert the crew she was rooming with, apparently. How no one had heard the implosion was a mystery to me, but then again, fire fighters work hard day and night, so they likely were tired, and no one is looking out for an imploding fire extinguisher.

When Mark returned home an hour or so after leading, he asked that I make more cake. “It’s not for me,” he said, “It’s for Lavi,”

“She liked it, huh?” I asked, still wondering how otherworldly beings could enjoy it, let alone know what cake was. Then again, cake was one of the most popular desserts in the bakery. I suppose it was no surprise that Lavi would enjoy it, too. I agreed, but only because Mark said that she’d be more willing to cooperate if she could have more of the cake on a regular basis. It wasn’t a ridiculous request and I doubted that being cooped up inside of the very device that was capable of putting you out was much fun, nor being surrounded by people who actively worked against your ability.

Mark had a way of humanizing the paranormal entities, which I didn’t think much of at first, but as time went on, I began to understand things much better. I found myself feeling sorry for some of them because of how they were treated before Mark helped them. Others, not so much, but Lavi wasn’t one of them from what I had seen, and Mark believed she wouldn’t be any more trouble so long as she got her cake.

He was right. For about three months. I would make the cake, he would take it to her, and Lavi would continue to cooperate. It was a cycle that continued on for those few months, and from time to time, I would visit Lavi with him. She was one of the safer entities that Mark dealt with, otherwise he wouldn’t have let me come with him, which was understandable. Paracommunicators didn’t have it easy. Many of them quit or wound up dead within the first year because they thought too highly of themselves and could handle whatever was thrown at them. The first rule for becoming a paranormal communicator was be humble or be dead. If you didn’t adhere to that rule, unless you had an insane amount of luck, you’d be dead.

So why did it stop after three months? Because Lavi stopped talking to Mark suddenly. She refused to come out of the extinguisher, refused to eat cake, and refused to talk. He asked me to speak to her and though I didn’t really know what to say, I decided to help. Lavi always wanted cake and though she would complain if she didn’t like the cake, she never just stopped talking altogether. Even I was worried at this point.

Stepping into the fire station, the first thing I noticed was how thick the air was with tension. Some of the crew members were there as they cleaned one of the trucks, carrying on about their day. Nothing appeared to be wrong with them, so I continued on towards Lavi’s room. When I reached the room she was being kept in, I noticed that the fire extinguisher wasn’t glowing like it normally did, which meant two things: Lavi had managed to break out of the extinguisher without imploding it or something horrible had happened to her.

Come to find out it was neither. Well, nothing horrible that couldn’t be fixed. It took some coaxing on my part, but Lavi finally came out and she was in anguish.

“They treat me like some criminal, and yet they stole from me!” she growled, the crown of fire atop her head burning much higher than before.

“Okay, Lavi, what’s the problem?” I asked.

“The slice of red velvet you had left the other day! Someone ate it! It’s bad enough that I have to stay inside of this stupid fire extinguisher! All I ask for is cake! I haven’t burned a single village down in centuries and have cooperated! I will turn this building to ashes if they don’t confess to their crimes,”

“Someone ate your cake and you didn’t like that. I’m sorry that that happened, but you can’t burn this building down, otherwise the authorities are going to put you in the facility,” I reasoned and smoke came from Lavi’s ears. She could only fold her arms as she reluctantly agreed with me, “And you know that they have an entity who can use water on their side,”

“Yeah, I know,” she spat.

“How about this? I get them to apologize and bring you another slice,”

“Or you could let me burn this building down so I could be moved to facility. It would beat being confined,” I had known Lavi disliked her living situation, but I didn’t know that she hated it. One could hear the venom dripping from her voice with every word, and that got the wheels turning in my head, thinking of just how lonely and claustrophobic it could be to be confined to one space all the time with limited contact. It was isolating, to say the least.

“I can’t make any promises, but what if Mark and I found a place for you to stay that’s much bigger than this? Maybe even use your fire?” I suggested.

“Like where?”

“A place that grows pine trees…I think that they need fire to reproduce. You could burn to your hearts content and be free,”

“Really?” asked Lavi, her eyes burning brightly with hope.

“No promises, but you haven’t been giving us any trouble, so I don’t see why the authorities can’t look into it,” And that’s exactly what Mark and I did. After a few weeks of getting everything squared away, Lavi would be free of the fire extinguisher because she’d be going to a farm where seeds needed fire to germinate. An ironic thing about Lavi was that she loved plants, even if her fire would ruin them, so this was something she was looking forward to. She would be happy, safe, and free.

As for the person who ate the slice of cake she had been saving, it wasn’t a person. It was the station’s dog, Smokey having figured out how to open the fridge. The crew found out when he suddenly got sick, putting two and two together.

Not only was this the start of me baking for paranormal entities, but also the start of Mark working towards putting those entities in places where they could burn brightly, not have their fires snuffed out.

“I should’ve brought you with me sooner,” he told me one evening.

“Why? Because of my desserts?” I replied.

“Not just that, but because I was the one who said look at them as if they were people. Doesn’t mean I was treating them like people as much as I should’ve. Sure, I talked to them, but I didn’t think about their living situations, just keeping everyone safe. They deserve just as much freedom as we do. Within reason. Can’t hurt others just to make one person comfortable,”

“Agreed,”

And that was how baking for paranormal entities began. Of course, I knew cake wasn’t the only thing they’d like, and this probably isn’t some super exciting story you’re looking forward to. To be completely honest, I’m still learning what paranatural means, not to be confused with supernatural. As time goes on, I’m sure I’ll learn more because my husband wants me to keep helping him. He says that my baking could make even the most vengeful entities forget their quest for vengeance, if only for a short while. Sometimes, all they needed was a brief act of kindness and they’d look at this differently. After all, it’s the small things, not the big things, that really make a difference at the end of the day.

As for the next entity, he was much less peaceful and judging from how others treated him it was easy to see why. There was only so much someone could take.

#paranormal #original work #baking

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