Sometimes it's the cake (warning goofy prose alert)

Sometimes it's the Cake

It wasn’t long after Cam told the Pope to kiss his ass that Stevie B., started coming around. I always saw her as something of a predator. Not in the sense of when a bear lumbers in a stream to fish out salmon, but more like a buzzard that hates carrion. She’d circle and circle and in that last moment of life she’d take hers. You might think of it like the loud ass brother-in-law that circles the turkey on Thanksgiving so as soon as everyone’s back is turned he can scavenge a morsel or begin pecking out the last remnants of flesh still clinging to the bone.
Cam wasn’t his real name, just a handle he went by because he hated his name. At least, that’s what we all believed. Cam wasn’t his whole nick name either. Cam is short for Camo, which is short for camouflage. We called him that since we were kids. His dad had tons of Army grease paint left over from his reservist days, the kind they use to camouflage their faces with, and Cam wouldn’t play “Forts” with us without it. This usually meant we had to wait on him to get it just right. He always said, “Heavy on the bone, light on the meat.” Something his dad undoubtedly picked up being in the Army Reserves, though none of us knew what it meant. So Camouflage was shortened to Camo, and then to Cam and it stuck. Just so you know, his real name is Grant Lee Eisen-something-or-other. I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem all that bad to me, but then again I was the only white kid in the neighborhood and my name is James Brown. Like they say, nobody’s perfect.
For some time, Cam had been in a downward spiral. I say for some time. If you consider his high point as birth, then it has been a bit more than merely some time. On his eighth birthday, his older sister choked on a hotdog and died. It wasn’t really as simple as all that. She had been walking around with a hotdog in her mouth, the way kids do, when Cam, while swinging at the piñata, hit her in the mouth with the stick. When he brought the swing forward again the piñata split in half raining gold coin chocolates down over the flock of kids diving for the candy. In all the excitement, his father had missed the part where Cam’s sister had fallen to the ground. Cam’s mother died giving birth to him, so if it hadn’t been for the Pastor’s wife, his sister would probably still be lying there.
Eileen Underwalther, the Pastor’s wife and frequent visitor to the Eisen-Something-or-other house, called Mac’s attention to his unconscious daughter on the ground. Immediately, Mac sprung into action. He knew just what to do. He elevated her head and checked her for breathing. It was kind of hard to really discern what condition she was in given the location of the hotdog and the amount of blood on her face. He checked her for breathing and listened for a heartbeat, in the middle of all of us kids screaming. When he didn’t hear a heart beat, he started CPR. The Medical Examiner said there really wasn’t any way to know for sure she was alive when her rib punctured her lung, but just know he tried his hardest with all of his training to save her and didn’t. I guess what I remember most about that day is the cake was really good.