You were baking in the kitchen when we got the news. Shortbread. Or was it brownies? It’s funny, you always say I have a good memory but I can never remember little details like that. It blurs together. Sugar trapped in the gaps between the tiles on the floor. Oven gloves with scorch marks for fingers. Did they hurt you? I always wanted to ask you this. I wanted to ask you so many things. What did the batter taste like? Looking back, I can still see you licking the spoon and reading your phone and just standing there, brownie or biscuit or blood on your tongue. Were you choking? Can I save you? The heimlich remover doesn’t work quite as well when what you’re trying to remove is memory. I remember everything except the things that I never want to forget. The sunset when we walked up a cliff and you held my hand and pointed out a constellation. Which constellation was it? All I remember is stars. All I remember is the scar on the back of your throat and the smell in the kitchen when we got the news. Sweet. Burnt. You had this bad habit of turning the oven on too early. You liked to think that the space would be homely for the batter. I read something once that said life is hard when you grow up feeling bad for inanimate objects. I drew smiley faces on my teddies that looked sad. You stuck a blade in their mouths and tried to carve out the shape. You were always one step ahead of me. When we stood at the top of that cliff I looked at you and you looked at me and for a moment I wondered if we were both thinking about jumping. Sometimes I think about jumping. Sometimes I think about burning brownie batter just so see if it would smell like you. Just to see if I remembered it right.
Ella Newman is a philosophy student from the east of England. She was a winner of the Trees Please Poetry Please competition run by Birmingham Tree people and was longlisted for the Hive Young Writer’s competition. Her work can be found in Nowhere Girl Collective, The Artistry Magazine, The Poetry Lighthouse, Anemone Magazine, and Fish Girl Collective. She was on the University of Birmingham’s UNISLAM team and competed in the 2026 online heat of Roundhouse Poetry Slam. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Pressed Flower Review. You can find her on Instagram at @ellanewmanwrites