| He worked waist-high in a white cloud. He never saw the end of the crowd around his house, and no one saw him sleep. He wore his rolling pin down to a finger-bone-sized dowel, let out a howl as he wrestled with the dough. A sign above his dutchdoor read, "Unleavened bread is the diet of the dead, the wafer of waifs." His oven spat out crumb and crust. Apricots with black wounds, saw dust, sesame seeds--he used anything to make the receipe less bland for us. And though the flour made him cough, he tried to please our senses, so we stayed off his fences and formed a spiralling queue. We stayed polite; we didn't bite eachother (just our tongues). We starved in a civil way, digesting shoeleather and dew while he raced neck and neck with famine. Our hunger pangs stabbed and dazzled. The old ones croaked; the children choked on gravel which they chewed like cashews and pistachios. What is scraped off the pestle, what is scraped off the mortar hardly fills the canyons in the enamel of twenty-eight teeth. Sacks of grain imploded like our unused, shrunken stomaches. The stuff we needed our angelic baker kneaded, until, at last, the shop went cold, the blessed smell of bread dispersed, as did we when he emerged, gripping a serrated knife. A powdery palm print on his cheek as though he'd been slapped by God. He murmured, "So sorry to report that there is nothing left. The only thing that can break this fast is death." We stared, a halo of the hungry surrounding this man who'd fed us so well. Every breath caught in constricted throats. The baker hovered there with no escape. Then he carved himself out of the black and fruitless landscape. |