The Beginning of the End of Hummingbird Cake

In the pineapple is the fiber we’ve been looking for, the sweet yellow threadiness we’d never confuse for stitches, for wound. In the banana is the quickening rot, the rot being the softest, sweetest stage of the fruit.

This is not Hawaii. There are no resorts here. We swim in no ocean but in One Mile Creek, where there are no whales, only six partially submerged washing machines giving in to rust, a rot slower than the banana, more ferric than sweet.

One Mile Creek: deflated footballs, downturned antifreeze jugs, skim milk cartons, dolls naked and dolls clothed. The biggest dirty diaper I’ve ever seen, painted, as if deliberately, with a crucifix of shit.

History is as cloying as sugar, is less prone than the banana to rot.

Here, we sweeten our trash with tropical fruit, add a leavening agent, a little cinnamon, pecan. Vanilla for Tahiti. Egg for Earth. Salt. Flour. Here, we frost fantasy with cream cheese and imagine the speed required for an ultimate cleaning, a final washing away. How fast can we eat our Hummingbird Cake without getting sick? This: our skunk cabbage, our syrup of ipecac. Hummingbird Cake as a purging of the creek. How fast do we need to eat to commune with the wing beats? The very fast wing beats?

In Mobile, in August, 93% humidity. In One Mile Creek, in August, the number of discarded tank tops quintuples. There’s a pink LIFE’S A BEACH one. There’s a red one collaring an egret.

The relative humidity of a human exhale is almost always 100%. The relative humidity of a human exhale through a mouthful of Hummingbird Cake (allowing that p = pressure, the force with which we breathe out; w = water content of the cake [averaging pineapple at 87%, banana at 84%, the pecans at 10%, the cake base at 30%, the cream cheese frosting at 75%]; T_C = temperature in Celsius; a = enthalpy, a thermodynamic potential that encompasses everything from the origination of a substance to its final resting place in the end stages of entropy) is almost always:

or smoke, or mirrors, or a language I incompletely understand. The hummingbird hovers over Mobile, knowing nothing of the things named after it, everything of enthalpy and equation. It watches the egret free itself from the tank top, bite, then reject the left shoulder strap. The hummingbird watches twelve mothers fork cake into their mouths with plastic forks. Watches us light our fires. It inhales and exhales 250 times per minute, each.

In our carbon is our incompletely burned garbage. In our cake, the pineapple beckons to the banana, and the banana to us.

According to Aqua Lab’s Moisture Migration Department, in an article not-so-scholarly titled Fruitcake and Fruit Cereal Surprise, “Water content is nothing more than a distraction. Pay attention to that number, and the outcome feels like sleight of hand.”

That flock, a bunch of small things, looks like one big thing. History makes off with the nectar. In this is some kind of abracadabra, some distraction that only our water can understand.

Paper plates, Snickers wrappers, empty two-liters of Mountain Dew, traffic cones, cyanide.

Above my head in Montgomery, circling—scouting perhaps—as they’re equally drawn to sugar, I can’t tell if that’s a hummingbird, or a Vespa mandarinia, that giant yak-killing hornet, the bee whose mandible is so relatively strong (and orange) and bears a single black tooth perfect for burrowing—that tiny strength like the hummingbird to the human, the Earth to Cassiopeia, our small stories about our desserts and breath and garbage able to inflame only our small, same hearts, some larger story, larger heart, forever out there bobbing like another inky blob in the rank shallows next to pineapple rind, banana peels.

Dead, in rigor mortis, Vespa mandarinia flares out its wings to their full three-inch span, and if we dare to lift its body, it is a cross that fills our palm.

Though it had been made in countless kitchens throughout the American...