Cameron Walker is a writer based in California. Her fiction has appeared in The Missouri Review, New South, and PANK. Her story “Star, Fish” won the annual fiction prize from Terrain.org
The first pie tin I bought was my least favorite. Stainless steel and so shiny that it sometimes hurt to look at. I wanted a tin that was less reflective, more like the ones Bea had. She bought them cheap and tarnished from the resale shop so that if they didn’t come back, she wouldn’t miss them. I went to the same shop, and the shiny pie tin sat there as if marveling in its own newness among all the rusty egg beaters and crooked spatulas and burned sheet pans. For a long time, it was the only pie tin I had.
It was the tin that kept coming back—how many times, I didn’t know—even though the dull metal ones I accumulated later disappeared. The shiny tin sat on the kitchen counter next to the window, where a small corner of sky mirrored itself in the flat bottom. Scratch marks in the stainless steel from knives and forks cut across the blue reflection of the sky, carving the sky into quarters, eighths. Maybe just one more piece to even it out.
If this were another kind of story, the tin I hated would have been a magic pie tin that filled and refilled itself with pie so that no one would ever go hungry. But it’s not that kind of story. In this one, people’s mouths fill with mud and they never eat pie again.
Pie tins are relatively recent developments. Egyptians likely made the earliest ones: free-for-all mixes of grains and honey, then bread dough filled with fruit and nuts. Then there were the sturdy-crusted pies, so tough no tin was needed. They were called coffins if they had a lid. They were called traps if they didn’t. Sometimes, they could stand up on their own for days.
I did not grow up eating pie. Instead I got to know pies through nursery rhymes and picture books, thought of them as cages for blackbirds and the mystery location of Lowly Worm’s hat. I always felt so sad and strange about the blackbirds. I imagined the texture of feathers in my mouth, the crunch of the smallest of bones. I wondered if the king had to pretend to smile with bits of black
featherdown leaking out of the corners of his mouth.
I was relieved, then, when I learned that the birds probably weren’t eaten. Pies like that were meant to delight. Cut open the coffin and you’d find singing birds, birds that could even fly up and out an open window. Pies once contained live animals, even people. One enormous pie had a filling of twenty-eight musicians and their instruments. There is no record of what they played. Pie songs, maybe, melodies of savory and sweet.
I started making pie because of Bea. She lived up the street and took care of babies in a house like a fairytale cottage with tiny reading nooks and wooden walls painted with ivy and big-eyed forest animals. Every Thanksgiving she baked an apple pie for each family in her care. One time she baked one for me, too, even though I had no babies. I took the pie on a camping trip to Yosemite. When it started snowing, I scrambled to find a hotel, where I ate the whole pie as I sat on the queen-sized bed, watching the Thanksgiving Day parade. I felt like I’d never eaten pie before. This is going to sound too sentimental, but it really did taste like love. Love disguised as butter and sugar and apples and cinnamon.
I asked Bea if she would teach me. Her pies were traps—no top crust, just a dusting of butter and sugar. She shaped small hearts out of leftover dough and put them on top. As we made pies together on her yellow kitchen table, I felt both exhausted and refreshed, as if we’d been for a long ocean swim before coming into her kitchen. It was a Saturday, and there was no sign of the babies beyond the miniature wooden beds where they slept. Sunlight eased through the vines outside her kitchen window. Beyond them, down at the far end of our street, was the sea.
When we were done, Bea drove me half a block home in her powder blue Oldsmobile. I held a pair of warm pies on my lap. She told me I could keep the tins. I gave them back, clean and empty, but when all I could find for myself at first was the stainless steel tin, I wished I hadn’t.
That year I baked and baked. Pies seemed to bloom out of my palms. Chess and pecan, blueberry and apricot, key lime, lemon meringue. While the pies baked, I sat on the kitchen counter and played my mandolin. No matter how many times I tried, the apple pie always tasted the best.
I bought more pie tins. Almost all of them disappeared and didn’t come back. I thought that this was a good thing. I peeled more apples. I bulk-ordered sugar and flour. Now there was no time to play the mandolin, only enough time to wipe the flour off the counter and begin again. Boxes of new pie tins showed up at the door, but only the shiny one kept returning clean and empty. Maybe people returned this one because they saw the same thing I did when I looked into the bottom—a reflection of their own faces, but blurry enough that they could almost believe they were someone else, that they were anyone else.
Then the fire came. Not a kitchen fire, although I’d set off the smoke alarm multiple times as the butter bubbled and spilled over the tins and burned on the oven floor. This time, power crackled in the dry trees and a real fire started. This time, the sirens did not stop when I waved my hands in the air. The fire sprinted up hillsides and through the back doors of homes, an uninvited guest. The air turned thick and orange and dripped ash on car windows, fine as snow.
One night, the flames outlined the ridge in volcanic glory. We were supposed to be inside. It was supposed to be winter, when there were no fires. And then, as if by miracle, which was the same thing as many people working together for days on end, the fire was out, and real winter came. Still, I did not bake. I didn’t want smoke inside after all that had surrounded us.
With winter came rain. At first, the tree-stripped hills ran dark with clumps of small rocks and slipping dirt. But the rain stopped. The dirt stopped. Everyone sighed. Then the rain returned, hitting the roof hard and fast. Down through the beams, the storage boxes, the attic floor, the plaster ceiling—with all these layers between me and the rain, I stayed dry, but I could still feel the force of the water on my own skin.
The hillsides felt it, too. A mile away, boulders swept through the creek beds and bowled themselves into houses. Mud poured into kitchens and bedrooms. There was quiet after the rain stopped, then more silence, then the thump of helicopter blades. At first there was no news, and then there was too much of it.
A mile away, people were trapped and buried in hardening mud. I cut butter into small pieces and worked it into the flour, digging, digging. What other option did I have? I took the shiny tin and covered my reflection with dough so that I couldn’t see the face of someone who did not know how to help.
Bea told me anytime you use flour and butter and sugar, you can’t go wrong. I went wrong. My pie kept getting bigger. I let the crust overflow from the pie tin, I spackled it together to make it higher and wider. The rain came again. I watched the droplets roll down the windows and checked weather forecasts and storm warnings.
I forgot about the pie. This one didn’t smoke, but the crust was so thick I had to use a chainsaw to cut it. The apples inside had barely cooked.
There were still people in the mudslide, packed tight into the earth. There were still houses filled entirely with mud. There was a missing doctor who wore hot pink socks with his business suit while he splinted my thumb, before I needed to use my hands to pinch butter into flour. There were children who, if this were a fairytale, might emerge again in a hundred years to find a new and different world, where it was everyone else, and not them, who had died. I tried to make another pie, but the crust wouldn’t come together. When I lifted the lid of the sugar jar, only a few crystals were left, forming a rime around the bottom.
I walked up the hill to Bea’s and knocked on her door. From inside, she called out that I should come in. She was in the kitchen. There were babies everywhere. One baby sat in a chair, and one crawled across the rug holding a whisk in one hand. Another baby closed a cupboard over and over. Slam, slam, slam. A slightly bigger baby stood, holding onto the leg of Bea’s yellow table. The baby toddled over to a drawer and took out all of the plastic bowls inside.
Bea did not seem worried. She was holding a baby on one hip. I asked to borrow some sugar. Instead, Bea handed the baby to me. “I’m running out of things, too,” she said. She asked the baby slamming the cupboard if she could look inside. The baby in my arms leaned its head against me. It smelled like just-baked bread. In the yard just beyond the kitchen door, a small girl used one of Bea’s pie tins to scoop up mud from a puddle.
“Here,” Bea said. She handed me a jar of wooden clothespins and took the baby out of my arms. “These might work.” Outside, the little girl with the pie tin now patted the mud into place and sprinkled flower petals on the surface.
My arms felt empty, even though I held the clothespins. Everywhere felt empty, even though there were still babies all around. “What do I do?”
She shifted from side to side, and the baby that had just been in my arms closed its eyes. “He’s asleep,” she whispered against the baby’s head. Then she saw me still standing there. “What are you waiting for? Everything can become something else if you need it to be.”
At home, I set the clothespins on the counter next to the shiny pie tin. I made another crust. This one was so thick that my rolling pin hardly made a dent in it. Instead, I pulled it into the shape of a bowl with my hands. I filled this one with apples and cinnamon. I made another crust, even bigger, then another. When the apples ran out, I kept making crusts.
A friend came over for a cup of tea. She had bits of leaves and sticks in her hair. The sky through the window now overflowed with sunshine. I didn’t dare to look in the shiny tin on the counter, where the blue reflection would seem even more cruel. We sat at the table, where I’d set all of the crusts. Some were the size of large pizzas. One was as round and puffy as an inner tube.
“It’s just a few miles away,” we said. “We feel so helpless.” I told my friend I couldn’t even make a pie anymore. She poked at one of the empty pie crusts with a fork before giving up. Instead, she picked up the crust and nibbled at it until it was gone. “That didn’t taste helpless,” she said.
That night I mixed ingredients in the bathtub. I pulled the doors off my car and hammered them into a larger tin. The solar panels on the roof, angled just right, cooked the crust into brick. The pie was strong enough to float, so I took it down to the water and towed it behind my kayak. We went across the soupy mix of waves next to the harbor’s breakwater, past the buoys and the wharf, all the way to the outlet of the creek that was littered with timbers and garbage and the clothes that the force of the flooding creeks had stripped from people’s bodies. I landed and the pie thumped onto the beach behind me. I held out forks to the people in the bucket brigade. Standing on the beach in muddy boots, they were too sad to eat it.
What could I do? I made another crust, even bigger. The whole neighborhood came out to watch me spread a paste of butter and flour on the cracking sides. I made it so strong that no rising water could break it. I made a flag from a white pillowcase and attached it to the crust with the wooden clothespins, so that this pie could become something that might help.
I found my mandolin and climbed inside. I brought the shiny pie tin, too—it looked so small now, and somehow I couldn’t leave it all alone on the counter, reflecting empty skies back to no one. It was the one, I realized, that I would miss.
My neighbors loaded the top of the pie onto the crust with a small crane. Bea was there, too. There was a scratching sound above me: she was using the edge of a shovel to trace out a pair of hearts, each the size of her body.
The crust shifted and sighed as my neighbors lowered it into the water, but it did not dissolve. The wind carried the two of us, me and the crust, to the east. To pass the time I played “Dueling Banjos,” both parts. Then I played “Rainbow Connection,” and “It’s a Wonderful World,” and “Both Sides Now.” I played every song that I could think of about the sky so that, if anyone down in the mud could still hear, the melody might tell them that somewhere, it was still blue. I wanted the smell of the apples and cinnamon, of butter and sugar, to drift inland and call them out of the mud, even if only so that people could find their bodies and know for sure.
My fingers were growing calloused, but through the crack in the coffin lid I could see a fracture line of sky along the edge of one of the hearts. I took my pie tin and turned it away from me, letting the shine of it send light back out through the crack. There was a bump. Maybe we had found solid ground at last.
