When one has been very good about not eating anything dessert-like for several days, and when one has worked quite hard and thinks that to reward oneself one should take a walk to the cafe down the road and buy oneself a small, sweet treat, and when one has picked out (with glee) what one thinks is a slice of banana-chocolate-walnut cake, carried it over to the park across the street, and opened it up to enjoy it next to one’s husband (who is happily consuming a luridly colorful Rice Krispies treat with Froot Loops), and when, in the midst of one’s joy, one discovers that what one has purchased is not, in fact, a delicious banana-chocolate-walnut-cake, but a foul and pestilential fruit cake, then what one is tasting in one’s mouth is not only the cloying tang of candied cherries, but also the ashy, gunmetal flavor of disappointment.