Recipe for Betrayal by Debra Bliss Saenger
from Betrayal: a PUNK NOIR Magazine series
He said he needed to cleanse his soul.
She knew that meant he needed to clear his conscience. His guilt. He said he was sorry and it wouldn’t happen again. This was a one-off, well, maybe a two-off, as this had happened before. The woman came on to him, her husband said. And the other one? The twenty-four-year-old worked in the office and it was difficult to avoid. She listened and nodded her head. Then she pivoted from the room while she still could, reeling as the truth deafened her hearing and spun her mind into a different orbit.
Mealtime. She extracted from the pantry shelf the ingredients needed to make a dessert for that evening—flour, sugar, baking soda, and raisins. The refrigerator yielded two eggs and butter. Then she headed to the shed for an extra spice: rat poison. Combining the items in a large bowl, she doled out the dough onto a baking sheet, creating twenty of his favorite cookies to be baked for twelve minutes in the three-hundred-seventy-five-degree oven.
He was going to have the best dessert of his life. No one deserved it more.
This story appears as part of Betrayal, a PUNK NOIR Magazine series, originally published May 2024.
Bio
As a member of Sisters in Crime, Short Mystery Fiction Society, and Arlington Writer’s Group, Debra Bliss Saenger’s extensive writing and publishing hats include Gannett, Inc. and Cox Enterprises editor, marketing professional, English teacher, public television director, and published poet. Being a murder mystery aficionado compelled her to wade into crime-based fiction.
She now lives in Northern Virginia with her family and fetching rescue dog.
PUNK NOIR, the online literary and arts magazine that looks at the world at its most askew, casting a bloodshot eye over the written word, film, music, television and more.
Subscribe for a regular dose of hard-boiled flash fiction, straight to your inbox.