BREAD (2021)

Sugar dissolved, yeast activated. 

If there was a man in the hallway, she pretended not to see him. She sought babyhood, the ability to forget the presence of another the second they left your line of sight. He couldn’t be there if she chose not to conceptualize him. She turned her back to the not-man in her hallway, catching a not-glimpse of him in the process. It was not a man, she realized, though now seated firmly in the "I wish it were" chair, which was not comfortable. She’d made the mistake of thinking it was a man, who might be reasoned with if she stayed silent if they both pretended she hadn’t seen him, or if she did something terrible if they confronted that she had. It was not a man, not in the non-conceptualized sense, but in the sense that it was not human. Eyes blurring the letters of the labeled bags, bins, and tins on the table, she chose to keep mixing.

Mixed salt, mixed oil, mixed flour. 

She did not want to look at it again, because it was not something she recognized. It shuffled in the hallway and she shuffled in the kitchen. She did not notice she was shuffling until she saw flour dusting the taper of her sweatpants. She entertained the notion of running away in her comfortable clothes, half-made loaflet on the counter. She wouldn’t be able to come back. I should leave a note in a time like this, like they do in the movies, when they’re running away, she thought, but that implied someone would be coming in after her, dropping their shoes by the door, hanging their coat on the rack, but it was summer, so why would they have a coat to hang on the rack? Eyes crossing the handwritten brevity of the note before meeting those of the still-not-man, the centerpiece of the room. And God knows what they’d get up to together. But no one would notice she was gone if she did or didn’t leave a note. She floured the table and buttered her hands. 

Greased dough to greased palms. 

She kneaded the dough and thought about the creature touching her skin. She didn’t think she was so malleable, but how would she know? She’d never been pulled apart before. The dough stuck to her palms. It made her head pulse. 

Greased dough to greased pan.

She began to cry when she remembered the bread needed to sit for an hour.

Warm oven under warm dough under warm towel. 

It might have been five minutes, or it might have been fifty. Whenever she’d put the bread into the oven, it felt like an hour. She wiped insignificance from the tables and arranged the pantry shelves until she couldn’t remember which spices she’d touched or untouched. She felt its eyes prickling her back as she reached her hands up to tug the strings of her hoodie. She didn’t know if it was staring at her, because she wasn’t looking, but she thought it might be and acted as if it were. She was long past trying not to conceptualize it and turned it over and throughout in her brain. She set the pan gently on the bottom rack of the oven, nearly brushing the wire above her unsteady knuckles. She decided to look. 

Full oven breadsmell kitchen.

They rested across from each other at the table as the scent filled the room. It was difficult to smell fear in the air they drew in together. It just smelled like bread. She’d sat down first, setting down two plates as far away from each other as the table would allow, hoping it would understand her intentions if she pulled out a seat. The creature obliged, perching on the arm of the wooden chair. It loomed above her even across the rectangular expanse. Fur and debris and something oozy and blackdripping. And eyes, two of them, for staring. She didn’t know if it had a mouth or a nose under all its layers. It had limbs with non-hands-or-feet at the ends of them, some other kind of fleshlike embellishment. She wondered how it ate, if it ate, if it would eat her, if it was thinking about her while she was thinking about it. If she’d be a good meal. She started to cry again. It looked like it would smell. She felt mean thinking this and angled her chair closer, a fraction of an angle. Her phone began to chirp. They looked at each other as it sang, a looping melody. 

Empty oven knife poised. 

She didn’t wait for the bread to cool before cutting slices. If this was her final meal, why wait? Why do anything? Why cut the bread into slices, she thought only after the knife had gone too deep. She thought about asking if it wanted butter. She thought about asking only after she’d buttered the bread. The creature looked at her, static. She placed two slices down before it before taking two of her own. It did have a mouth, she noticed, looking up as she chewed. She finished the first slice and stopped looking. She stopped looking for so long, sobbing, choking wet bread into her hands, that she didn’t see it shuffle back through the doorframe, through the window, having emptied its plate. Curtains breezing.