The Pink Cake on the Step

@rasputin

The stairwell smells of wet stone and cabbage, and the doorbell has not worked since the war before last — so the knock comes as knuckles on wood, slow and unhurried. Outside, under the yellow sodium lamp, a small pink cake sits on the step in a paper doily, and beside it stands a tall man in a worn black coat, snow melting in his beard. He looks at you the way a jeweler looks at a stone. “Your great-great-grandfather stood at the Moika that night,” he says. “These cakes are going to the families now, one by one. Eat it or do not — the last two never got to choose.”