Submit Your Child’s Birthday Cake Request Below:

The Child’s Name

It would serve you better to know she’s like herself to be called Bluey Glooey, the queen of the scrappy toads. The ones she loves to chase around the pond of her grandmother’s house. Bluey because being blue is what makes her the queen, she stands out in her iridescence and they look up to her. That’s why they run away. It’s a cultural thing, a reverence thing. That’s why she chases them, so they know she loves them, she would never desert them.

The Child’s Favorite Color

Don’t get confused by the above. It’s not blue. She’s not full of herself like other queens. It’s green, swamp green because it reminds her of the clean of nature, and the smelly of fumes. It reminds her of her toad subjects, and her grandmother who brought her into royalty.

Cake Type

        Single, two, three tiers

I asked her what she wanted and it was a long flat cake with little rocks. A cake just like her toad subjects’ home but in “mini” she said squinting her eyes and her fingers, showing me what mini means. She’d seen how you could make just about anything out of “flondant,” she called it, on teevee. She made me a sketch. But I’ve seen how expensive those “I can’t believe it’s cake” cakes cost and, although she wouldn’t believe me because I’m always fastening and molding gold-dusted trinkets for her queen outfits, we don’t have a lot of money right now and I’ve only seen real gold about the same amount of times I’ve driven. I just started last month. I can only handle short distances and the routes I’ve memorized. Dad taught me to go to the supermarket, to Bluey Glooey’s school, and to the park she invents worlds in with her friends. He says it’ll be good for me to drive her around when he goes off to handle grandmother’s house. He’s going soon. He’s packing as I put in this birthday cake order. He says it could be a while, assets, estates, family disputes, something like that.

I’d love to surprise her with a cake full of “flondant” rocks and toad subjects and shrubs and real-like flies and butterflies and leaves that shoot up like paper fans and trees for shade and my perfect little Blooey Gluey chasing her toad subjects to prove her affection around the pond she imagines to be a swamp. A swamp big enough to be a whole kingdom in which the women toads are part of the royal court and their suitors carry little flowers in their expanding “gaulets,” collecting them to regurgitate bouquets at their webbed feet, their eyes wide, their sounds croaked.

But maybe you could just make one of those tall single-tiered cakes. Maybe you could scoop out a pond shaped hole in the middle with an ice-cream scooper. Could you make some mini pebbles around, maybe a single toad, maybe a single crown—doesn’t have to be in “flondant,” could be in hard or squishy plastic? Could you make the cake brown? Its top green, and the scooped out pond-shaped hole blue even though her beloved pond is that murky mix between all three. The little rocks gray and the crown gold, dusted if you could, she likes it dusted.

Any toppings, decorations?

I might have answered in the above.

What should the cake say?

Well I want it to say I love you, we love you. I don’t know how to tell you this but you’ll never see your pond turned swamp kingdom or the grandmother who made you royalty ever again. That’s how they told dad to tell you so you wouldn’t believe in clouds and stars and showing up at doors. So you would understand in no uncertain terms the finality of selling a house, assets, and estates, and the reasons we do it.

It should say don’t worry, I’ll be here until I won’t be, which should be in a really long time.

I’ll dig you a new pond or I’ll make you one out of things I can fasten and mold. I know it won’t be the same and I know your toad subjects will never find a better queen, so quick on her feet, so quick to smother them with care.

But, that’s probably too long so maybe just write, “Happy 5th Birthday Bluey Glooey.”

Anything you want to add?

Let me know what’s edible.

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Iman M’Fah-Traoré is a Paris-born, New-York-raised Afro-Brazilian writer who recently moved to Ericeira, a quaint coastal Portuguese town. Raised by two families stretched across two continents and four cultures, Iman has always questioned the notion of belonging. That’s why, thematically, she grounds herself in family structures and multiculturalism, alongside queerness, relationship to influences, and grief. Her work has been featured in miniMAG, Mania Mag, Bending Genres, PapersPublishing and NeverApart. She has also written for The Guardian and Business Insider. Find her @imanmft on all the things.