Bloodbath for a lemon tart

It’s been three days. Three whole fucking days of craving a lemon tart. And not just any lemon tart, specifically like the kind we used to get back at Bengal Club in India. A soft, flaky shell, with sour but sweet lemon curd piled up in the middle, topped with green flakes of what I never found out. Pistachio, maybe? I could inhale four of those without blinking an eye. I remember when Dad would bring them home after dinner at the club with his friends. They came in a delicate, white cardboard box, each in a little tissue paper cradle, sitting there in all its confectionery perfection. Those lemon tarts are so good, you can’t eat them standing up, your knees buckle. My favorite thing to do back then was take one out of the box, go to my bedroom window, get up on the sill and lean against the cold glass and eat it slowly, one excruciating bite at a time, gazing into the emerald green waters of the lake below. I’m drooling just thinking about it.

I’ve hunted all the supermarkets and stores in Bloomington, and have come up with nothing. When I look for a lemon tart online, it just shows recipes to make your own. I’m a good baker, but I would never dare try to recreate that splendor.

Drunk on power from my new car, who I have named Pepsi, I drive all over town, getting more and more depressed. It’s been three days since I’ve eaten anything, or drank anything but coffee. All I can think about are those lemon tarts. Everything else makes me nauseous. I’ve never had a fixation like this before. The voices are just as greedy as I am. Go get them, go find them, we want, we want, we want. It’s the first time in a long time that we agree on something.

Then I get a call from Louis. He says Whole Foods has lemon tarts, just the kind I’ve been on the hunt from. He shows me a picture. My eyes are wide in disbelief. It’s exactly the same, maybe a bit bigger, and without the green bits. The Whole Foods in downtown Chicago is where they have them.

Without thinking, I grab my bag and jump into the car, pedal to the metal. Louis tells me to pick him up at the store. I don’t know what he’s doing in Chicago, but I don’t care.

I got my license less than a month ago. I’ve never been on the highway. Chicago is four hours of highway driving up north from Bloomington. It’s a now or never type of thing, I tell myself. I check my navigation. The sun has already set, and my arrival time is just half an hour before they close, if I don’t stop at all on the road.

With the mirage of the lemon tart picture in my head, I ease the car towards the highway. The speedometer crawls up as my heart races faster and faster. Thirty, thirty-five, forty, fifty, fifty-five, sixty. My hands are trembling on the wheel. I’ve heard about all the horrible accidents that happen on the highway, at this exact speed. I clench the steering wheel in a white-knuckle grip, eyes flicking back and forth from the speedometer and the big, open, gray road ahead.

On my left, the sky is all rose and pink and blush and orange from the aftermath of the sunset, great heaps of fluffy clouds filling up the west. It’s been gorgeous day after day in July, but I couldn’t look at it now. I’m too scared to turn the radio on and so I drive in silence, teeth grit, trying not to blink to miss any mistake at all, barely breathing. If my eyes wander for even a second, the car snaps left or right, so dangerously breaching the white lane lines.

So I drive like that, for four hours straight, never moving, never pausing, sitting up poker straight. The only sound is the groan of the engine, and my erratic breathing. Sometimes I go way too fast, snaking around other cars and trucks like I’m in some video game, veering so hard it takes my breath away. Other times I’m a snail, in the right lane, where I belong, but they tailgate me anyway. “Go around me!” I keep shouting to them, but they all pile up behind me sulkily, always getting closer and closer, till I lose my nerve and speed up again. The power from going so fast is thrilling.