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It had been a long day of testing. Shadow’s feet stung as Maria led them both quickly down the hallway in the direction of her room. She had something to show them, and whatever it was couldn’t wait the handful more minutes that it took to walk down the corridor versus running down it.
“What’s going on?” he asked again as Maria, who was still holding his hand, dragged him into her room and shut the door behind her.
Their sister was wearing her nice blue dress, the one she only wore on ‘special occasions’.
“You’ll see in a minute!”
Shadow stood confused in the middle of the room as his sister went and knelt by her bed and pulled out the box that she kept underneath to look through it for…something.
“Turn on the fairy lights and wait for me in the fort, I just need to grab something,” Maria told them.
He did as she said but poked his head back out to keep watching her, to see what she got out of the box. Shadow watched as she pulled out a thin, blue candle, two pieces of paper, and a ball of string from the box. Then she came to join him in the blanket fort which they hadn’t torn down from the last time she had managed to get Shadow in here.
Maria pulled out a paper plate from one of her pockets, and a piece of bread — or was it cake? It looked like cake but was cut like bread — from another pocket.
“This is banana bread,” she explained. “I took it from the cafeteria at lunchtime. Grandpa and the scientists didn’t even know I was in there!” she whispered to them. “We’ll use this as a replacement birthday cake,”
What’s birthday cake?
Maria unwrapped the bread (but wasn’t it cake? It looked like cake) and set it on the plate between them, then she stuck the candle straight into it.
“Why did you put a candle in that…bread?” they asked.
“It’s a birthday candle! Ideally I would have twelve more candles but I don’t think they’d all fit on here,” She shrugged.
“Why are we putting candles in it at all?” he asked, because her explaination still hadn’t explained what a ‘birthday candle’ was.
“Usually, you would stick candles like this in a birthday cake, a whole cake that’s decorated with fancy stuff like icing swirls and sprinkles and cool designs. Sticking it into cake is just what you do with birthday candles,” Maria explained which was only slightly more helpful than before.
Shadow cocked their head. Huh. He was still confused.
“A birthday party has to have party hats, but we can’t go buy any so we’re gonna make them!”
The matter of birthday candles and cake was forgotten for the moment as the two of them set about making these funny-sounding (and funny-looking too, he’d soon discover) hats.
She handed them a piece of paper while she kept the other for herself. Maria laid out her paper on the floor and uncapped her blue marker.
“Do ‘party hats' have any designs on them?”
Maria shook her head.
“No. Store-bought party hats are usually either just one colour or have things like confetti or multicoloured dots on them. But you can draw whatever you want on yours, I’m going to do stars on mine,”
He didn’t know what ‘confetti’ was either but colourful dots sounded easy enough. The hedgehog laid out their paper on the floor too so that they wouldn’t get marker on the sheets (again) and uncapped the yellow marker.
When they were both done with their designs, Shadow watched as she rolled her piece of paper into a rounded pyramid shape, before using tape to keep it fixed like that. She also used some tape to stick one end of the string to the hat and then the other end too, once she had cut it to the length
When she was done with hers, Maria helped them do the same with their piece of paper. His ‘party hat’ sat between his ears, with the string looped between his quills.
“I couldn’t get a lighter or matches, so we’ll just have to pretend that the candle’s lit, okay?” Maria told them.
They were both wearing the hats that they had just made.
“Why do we need to light the candle? Do lit candles have a purpose?”
“Yes, because when the birthday person blows the flame out, they also makes a wish,” Maria explained. “It’s like this,”
She leaned forward and closed her eyes before blowing out a pretend-lit candle. When she was done, she opened her eyes again and looked over at Shadow.
“You didn’t say anything?”
“If you make a birthday wish, you can’t tell anybody or it won’t come true!”
“Oh.”
Their night was interrupted less than an hour later when Grandpa suddenly burst into Maria’s room telling them that they needed to run.
It had been fifty years since that night and Shadow still didn’t understand quite what birthdays were, but they were not going to tell the Wachowskis that. He knew that they were wondering when his birthday was — or at least Sonic was, the cobalt hedgehog was not subtle.
Sonic finally blurted out his query when the two of them were walking the Wachowskis’ dog one afternoon. “When’s your birthday?”
“I don’t have a birthday,”
“But everyone has a birthday!”
“Not me.”
The other hedgehog was quiet for a long moment, long enough that Shadow thought that he was actually going to drop But they weren’t quite that lucky.
“Do you want one?”
“What?”
He’d heard what Sonic asked, so he wasn’t confused about that. They were confused that the other even thought it was possible to be able to choose if you had a birthday or not; what a idiotic thought it was.
“Do you want to have a birthday?”
Did he?
Shadow remembered Maria’s birthday so clearly as if it had happened yesterday. The last and only one the two of them had celebrated together, in the blanket fort with a singular piece of banana bread and twelve less candles than they should have had (or so she’d told him). At the time, they didn’t understand the reason behind why she had wished to have had thirteen candles stuck in some cake (they still didn’t understand that now).
He remembered how she had blown out that lone candle and then they had spent the rest of that night eating that banana bread and watching films. They had worn cone-shaped hats that they made out of notebook paper and pieces of string.
He remembered how happy she had been while celebrating that she had survived yet another year on this planet. Why she would celebrate something like that, he didn’t know.
That wasn’t something they had experienced. Their existence had just begun and that had been that. One moment he didn’t exist and then the next he had.
But then they remembered that last night, full of fun and celebration, and a small part within them longed. That had been Maria’s, so what would his be like?
Maybe he did want a birthday.
“…Maybe?”
Sonic, having walked ahead with the dog, spun back around to face them. His surprise was clear on his face, as was his happiness.
“Is there any specific date you like, or should we just pick a random one?” he asked.
“You are far too invested in this,” Shadow grumbled, half under their breath but it lacked any real heat, and he went on to say, “June 19th,”
“Hey, that’s a few days before my Earth-versary!”
“Your what?”
“Earth-versary. It’s the anniversary of the day I arrived on Earth,” Sonic explained. “Because I don’t know my birthday either,” he added quietly.
Oh.
Now there were at least three questions Shadow wanted to ask but he didn’t.
Sonic dragged them to go tell the humans Maddie and Tom as soon as they got back from walking the dog. Shadow, at this point, was used to Sonic’s inane rambling. He was getting used to half listening, rather than half tuning him out. What he wasn’t used to, was being the subject of both humans’ gazes at the same time.
“What date did you pick?” Maddie asked them, just as they were starting to feel uneasy where they were.
“The nineteeth of June,” he said.
“That’s in a week,” Tom mentioned.
“Oh.”
Shadow hadn’t realised that the date they had picked was so soon. He had chosen it because it had been Maria’s, so it made sense to pick that day over the other three hundred and sixty-four days in the year.
It made something foreign curl in his chest but he wasn’t going to change his mind. That day was the last and only thing that they had left that tied them to Maria.
Maddie asked him hours later, as he was getting ready for bed, if there was anything that he wanted to do for his birthday.
“It’s got to be within Green Hills and within reason,” she had added when she asked.
“I — I’m not sure,” they admitted, gaze sliding down to their toothbrush gripped in one of their hands.
“Don’t have to decide right now. Sleep on it and you can tell me in the morning,” Maddie told him before she left to return to her and Tom’s part of the house.
Shadow slept on it and then thought it over when the new day dawned on him.
What did he want to do for his birthday, now that he had one? What did people usually do on their birthdays?
It was the next evening that the echidna — Knuckles, they were trying to make an effort to learn everybody’s names — approached him with a very odd query.
“What flavour of baked wheel do you prefer?”
The striped hedgehog blinked in confusion. What?
“‘Baked wheel’? Do you mean cake?”
“Yes, that,” Knuckles confirmed. “What flavour do you desire?”
“Banana bread?”
“I do not know what ‘bread of banana’ is but Sonic or Maddie will,” Knuckles announced.
A hushed, Sonic-sounding “Shhh! Knuckles! You gave it away!” was hissed from the direction of the attic stairs.
Shadow couldn’t help it but snort at that.
But nothing more happened that night. Neither Knuckles nor Sonic asked him anything more or said anything to him. The four of them went to bed soon after that.
Nothing more was said about Shadow’s newly-minted birthday for the next few days. To the point where they thought that no one was going to do anything about or for it, despite Knuckles (and Sonic’s) question about cake flavours. And then, on the eve of the nineteeth, all three of the kids and Shadow (he did not consider himself a child) were kicked out of the house to go walk Ozzie and run a couple of errands.
“Why can’t we complete these errands tomorrow?” Shadow asked, looking over the list again.
The list included things such as ‘pick up the grocery order’, ‘recycle cans’, and ‘take this bag to Wade’.
“Why do we need to do all these tonight?” the fox asked at the same time.
“Because the grocery store is going to be closed for the next few days and we still need food for that time,” Maddie explained.
Tom added. “And you four might as well stop by there while doing the other things on the list,”
They set off. Knuckles and Tails took the lead, the fox took the dog while the echidna carried the sack of cans, while Shadow and Sonic took up the rear, the other hedgehog took the bag to give to Wade.
Their first stop was to recycle the cans. The recycling drop box was at the town hall. So they had to walk into town and across it to the other end.
As they walked, Shadow thought.
Why were Maddie and Tom making them do all of this now? And why hadn’t they come with them, it was very odd. He was suspicious now; this whole errands run was very convenient.
The humans were doing something back at the house at this very moment, something that the four of them weren’t allowed to witness. But what that something was, Shadow could not work out.
What was there for them to do that they needed the house to themselves?
Shadow got brought out of his thoughts by them arriving at the can recycling box.
Knuckles tipped the sack into the box. The meter on the box reading each can’s type as it went in and keeping count of their cost. The amount on it ticked upwards.
“$19.46? I didn’t think we had enough cans for it to be that much?” Tails questioned once the meter had registered everything they had put into the box and was flashing the total at them.
Sonic just shrugged as Knuckles proclaimed about ‘the coin that they had just procured from conserving the planet’. Shadow, on the other hand, still did not understand money and fifty years of inflation didn’t help matters.
Then it was onto the grocer’s, where a human lady with greying hair which the others appeared to be familiar with but Shadow had only seen in passing gave them three bags of groceries. She had smiled down at him in a way that was too pleasant to make him bristle but too unexpected for him to not be unconfortable. But she had winked at Sonic when she’d handed him one of the bags.
The last thing on the list was to give the bag that Sonic had been carrying to the other police officer. Wade had been waiting for them, as he met them at the station’s door as
He refused to tell them what was in the bag that was so vital that they drop it to him tonight, even when faced with four very curious aliens (some hid that curiosity better than others).
They returned to the house barely more than two hours after they had set out. Despite it being summertime, the sun was almsot gone from the sky and long shadows stretched across the street. The entryway to which was suspiciously dark when they stepped inside. The light had been on when they left.
They headed deeper into the house, the others eventually fell behind so that Shadow led the way. Maddie and Tom were both found in the kitchen, cleaning it up. Tom had some flour in his hair and Maddie tossed what looked to be broken egg shells into the rubbish bin.
Shadow stepped into the empty kitchen, no one else appeared to be up yet. There was something on the counter, he ventured deeper into the room to look at it. It looked to be some kind of baked thing, some kind of cake with a light brown colour and shaped into a rectangle. It smelled like bananas and fresh doughnuts.
What was that?
And then they noticed the writing ontop of it.
‘Happy Birthday, Shadow!’ in swirling red lettering, the ‘w’ in his name was smudged slightly.
Oh.
Today was the nineteenth, his birthday.
Their ears twitched at the sound of approaching footsteps. One set, too slow to be Sonic’s and too steady to be anyone other than Tom’s.
“You found the cake,”
Shadow couldn’t tell if it was a question or not.
Were they not supposed to have seen this already?
“The counter is not a good hiding place,” they said eventually, instead of the dozen other things they wanted to say.
Tom laughed — what was funny?
“No it isn’t,” he agreed. “Though, there are some who’d disagree with that,”
The sounds of Sonic and Knuckles’s voices, accompanied by Tails’s, drifted into the kitchen seconds before the three appeared.
The others, to his surprise, were not mad either that he had already seen the cake. Instead, they were…happy that he’d found it?
But they had meant for this to be a secret until they chose to reveal it, so why were they happy that Shadow had ruined it?
“What do you think?”
Shadow looked again at the cake. Properly this time.
“Are there — do we have any candles?” they asked instead.
“That’s the real reason we sent you guys to go pick up the groceries last night,” Tom said.
From one of the grocery bags came a package of candles. Multicoloured spiral ones not too unlike the one that Maria had had, just with gold spirals instead of white. Shadow only had eyes for the blue ones. There were two of each colour so there were two blue candles.
Shadow was not sure quite what to think of their current situation. A large part of them were confused but a smaller part — the same part which had wondered what a birthday celebration of their own would be like — was intrigued.
They sing him Happy Birthday — a song that he had only ever heard on television before now, Maria had been too preoccupied with making party hats that night to mention it — and he blows out the candles.
Candles, plural! Because this was a full cake and there were two of them!
Candles which were actually lit, not pretend-lit. Candles that they had stuck into the cake in the ‘a’ of ‘happy’ and ‘d’ of ‘birthday’. Shadow closed their eyes when they blew it out as they had watched their sister do, what felt like a lifetime ago now.
“What did you desire for your wish of the birthday?” Knuckles asked when he had opened his eyes again.
“I am not telling you,” they said and then added “Any of you,” when Sonic perked up.
Shadow was handed a knife, the big one he had only ever seen in the drawer before now, and lined it up on one of the corners to make the first cut.
This banana bread was different to the piece he and Maria had shared. That one had been hard and dry (‘stale’ she had called it), this was soft and moist and didn’t crumble into tiny pieces as soon as it was cut.
After the bread was cut up into enough pieces, they took theirs and opted to just break small pieces off with their hand rather than use one of the forks from the pile on the bench to eat it.
Later, once the bread had been eaten and the others had dispersed across the house and left the kitchen vacant, Shadow approached the bench where the rest of the banana bread remained — where the candles lay discarded to the side. They scooped them up and, using a tissue, cleaned off the bread crumbs before shoving them securely into their quills.